SJA #21 - 29 October 2018 - The Afterlife, Intersectionality, and Republican Violence

Afterlife
This skeptical topic isn’t in the skeptic’s dictionary, oddly enough. I mean, it’s one of the most popular woo beliefs in the world; why wouldn’t they cover it? A lot of skeptics restrict themselves to “non-religious woo”. Things like obvious pseudoscience, pseudohistory, so-called “alternative medicine”, ghosts, aliens… those are all fair game. Anything that’s “supernatural”, or “ spiritual” or New Age, but not mainstream religion. They do have Christian ultrafundamentalism (or CUF). I haven’t read that yet, but, judging by the name, it’s restricted to the extreme fringes of Christianity.

This fear of discussing popular religion and religious beliefs is common in skeptic movements. They’ll go after ghosthunters and cryptozoologists, chiropractors and homeopaths, but not preachers or prayers. Faith healing is a popular target, faith itself is not.

There’s probably a complex interplay of reasons for this. Among them, I suspect it’s… prudence. Discretion. Rank cowardice. The majority of the public will leave you alone if you’re only attacking the fringes of society, but if you turn your skepticism on the popular beliefs of the majority, they’ll turn their rage on you. So, an instinct for self-preservation will probably drive most skeptical organizations to refrain from attacking religion. It will limit conflict (conflict will of course be unavoidable).

Another major reason, I think, is that a lot of skeptics are going to be religious. That’s inconsistent; if you seek to apply skepticism to your beliefs, then you should end up rejecting religion. However, expecting complete consistency in people’s beliefs is expecting a bit too much. I think it may even be impossible. The human brain isn’t a homogeneous entity, but a collection of regions with different functions, that are interconnected and communicating in various ways. And those regions, having different functions, will often be in conflict. We should expect people not to be consistent in their desires and beliefs.

So all of this is to say that, yes, the afterlife and all associated concepts are fully deserving of skeptical analysis.

What is the afterlife? People believe (or want to believe) that, after a person dies, some “essence” of the person continues to exist in another form. This essence can be more or less coherent, more or less related to the person who died. For example, here in the US, we’re most familiar with the protestant and Catholic Christian belief that a human being has a soul that, after death, will have all of that person’s memories and beliefs, and which will be punished or rewarded for the person’s actions in life.

South Asian beliefs such as Buddhism and Hinduism can be very similar in their belief in reincarnation. Though Buddhism states that a person is in a constant state of growth and development, always changing, and that this process of change continues after death so that the person at reincarnation is different from the person who died, there is nevertheless a thread of continuity that can be traced from one to the other.

You can also get a New Age belief in spiritual energy that returns to the universe as a whole. When a person is born, they get some portion of this energy that returns after death. It plays on the theme of reincarnation, in that a person can be reborn with spirit energy from someone else, but, like pouring water into the ocean and scooping water back out, you’re simply not going to get all of the same spirit energy from a person who has died.

Note my use of the word “energy” right there. That’s not limited to discussing New Age beliefs. It’s incredibly popular with them, as it’s a cultural movement that arose in the west in the wake of the development of mass media and popular awareness of physics. “Energy” is a term that is vital for understanding physics, chemistry… any kind of physical science. However, it’s also a slippery concept, difficult to understand, and thus is subject to abuse by mystics who want scientistic support for their beliefs.

However, it absolutely is not limited to New Age hippies. Anyone who wants to argue in favor of the soul is perfectly free to adopt the term, and they frequently do. Whether you’re talking to Christians, Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists, it is likely that they’ll at some point say, “Energy is neither created nor destroyed; where does a person’s energy go when they die?”

The first part of that, the statement, is true. That’s the first law of thermodynamics. To the best of our ability to determine, the energy of the universe is constant, it can never be created nor destroyed, but can only change forms.

The second part is a lie.

It’s a lie because it assumes that there is some energy that has gone somewhere. It can more charitably be called a fallacy of equivocation, where a term is introduced using one definition, but is then used to make or support an argument under a different definition. “Energy” is introduced into the argument by noting what is clearly true, that people are made of matter and that every process of the human body is driven by chemical energy derived from the food we eat.

However, the equivocation arises when they start talking about a soul or spirit as some form of energy and saying it has gone somewhere. This introduces two new assumptions that have not been granted, but are instead the subject of discussion. The soul, whether physical or supernatural or “some kind of energy” has not been demonstrated to even exist. The other assumption is that some energy was present in the body which is now absent.

Physicist Sean M. Carroll (to more clearly differentiate him from the biologist Sean B. Carroll) once, while discussing this subject, brought up something like a Zen Koan “Where does the flame go when the candle is out?”.

The answer is that it doesn’t. It doesn’t go anywhere. It isn’t a thing and doesn’t do anything.

A candle’s flame, like a human being, is a process and the result of a process. Heat melts the wax, draws it up the candle’s wick, boils it, and ignites it. The burning of the wax releases more heat, which melts more wax. The heat of the burning wax also causes the resulting gases to move outward and upward, away from the source of the heat, while the pressure from the cold air around the candle pushes it inward, producing the characteristic shape of the flame. The heat also strips electrons away from the gases, producing a translucent plasma, which releases light in its efforts to return to a stable, low-energy state. All of this is the candle’s flame.

When you extinguish the candle, you have ended the process. The candle’s flame is no more. The flame itself was an illusion. It was an illusion in the same way that all objects are illusions. Every physical “thing” you see is a collection of atoms and molecules, held together by forces that can be overcome by outside intervention. Every object, no matter how stable, is only temporary. The candle’s flame is exceptional only in that the temporary and conditional nature of its existence is so obvious.
When you extinguish the flame, nothing has gone anywhere. The matter of the candle is still there. The chemical energy stored in the wax is still there. You can easily re-ignite the candle, restart the process. The potential for the flame exists within the candle, the flame is produced by the candle, the flame is not a thing that exists.

You are likewise an illusion. You are a process and the result of a process. The many, many complex processes that produce that process likewise produce the “you” that we all acknowledge. Every cell within you is a city, every organ a nation, you are an ecosystem. When you die, the process stops, the processes stop, the ecosystem is shattered. The matter is still there, the energy is still there, but the illusion of “you” is no longer being sustained.

A candle can be reignited. Sometimes a person can as well. If knowledgeable people with the right equipment can get to the body in time, the process can be restarted. The window for that is very short, because the processes that make up a human being are magnitudes more complex than a candle.

A candle in its entirety can be described in a few words. The process of the candle likewise. The systems that make up a living being cannot. We have dedicated centuries to the study of life and have come to understand much. What we know can fill books, does fill books. What we don’t yet know will fill many more.

One of the things we know is that there is no soul. The energy that would have been used for the process of the human being is still there after the process has stopped. Nothing has gone anywhere. The reason you have only a short window to reignite the person is because the matter and energy will very quickly be used by other processes. By the many organisms that live in your body that do not share your DNA, and that, at best, only incidentally help to keep you alive.

As soon as a person dies, they will begin to transform the matter and energy of that body into matter and energy for their own lives, their own processes. When the process that is a person stops, the flesh immediately becomes food, and starts turning into bacteria shit.

There is no afterlife, because there is no soul. You will not continue to exist after your death except in the memories of those who loved you. You will not be punished, you will not be rewarded. You will not know or experience anything, because there will be no you. Like the candle’s flame, your body’s life will cease, and the illusion will end.

If any of that is upsetting to you, then I’m not sure what to tell you. If you demand reward and punishment, you will have to work to create that here and now. If you demand an afterlife, you will have to take copious notes here and now. Here and now is all you have. Here and now is what matters.

Intersectionality
Intersectionality is a concept that is often misunderstood, often deliberately distorted and misused. Since it’s central to the modern struggle for social justice in the US, I think it’d be a good thing for people to understand, generally.

The term originates with Kimberlé Crenshaw, civil rights advocate, leading scholar of critical race theory, and professor at the UCLA and Columbia schools of law. It appears that she was the first person to use the term in the context of social justice back in 1989, in a paper titled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics”, published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum.

In the paper, she discussed a legal case brought against General Motors in the mid-70s, suing the company for not hiring black women. The company argued in court, and the courts agreed, that they weren’t racist and they weren’t sexist. Their evidence that they weren’t racist was that they had hired black employees, and their evidence that they weren’t sexist was that they had hired female employees. The problem with theirs and the court’s analysis was that they failed to note that the company had only hired black men and white women.

In her discussion, Crenshaw stated that the experiences of black women cannot be understood simply as the experience of blackness and the experience of femaleness. That is to say, they are not just black in a white world and women in a man’s world. They experience racism, and they experience sexism, and they experience the world as black women. The combination of blackness and womanness creates new situations, new obstacles for them to navigate, experiences that neither black men nor white women will ever face.

For example, women have always been sexualized and treated as objects and black people have always been hypersexualized and treated as objects. However, black women experience the combination of these objectifications in a fashion that is different, sometimes horrifyingly so, from black men and white women.

The hypersexualization and objectification of black men has, since the 1600s, positioned them as an imminent threat, as violent beasts always one wrong move away from breaking free and injuring white people, specifically white women. The racist propaganda of black men as violent rapists is thus a century older than even the United States. It was used to justify slavery and to fight against abolition, and the end of Jim Crow, and the end of the War on Drugs.

The objectification of white women sees them as objects, as property to be transferred from the control of their fathers to the control of their husbands. They are thus subject to sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and sexual assault as a normal part of their everyday lives. Some men are simply convinced that women are available for all of those things at all times, and that they have no right to object because they’re not fully human.

Black women meanwhile are subject to the objectification of black people as being hypersexual and naturally violent and to the objectification of women as being always available for the sexual use of men, particularly of white men. Because of the white supremacist belief that black people always want sex, it was simply a fact of law that black women could not be raped. The courts believed that black women always wanted sex, and that saying no was just playing, and fighting back was just their natural violence.

Whereas if a white woman accused a black man of rape it was automatically believed and the man immediately murdered, a black woman accusing a black man of rape was greeted with a shrug because they were both believed to be violent animals, and she really wanted it anyway. Her accusation of rape was transformed in white eyes as just another expression of black violence.

And if her rapist was white? Fighting back probably wasn’t even an option. A white man could kill her and walk away with the public having no doubt that he had done so. Women, in the face of present violent assault, always face the difficulty of knowing that fighting back could get them killed and not fighting back means their later claim of rape won’t be believed. Black women face the certainty that both options are dialed up to 11 because of racial stereotypes.

Thus the world a black woman interacts with is racialized in a way white women don’t experience and sexualized in a way black men don’t experience. Racism alters the misogyny they face, and misogyny alters the racism they face. Neither one can be studied in isolation.

All of this is to say that the world is a complicated place, and culture creates a difficult interaction of different forms of oppression and bigotry. A disabled black woman’s experience of oppression simply cannot be compared to the experiences of a gay white woman.

Which brings us to the myth of the oppression olympics. Right wing douches love to claim that you can only participate in a discussion about oppression if you are yourself oppressed in some way (thus straight white men are ignored… and oppressed!!), and the more oppressed you are, the more social justice cachet you have. According to assholes like Paul Joseph Watson and Ben Shapiro, the god of social justice is a gay black muslim jew native american left-handed red-headed immigrant transwoman victim of rape in a wheelchair.

Nope.

Oppression olympics was first brought up by Social Justice Warriors, noting the importance of not trying to rank oppression. My suffering isn’t greater or less than yours, it’s different. Trying to compare oppression, to compete over who has it worse would only be a distraction from the end goal of trying to end suffering and oppression.

It’s not that white men have nothing to say, nothing to contribute, the problem is that they don’t have the lived experience of most forms of oppression. They don’t have the native understanding of racism or sexism. Straight people don’t live every day with homophobia, nor cis people with transphobia, nor abled people with ablism.

A straight white man can indeed have knowledge of and insight into the oppression experienced by queer folk or black folk or women, but it’s something that has to come with study and effort on his part, and that’s the kind of thing that needs to be actively demonstrated, not assumed. And even the most knowledgeable, caring, and dedicated ally can put their foot in their mouth, talk over someone, or take offense where it’s neither intended, needed, nor helpful. When you’re talking about oppression you don’t experience, you’re always going to be speaking in a foreign language, and there’s always going to be mistakes and misunderstandings… and a lot of disingenuous assholes take advantage of that to abuse oppressed people.

Trolls and abusers abound, and any oppressed person who takes an active role in the fight against it suffers from those assholes constantly. Anyone who’s on the privileged side of multiple axes will always, necessarily, be viewed with some suspicion, because there are just so damned many neonazis, sealions, and Fox News dipshits of every stripe just aching derail every conversation and attack decent social justice warriors.

Anywho, that’s oppression and that’s why you need to be calm and respectful in a conversation that isn’t about you. Also, don’t make the conversation about you.

SJA #20 - 22 October 2018 - Sam Harris, Afrocentrism

Transcript

Sam Harris
Who is Sam Harris? From his website, samharris.com, quote:

Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times bestsellers and the host of the Waking Up Podcast. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.

Harris’s work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.

Sam Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.

Why bring this up? Well, I wrote this out months go, then shelved it, but currentaffairs.org recently published a long, well-written piece by Eli Massey and Nathan J. Robinson. They wrote a 11,000 word article that calmly and clearly takes Harris to pieces (with a further 9,000 words in endnotes to answer anticipated objections). It’s a long read, but well worth it. If nothing else, because Harris is so clearly a piece of shit, and so thoroughly representative of a lot of the problems facing the US today: a huge current in modern atheism, the failures of intellect on the right, and white people.

So, who is Sam Harris?

Harris was born to Hollywood producer Susan Harris (née Spivak) and actor Berkeley Harris in 1965. His parents divorced in 1969, and his mother remarried in 1983, to Paul Junger Witt, with whom she had been working since 1977. Witt and Harris were successful as writers and producers, mostly in television through the early 90s, with notable hits including The Golden Girls. All that is to say, Sam Harris grew up in a fairly wealthy home.

During his sophomore year at Stanford in 1986, Harris played around with 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, aka MDMA aka ecstasy, and he had what he has since described as spiritual experiences. This inspired him to try and find the same sorts of experiences without the drugs, so he dropped out of Stanford and spent time in India and Nepal studying meditation with Buddhist and Hindu teachers. You could be forgiven for thinking this sounds like the stereotype of a child of wealth going to the brown countries and engage in religious tourism. Because that’s exactly what it is.

Harris returned to Stanford in ‘97 (that’s ten years of bumming around, for those trying to keep up with the timeline) and finished his undergraduate degree in philosophy in 2000. He wrote his first book, The End of Faith, a year later, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. He eventually matriculated to UCLA for his doctorate, earning a PhD in cognitive neuroscience under advisor Michael S Cohen in 2009, with a thesis titled The moral landscape: How science could help determine human values.

Harris has not continued to contribute to neuroscience since earning his doctorate. He is listed as a contributor on one paper that I can find, and that appears to be based on work he did prior to earning his doctorate rather than ongoing contributions. That is to say, Harris doesn’t appear to be a researcher, nor in any way a scientist.

Rather than a dedication to scientific advancement, Harris appears to use his doctorate to advance his primary vocation: right-wing atheism. He gets to call himself Dr. Harris and an expert in what religion does to the brain. His work in neuroscience functions as a shield against criticism as he makes sweeping claims about unrelated fields, unsupported by evidence and dismissed by experts within those fields.

Harris’s willingness to be dramatically ignorant and dogmatically incorrect in the face of compelling argument and evidence is well documented. In 2012, he proposed racial profiling as a way to counteract extremist Muslim terror. Security expert Bruce Schneier weighed in, pointing out that 1) “Muslim” isn’t a race, 2) racial profiling doesn’t work (it generates too many false positives), 3) any system like that can easily be gamed by terrorists (generating false negatives), and 4) would be counterproductive (by pointlessly pissing off the 99.999999% [6 9s] of muslims who aren’t terrorists).

In spite of his conversation with Schneier, Harris has continued to support racial profiling, just as he ignores criticism from experts in the many other fields his essays touch on. He tends to view any criticism of his errors and inconsistencies as personal attacks. For example, following his discussion with Ezra Klein regarding Harris’s discussion with eugenics apologist Charles Murray, Harris’s response was so petulant that even his legion of fans, who ordinarily support him unconditionally, were taken aback.

Harris has defended other indefensible positions as well, including torturing suspects for information about terrorism and pre-emptive nuclear strikes against muslim nations. Are you noticing a trend? Because there’s a trend. It’s a trend against muslims, against Islam.

As I’ve said elsewhere, Harris was part of the surge in movement atheism that occurred in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. His first book was written and published after 9/11. He became famous as a blogger and speaker after that, and didn’t start his podcast until 2013.

Harris was something of an outlier among other prominents in the atheist and skeptic communities. He was far younger than the other “horsemen”, with no established career or credentials. He had no science background, and he was never particularly interested in skepticism. Instead, he talked far more about his practice of martial arts and meditation. And the need to eliminate Islam. He defended torturing muslims. He defended nuking muslims. For Sam Harris, muslims are the boogeyman.

He’ll attack other religions, to be sure. He debated William Lane Craig, and he’s no fan of catholicism. However, he’s the right’s darling for a reason, and it’s not because of his passionate defense of libertarian free will (which he doesn’t believe in).

It’s because Harris is a far right wing clown. Don’t make the mistake of thinking his love of eastern mysticism makes him a hippy. Harris is a right wing authoritarian, he’s deeply misogynistic, and he’s racist as hell. Look at some of the recent (as of writing) guests he’s had on his podcast:

• Tamler Sommers: author of “Why Honor Matters”, a “controversial call to put honor at the center of morality”
• Bart Ehrman: an atheist who defends Christianity
• Robin Hanson: economics professor at George Mason University (GMU was recently in the news because the Koch brothers have spent years turning its economics department into a far right wing super-PAC to give themselves legitimacy) (Oh, and this conversation was before Hanson made the news for arguing in favor of “redistribution of sex”, aka rape, in order to prevent more terrorist attacks by incels. But well after he asked whether a woman being non-violently raped, because the violence is what makes it really bad, is worse than infidelity).
• Niall Ferguson: a pro-imperialist writer of “controversial” history (“controversial” = politically motivated and false)
• David Frum & Andrew Sullivan: arch-conservative politicos
• Eric Weinstein & Ben Shapiro: arch-conservative economist and arch-conservative politico
• Bret Weinstein: Eric’s brother, former biology professor, paid to resign after being racist as hell.
• Tom Nichols: right wing academic

Yes, Harris has others on his show to discuss other topics, but there is a long and consistent theme of bringing in right wing or far right wing personalities (who Harris describes only as “controversial”) to defend right wing policies and beliefs. Harris then fails to play the devil’s advocate, which he’ll happily do against the liberals he brings on his show. Instead, Harris helps these right wing figures attack liberal positions, decrying identity politics and political correctness.

Harris brought Charles Murray on his show in April of 2017. In April of this year (2018), Harris described the interview thusly:

Almost exactly a year ago, I had Charles Murray on my podcast. Murray, as many of our listeners will know, is the author of the notorious book The Bell Curve. It has a chapter on raising IQ and differences between racial measures of IQ that was extremely controversial. Murray is a person who still gets protested on college campuses more than 20 years later.

While I have very little interest in IQ and actually zero interest in racial differences in IQ, I invited Murray on my podcast, because he had recently been de-platformed at Middlebury College. He and his host were actually assaulted as they left the auditorium. In my view, this seemed yet another instance of kind of a moral panic that we were seeing on college campuses. It caused me to take an interest in Murray that I hadn’t previously had. I had never read The Bell Curve, because I thought it was just ... It must be just racist trash, because I assumed that where there was all that smoke, there must be fire. I hadn’t paid attention to Murray. When I did read the book and did some more research on him, I came to think that he was probably the most unfairly maligned person in my lifetime. That doesn’t really run the risk of being much of an exaggeration there.

The most controversial passages in the book struck me as utterly mainstream with respect to the science at this point. They were mainstream at the time he wrote them and they’re even more mainstream today. I perceived a real problem here of free speech and a man’s shunning and I was very worried.

To describe Murray’s book as “controversial” is false. To describe it as “mainstream” is a contemptible lie. To say that Murray is unfairly maligned is wrong to the point of absurdity. Charles Murray is a nazi. Not even a neo-nazi, just a nazi.

