I think i am one of the most sceptical a minded people. For me personally, again, it's this kind of collective action from the top down versus just sort of internal, subjective truths. Does the loklets monster exist? Almost certainly not. I've told this story sore of of e, richard dawkins and and ken miller. Yes. It's very, very improbable that such a small group wot bodies would never have been discovered. Ebut there's something exciting, ther's something satisfying about that. So i can understand why, you know, i want to believe in the lokness monster.
Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn’t practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society?
In this wide-ranging conversation Helen Pluckrose recounts the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous.