You cannot engage someone if they use rhetorical techiques that foreclose on your ability speak, or theirs to listen. These include (🧵):

1. Asserting that authority depends entirely on identity, either professional identity (I have a PhD and you don't) or personal identity. 2. Framing any kind of response to an argument as defensiveness. In a personal relationship this borders on abusive behavior. Accuse someone of something, and then when they respond, ignore the response as "defensiveness".

In this single heartwrenching Reddit post you’ll find a microcosm of all the philosophical issues underlying mental health diagnostic categories. Start with the first sentence. Paraphrased:

“I am suffering. Why?!!!” The second sentence captures the essential meaning of a diagnostic category. Paraphrased:

“I need to know if my suffering is *my fault* or a medical condition.”

The more I notice it, the more remarkable I find the replacement of "good/wise/kind" with "healthy".

Everything is a "health" issue: personal worries, education, the justice system, housing — it's all "mental health" or "public health."

This conceptual monoculturing is bad. Living a good life is living a "healthy" life. A person engaged in unwise or immoral actions is "mentally unhealthy."

By extension, all approaches to fixing our problems are "medical interventions."

Should we have friends? Consult this study on how they affect mental health.

I don't understand how progressive Christians who call for "decolonizing" everything view their own religion, or Islam for that matter. The historical spread of these religions is inseparable from colonization, and their continued spread is textbook "cultural colonization". Judaism, by contrast, is not a "colonial" religion. Unlike Christianity and Islam, there was never a Jewish empire that spread religion through political conquest. There is no evangelical Jewish tradition. No indigenous religions were displaced by Jewish missionaries.

I think a defining feature of our time is "epistemic opacity."

First heard the idea from a historian of tech, who explained it with cars. In 1950, cars were all epistemically transparent to any skilled mechanic. Pop the hood on a car today? It's opaque. We live in a world of increasing epistemic opacity. Virtually everything in our lives requires a very, very complicated explanation, from the chain of production that gets us our food to the workings of our smartphones.

Epistemic opacity is ALIENATING.

I'm still thinking about the book I just finished, Coming Up For Air.

45 yr old insurance salesman, George Bowling, he's so bored, by his kids, his wife, himself, he wants to "escape" the rat race...and slowly you begin to see it's George, not the rat race, that's the problem. George is very observant, very cynical. For much of the book, it feels like he's right about how lousy his own life is—and, by association, the lives of all those who live like him. Zombies, idiots, no ambition, shapeless middle-aged bodies, dead to the world. Tragic.

In a complete change, I will be going from no restrictions on my classroom tech to a fully restricted approach, with exceptions only for disability or unique requests made directly to me.

https://twitter.com/BradWilcoxIFS/status/1666138839541219334

I once believed restriction was foolish and draconian. What changed my mind, in part, was *students* telling me they wanted restrictions in place, like Odysseus tied to the mast so he can’t visit the sirens (well the metaphor is mine, but the sentiment theirs).

We've watched too many f*ing movies where evil villains want to control everything ALL ELSE BE DAMNED.

So when people say "the billionaires want to control us and inject us with COVID vaccines" it sounds plausible.

Folks: All the rich people hated having society shut down!! Is it true that wealthy people want more money and control? Sure, of course. But they also want to enjoy themselves. No one—I repeat, NO ONE—enjoyed shutting everything down. (Well, maybe some hardcore introverts.)

There's no way. The man's entire perspective is dominated by the appeal to nature fallacy. This is why he has been so good on environmental law, but so bad on vaccines, and, in his opposition to nuclear energy, bad for the environment he wants to protect.

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1665460519719895042

Part of RFK Jr's appeal to nature leads him to a misguided belief that only "organic" solutions—eg, bottom up, pioneered by individuals, rather than top-down and institutional—are good solutions to problems.

This is deeply misguided.

"Magic" and "witchcraft" aren't "post-Christian" or "non-Christian."

Incantatory healing, speaking in tongues, and exorcism, for example, are all Christian.

The difference between those and "magic" is the purported source of efficacy. Superstition is what you don't believe in. I'm responding to the quote below in Ross Douthat's article.

IMO it's important to realize that *metaphysically*, there's not a huge difference between "magic" and lots of very standard Christian beliefs/practices.