Murray said he was surprised that people called his book racist when it was first published in the 90s. He has also said he was surprised people thought it was racist when he and some friends burned a cross on top of a hill when he was a teenager. Charles Murray is a disingenuous piece of shit, and a member, erstwhile if lapsed, of the klan. His book was funded by the Pioneer Fund, a non-profit established in 1937 to “advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences”. Did you catch the goal, there? It’s a eugenics organization intended to “breed the badness out of humanity”.

And because it was founded in 1937, when a whole lot of America was utterly charmed by the German Workers Party, it’s just a nazi organization, not a neo-nazi organization. They paid for the “research” that went into Murray’s book, and they paid Murray to write it. The purpose of the research and the purpose of the book was to push the fascist agenda here in the US that would end the few scraps of semi-socialism we managed to push through in the 1930s. Because fascists want poor people to be desperate and scared, and they fucking hate it that brown people were able to get on food stamps and social security.

Murray’s book is filled with terrible science conducted by godawful racists with the end goal of destroying the few safety nets we have left. The pseudoscience in the book was conducted in order to provide a smokescreen justification for the elimination of those safety nets, namely that poor people are poor because they’re genetically inferior, and keeping them alive just lets them breed to make more inferior people.

That’s what Harris describes as “controversial” and “mainstream”. That’s who Harris describes as “unfairly maligned”. In what way does Charles Murray, whose book’s central message has been adopted as central to the Republican party platform, need defense? In what way does he deserve defense?

And, side note, you may have noticed the right-wing talking point of attacking colleges and college campuses. Harris described Murray’s de-platforming as an instance of a “moral panic that we were seeing on college campuses”. The right has long been attacking colleges and universities, seeing them as hotbeds of communism, leftism, jewism, liberalism, and gayism. Of course, they can’t just come out and say that. Instead, they adopt the tactic of claiming to be defenders of a fundamental liberty, in this case free speech.

Fox News and the alt right have long been spreading the propaganda that our college campuses are shutting down free speech, that they prevent any conservative or right wing “truths” (heavy sarcasm quotes there) from being heard. This is a talking point you can hear being parroted by other exemplars of white mediocrity on college campuses, like Stephen Pinker, Brett Weinstein, and Jordan B. Peterson. In fact, far from stifling free speech, college students are the population most broadly in support of free speech in the United States.

Harris has also been openly misogynistic.

“There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said. “The atheist variable just has this—it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.”

Along with his essentialism toward muslims and brown people, Harris also believes in an essentialism toward gender. This is reflected not only by the above quote, but also by one of his conversations with Douglas Murray (another far right wing bigot, not related to Charles Murray), where D. Murray goes on a rant about trans people and Harris just chuckles along. In 6 minutes of conversation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04sSvofgWTg, an excerpt grabbed by a pro-Trump right winger calling themself Patriotic Populist), Murray whines about trans folk and throws in some anti-muslim bigotry for good measure.

Harris’s response? “That is hilarious.” He then goes on to… ask if Douglas Murray is more free to attack trans people because he is himself gay. He doesn’t open with criticism of Murray’s bigotry, but with criticism of Murray’s opponents for daring to criticise Murray. He then goes on to attack the left for “anti-intellectualism”. Why doesn’t he challenge Murray’s bigotries? Why is his ire instead immediately raised in defense of Murray against hypothetical criticism?

He’s also had Jordan Peterson on his podcast. Peterson rose to fame for criticizing a proposed law (which has since been passed) regarding trans people’s rights, declaring that he would happily go to prison for being a bigot to trans people (the law wouldn’t have done that, doesn’t do that), and that he would happily pay a fine (wouldn’t, doesn’t). Peterson now earns tens of thousands of dollars a month on patreon, and in return he routinely goes online, or gives talks, or gives interviews where he combines the most vacuous, empty truths he can think of with the most inane garbage he can think of, all so he can imply (he very carefully never states anything outright) that women belong in the kitchen, men belong in charge, and that everyone has to have a fixed role to play.

And instead of going over Peterson’s odious, false, and “controversial” beliefs, Harris spends an hour arguing about the nature of truth.

Who knows how Harris came to his atheism. It’s clear his approach to life isn’t built on compassion or understanding.

From what I can dig up on Harris’s past and life, he’s a child of wealth and privilege who’s never faced a challenge he didn’t personally select. He’s never had a boss or a job he could lose. He’s never had to work for shit. He had a weird trip in college, then fucked off to the India for a decade. He shared our collective trauma on 9/11 and wrote a book, which allowed him to coast for years as a public speaker. He spent a few years doing the minimum necessary to get a Ph.D., which work he abandoned entirely so so he could get back to earning royalties and start a podcast.

So who is Sam Harris? He’s a spoiled kid who’s spent the last 17 years defending the status quo and attacking whoever the hateful white kids thought it was cool to attack. Harris is yet another example of a mediocre white kid with rich parents who succeeded in spite of, or even due to, his faults rather than due to his merits.

Afrocentrism
Our next skeptic topic: Afrocentrism. This one caught my eye, because I wondered why the hell it was a topic in the Skeptic’s Dictionary. Then I read it and wondered if I was getting the whole story.

