Fire Walks, It's Not the Temperature, Its the Conductivity

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i think we need to keep these, these ideas in the right places. If i can walk across high coals, i can ask for raise at work. I don't want he prickly people who are sceptic thinking in terms of 'what is true' But i do think it's a mistake when people think that they can talk each other into being a different kind of person. Ut and atheists could be found on common ground - but there would have to be compromise. We're not going to bring enlightenment versus counter-thinking R, but we can avoid making too much of a conflict of this.

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.