What skepdic.com presents is… not the whole story. According to the dictionary:

Afrocentrism is a pseudohistorical political movement that erroneously claims that African-Americans should trace their roots back to ancient Egypt because it was dominated by a race of black Africans. Some of Afrocentrism's other claims are: the ancient Greeks stole their main cultural achievements from black Egyptians; Jesus, Socrates and Cleopatra, among others, were black; and Jews created the slave trade of black Africans.

The main purpose of Afrocentrism is to encourage black nationalism and ethnic pride as a psychological weapon against the destructive and debilitating effects of universal racism.

Clearly, if this is what Afrocentrism is, then it’s a complete pile of crap and should be ignored when absent, scoffed at when present. Unfortunately, that’s not what Afrocentrism is. I went ahead and did a bit of googling to see if I could find other perspectives.

Let’s go ahead and start with wikipedia. No, it’s not a great source, but wikipedia’s bias is toward white, male, conservatives. It’s dominated by college bros, engineers, and programmers, except for the niche page that only ever gets edited by the two people who are the only two people in the world who will ever read that page. That is to say, wikipedia isn’t likely to be biased toward something called “Afrocentrism”. So here’s wikipedia’s summary:

Afrocentrism (also Afrocentricity) is an approach to the study of world history that focuses on the history of people of recent African descent. It is in some respects a response to global (Eurocentric) attitudes about African people and their historical contributions; it seeks to correct mistakes and ideas perpetuated by the racist philosophical underpinnings of western academic disciplines as they developed during and since Europe's Early Renaissance as justifying rationales for the enslavement of other peoples, in order to enable more accurate accounts of not only African but all people's contributions to world history. Afrocentricity deals primarily with self-determination and African agency and is a Pan-African point of view for the study of culture, philosophy, and history.

Afrocentrism is a scholarly movement that seeks to conduct research and education on global history subjects, from the perspective of historical African peoples and polities. It takes a critical stance on Euro-centric assumptions and myths about world history, in order to pursue methodological studies of the latter. Some of the critics of the movement believe that it often denies or minimizes European, Near Eastern and Asian cultural influences while exagerating certain aspects of historical African civilizations that independently accomplished a significant level of cultural and technological development. In general, Afrocentrism is usually manifested in a focus on the history of Africa and its role in contemporary African-American culture and Greek philosophy among others.

What is today broadly called Afrocentrism evolved out of the work of African-American intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but flowered into its modern form due to the activism of African-American intellectuals in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and in the development of African-American Studies programs in universities. However, following the development of universities in African colonies in the 1950s, African scholars became major contributors to African historiography.

Wow. That. Is. Different. Very different. Like, the difference between “Black Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter”? Maybe not that far.
I have heard a lot of things over the years that aren’t great about black nationalism, of course. To be honest, I don’t care for any form of nationalism. I have sympathy for any movement among oppressed peoples that attempts to fight back against oppression, but issues that carry strong emotional impact and that focus so strongly on something central to a person’s identity? That can lead to woowoo, myths, pseudoscience, and pseudohistory.

On the positive side, we can absolutely state that Afrocentrism has done good work, establishing departments for African American studies in universities, countering the racist assumptions built into decades or centuries of academic work coming out of those very, very white universities.

On the other hand, Afrocentrism also contributed to black nationalism and built up a lot of nonsense beliefs that are still present in a number of communities. Just as you’ll occasionally see nonsense about “How the Irish Saved Civilization”, you’ll see nonsense about how ancient Egyptians were black and were the heart of all civilization and so on.

Africa is a huge continent, with the largest amount of linguistic and racial diversity you’ll find anywhere on the planet. The black population of the United States came largely from a small region of western Africa, and represent only a fraction of the continent’s diversity and heritage. There many excellent reasons to celebrate what black people have done in the United States in surviving, overcoming, and battling the horrific conditions white people forced upon them and many excellent reasons to fight the deep currents of racism still built into American culture and academia, but this shouldn’t be used to foster false beliefs.

The Pan-African movement that forms part of Afrocentrism is probably an excellent and necessary thing in itself, as part of the effort to combat the neo-colonialism of the modern west. It would also be necessary to unite or ally that movement with a pan-Latin or pan-American movement which would allow (does allow?) Central and South American peoples to fight that same neo-colonialism.

But we can’t extend it in the past, and we can’t pretend that there’s some sort of genuine unity there. When I said that Africa is huge, I meant huge. It’s 20% of the Earth’s total land area and contains 16% of the world’s population. And it’s old. Remember, that’s where humanity started! That’s why you get more diversity in language and race in Africa than you do anywhere else. We shouldn’t really talk about Africa as a single place or people any more than we can for the Americas.

Just to maintain absolute clarity: I support Afrocentrism as a movement intended to fight back against racism in society and the academy. I support the study of black American culture and history, the contributions and developments and struggles of black people in the US. I also support an anti-colonial movement, a decolonization of Africa generally, and the study of African culture and history. But I urge all those involved in that project to not fall prey to black nationalism, or any nationalism, or any movement that ties identity so strongly to the field of study that they allow myths and falsehoods to creep into their work.

I also urge the Skeptic’s Dictionary to provide a little nuance to their article. I mean, damn. Afrocentrism was and is a large and vital movement that has grown and changed over the decades. To call the whole thing just the pseudohistory and pseudoscience of some portions (significant portions, I’ll admit) of the whole? That’s not good skepticism.


Links

• Sam Harris's website
• The Current Affairs piece on Harris
• The debate between Harris and Schneier on racial profiling
• The Skeptic Dictionary's entry on Afrocentrism
• The Wikipedia entry
• A more different take on Afrocentrism

SJA #19 - 15 October 2018 - New Directions, Music, and Vocab!

Timeline

• 00:00 - Hi!
• 00:30 - Taking things in a new direction
• 04:15 - Big Rock Candy Mountain by Harry McClintock
• 06:16 - Vocab:
• Acupuncture
• Minority
• 19:34 - News
• Someone bought BrettKavanaugh.com
• Urmila Mahadev brings us closer to the FUTURE
• 25:13 - Bye!

Other Links

• The Social Justice Wiki
• The Skeptic's Dictionary
• SJA Podcast
• Twitter: @surgoshan
• Twitch: Surgoshan
• D&D Podcast

SJA #18 - 8 October 2018 - Brett Kavanaugh, Me Too, and Me

Not a Rant
I've been rolling this around in my head a lot. I've had this on my shoulders for years, but the cacafuego of Kavanaugh's confirmation has really weighed heavily on me. I don't want to talk about this, but I think I need to. So there's no doubt, I'll be discussing, albeit not in strong terms nor in detail, sexual assault and aggressive conduct, both drunk and sober.

Obviously, this isn't the first time we've had a shitty person trying for or achieving public power, and as a result it's not the first time I've had my personal demons reflected in a public figure. However, this time it really hits home. In part it's because I've spent years now steeping myself in social justice and intersectionality, but that was also true when Trump was running for office.

No, the reason this is hitting so hard is because Kavanaugh's history is so similar to mine. I grew up privileged, albeit slightly less privileged than Kavanaugh. My parents could have easily sent me to private schools, and at one point seriously considered it when it looked like dad's job might take him overseas long term. So I always attended public schools, but they were the best public schools in the area.

I also attended an Ivy League school (Cornell, and unlike Kavanaugh I actually was the first person in my family to go there) and joined a fraternity. At that fraternity, I drank. A lot. A very lot. And I was an entitled douche to women. I have my #metoo stories, but I'm on the wrong side of that hashtag.

I was aggressive. I crossed boundaries. I made women feel unsafe. I made women unsafe.

Before you put a hole in the wall getting away from me, I never got to the level that Kavanaugh reached. I don't think I got to the level he started at. I never jumped a woman and tried to literally silence her cries for help. I never drugged women and participated in gang rapes.

But I did cross lines. And they're not blurred lines. They're very clear lines. I can recall a number of occasions, and have been told about another, where I can't even imagine what I made another person feel. Was she uncomfortable? Disgusted? Afraid? Terrified? Scarred?

I don't know because these women haven't sought me out to tell me. Some of them wouldn't have known me well enough to be able to seek me out. Also, I haven't made any effort to try and get on the supreme court or run for congress. I haven't tried to position myself as a Sterling moral authority.

I want to clarify, while I did many things I was ashamed of while drunk, not everything I did can be pinned on alcohol. I was immersed in a toxic environment and perpetuated that toxicity. I was bad when I was drunk, but not only when I was drunk. I was just worse when drunk.

In any event, there are differences between me and Kavanaugh as well as similarities, but the biggest difference is that I regret the harm I've done. I've tried to grow, and change, and become the moral exemplar I don't, and will never, claim to be. I sincerely hope that this is clear, not from my words (because a number of men have demonstrated they don't live up to feminist ideals, from Joss Whedon to Louis CK), but from my actions. I hope I lift up the voices of the oppressed, I hope I nurture students instead of shutting them down, I hope people feel safe when I'm around... I hope I'm becoming the person I want to be.

A lot of Kavanaugh's defenders, rape apologists all, have tried to claim that these allegations are so old that they're irrelevant, he was young and now he's mature, we can't hold youthful mistakes against him. Yes we can. We absolutely can.

First, Kavanaugh clearly doesn't regret, doesn't repent his actions. He has vigorously denied the allegations even as he provided the high school calendar that confirms them, even as more and more allegations come out, even as more of his former friends and acquaintances step forward to refute his statements. He has responded with disbelief and anger, not sorrow. He hasn't learned in the last 36 years, he hasn't grown beyond his boyhood rape phase.

Secondly, we have Kavanaugh's long history since college. We know that law professors groomed female law students to clerk in his court. They had to be physically beautiful, dressed to excellence, with perfect makeup. Mere academic excellence was no guarantee of a job with Judge Kavanaugh, not for anyone with a vagina.

And his actions in and out of court also confirm his continued disdain for women. He has made it perfectly clear, using the coded language of Republican doublespeak, that he will repeal Roe v Wade. And yet in 2007, while sitting on the DC Circuit Court, he ruled in favor of forcing two women to have abortions over their objections. He also ruled in that case that a third woman could be forced to have elective eye surgery over her objections. The three women were intellectually disabled and had been ruled mentally incompetent, and thus were being forced to undergo medical procedures without their consent.

If you bought into the lies surrounding the Republican party's position on abortion, you might be confused about a "conservative" judge forcing women to have abortions. However, their smokescreen is meant to hide the truth of their fundamentalist, antediluvian ideals. They view women as less than fully human, perhaps not even human, certainly not deserving of the human rights men possess. They view women as objects, as the property of men, to be transferred from the possession of their fathers to the possession of their husbands, locked away in homes and used however their owner sees fit.

Kavanaugh views women as objects to be used. As a boy, he used them for his physical pleasure. As a grown man, he requires his female clerks to please him visually, though no allegations have surfaced (yet) that he abused them otherwise. And he has used his position as a judge to push women into the subordinate, purely physical role of making babies for men. They are not human beings to him, with dreams, goals, and motivations, but limited use baby factories.

And those disabled women he forced to receive abortions they didn't want? Damaged goods. Unfit for the use of men because they would produce tainted offspring.

Perhaps Brett Kavanaugh did outgrow his "violent, physical rape phase" from high school and his "drug and gang rape" phase from college. Perhaps he truly has stopped physically, intimately assaulting women in person. But that doesn't mean he's grown into a better person. He now assaults women globally. He now uses his power to strip them of the dignity, equality, and human rights he feels that they, as objects, don't deserve. His position on the rights and dignity of other minorities is just as awful, and for much the same reasons.

Brett Kavanaugh doesn't belong on the Supreme Court. His repeated perjury means he doesn't belong on any court. Brett Kavanaugh needs to stop shouting angrily about his wounded pride, and instead spend a few years listening to the women who have been injured by the toxic culture he represents, that I used to represent. It might do him a world of good. It certainly did for me.

There's something more important to take away from this. Brett Kavanaugh is awful, but he's not a monster. He loves his wife and daughter. He genuinely cares about his daughter's basketball team. He absolutely loves the United States and believes that the terrible, genocidal things he's going to do as a member of the Supreme Court are good things to do. He has a normally functional brain, with the full complement of moral emotions. He's normal.

Brett Kavanaugh is what happens when you take a perfectly ordinary person and raise them in an environment where the most serious crimes face no consequences, and ridiculous non-crimes like "blasphemy" or "disrespect" face severe consequences. When you force a normal, decent person into a perverse environment, the result is a perverse individual. He has spent decades turning into the ingrown toenail of a human being we see today... but he's normal.

And so am I. Somewhat. I've been wrestling with my demons for years now, both the demons foisted on me by culture that led me to do harmful things to others and the demons I was born with that led me to drink myself unconscious every night for ten years. But before I dove into that project, I was just a guy, living the way he had been taught, trying to live up to the mal-formed and ill-expressed set of virtues he'd been fed.

I look back on my past with shame and disgust, and I know there are other men like me who have faced and are facing what they have done, who are learning to live with that shame, and who are trying to build a better world. Because there are other men who will have to face their crimes in the future, men who are still boys, men who are infants, men who haven't been born. Our culture shapes men like Kavanaugh and me, and throws us into the world, weapons intended to dehumanize and subjugate women, forcing them into place as lesser beings, subservient and traumatized.

I can only hope that by sharing my story, by outing myself as a one-time abuser of women, that I can transform Kavanaugh from a distant, monstrous other, into the nightmare next door. Because rapists aren't troglodytes lurking in the bushes. If the women in your life trust you enough to share their pain, and far, far too many of them have pain they're hiding, then you will learn that three out of four rapists are known to the victim. Your rapist is not a stranger hiding in the shadows. Your rapist is your neighbor, your friend, your roommate's boyfriend, your roommate, your brother, your father, your uncle, your grandfather, your teacher, your boss, the kid sitting next to you in math class.

Brett Kavanaugh will never answer for his crimes, not even to himself. A few hours before I recorded this, he was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Even in the most optimistic future, he will never be charged for his assaults and rapes. He will only ever be removed from the court if the United States alters its culture and politics in a dramatic fashion.

Which means we need to work to make sure there are no more Kavanaughs moving forward. We need to act to stop the rapists, the abusers, the harassers in our lives. It's going to be difficult, heart-breaking, and dangerous, but the alternative is worse in every possible way. When you call out a co-worker for demeaning someone sexually, you're not just confronting him; you're confronting everyone who didn't say something. You're encouraging the people who wanted to, but were too frightened, you're discouraging the ones who thought he was funny, you're changing the minds of those who hadn't thought about it before. And they can go out and change the world, too. Your small acts can add up to big changes, but only if they're difficult. The small easy things just keep things the way they are.

Thank you for listening. This may have been hard for some people to listen to. It was hard to say. If you want to share your me too stories, if you want to rip me a new one, if you want to comment or respond in any way, you can do so at my youtube channel, Social Justice Alchemy, or on the blog, surgoshan.blogspot.com. You can also find me on twitter at @surgoshan.

No news this week; I'm going to let this one stand alone. I've included links to some articles about Brett Kavanaugh's behavior and legal decisions below. And remember, these past few weeks have been awful for many people, there are people in your life who could no doubt use some additional kindness.

Amanda Marcotte's article on Kavanaugh forcing women to have abortions
Caselaw: Kavanaugh's decision
Kavanaugh's clerks groomed like models

Social Justice Alchemy: No Podcast This Week

No podcast this week! Buzzsprout gives me 2 hours free per month, and this month doesn't update until the middle of the week, so I'm giving myself a break from screaming about the news. :)