Religiously? Sure.

The tyranny of scientific authority means increasingly impoverished forms of value. Valuable = material and quantifiable.

What if hiking, and marriage, and friendship, weren't good because they have "mental and physical and financial benefits," but just...good in themselves. When every activity must be seen as a means to a few very specific ends—health, wealth, longevity—we disenchant the world, and ourselves.

I've commented on this before, but I think it's an important, neglected question:

Many who are "anti-woke" criticize schools for indoctrinating children instead of educating them.

Which leads to the Q:

Is indoctrinating children bad, full stop, or only bad in public schools? Typically, arguments against indoctrination assume indoctrination is inherently bad.

Free thought is good, children should be allowed to choose their ideology rationally, neutrality is a virtue of education, etc.

But...that means churches and parochial schools are terrible!

Yesterday at the public basketball court with my wife and daughter. Older white man carrying an orange bag approached us. He asked me if I was receiving my mail, because his was late.

Then he said, "The mail is racist. Black people get theirs on time, white people don't." I asked him what he meant. He said that black mailmen were deliberately targeting him and other white people. I told him I thought that wasn't true. At this point he put a hand in his pocket, and we were all getting creeped out. My daughter took my hand.

Folks, it’s straightforward—if not easy—to use Twitter well. Here is a short list of flexible rules I use to make this a wonderful paradise I enjoy almost all the time: 1. Turn off notifications.

IMO panic over Musk reifies the Great Person vision of reality. Powerful/genius individual change history. But Bezos, Musk, the President, Nobel winners…they are avatars we use to make sense of the complex systems out of which they emerge, and by which they’re controlled. It’s like how people blame the President for high gas prices, or praise them when the stock market goes up. That’s not how it works, but we need a simple explanatory heuristic for these things, and a target for our emotions. It’s naive to think that without Bezos, no Amazon.

The real social media problem isn’t about free speech.

It’s that social media is an information centrifuge, separating us, siloing us, and rewarding those who are most alarmist in the most general terms.

My main worry isn’t the censorship of truth, but the promotion of poison. It worries me deeply that people like @elonmusk are *so* focused on free speech—an important issue—that they don’t care about the overproduction and consumption of ultra-processed junk information that’s sickening us all.

A complete explainer of @TuckerCarlson's video—yes, even the burly man shooting bottles of canola oil.

It all comes back to my favorite topic: Naturalness.

You see, "The End of Men" is about a (ludicrous) vision of what is to be a Natural Man.

Let's get started! Seed oils—like canola oil—are one of many "new" processed foods being blamed for poor health by wellness gurus who want us to return to a dietary paradise past.

They move us away from TRADITION and towards corrupt, corporate, secular, unholy modernity.

knowyourmeme.com/memes/seed-oils

Kendi’s ever more capacious definitions of white supremacy are counterproductive. They make it seem as if sexism and homophobia and anti-Semitism could be eradicated by eradicating white supremacy, as if those forms of bigotry didn’t long predate the very idea of “race”. If you want to fight sexism or traditional gender norms, for example, the belief these were invented by white Europeans—or are currently sustained by white Europeans—is going to really confuse you when you learn about international history and politics.

Today my 9 yr old got upset when her new shoes didn't fit (I get it!). Didn't want to go to school (it happens).

But then, when we said she had to, she said, "Why don't you care abt my mental health? I should get a mental health rest day."

And folks, I don't think that's cool. Here's what I mean: I don't want my daughter confusing upsetness about shoes with a mental health issue. It's bad for her *and* trivializes genuine mental health issues.

And let me be crystal clear: This isn't HER. It's adults not making that distinction hard and fast.

I've spent a ton of time in the health misinformation space. I've visited horrific "natural" cancer retreats that kill people by convincing them not to pursue chemo.

Let me tell you this: The reason there's a market for misinformation is because people's needs aren't being met. What do they need? Here's a partial list:

1. To feel empowered when caring for their own health and that of their families

2. To feel like they are being treated with dignity, as real humans

3. To feel like experts aren't working top-down by "nudging" or coercing

I’m getting frustrated by the vague sloganeering and lack of complexity in debates about free speech. If censoring means “denying a platform,” then we are *constantly* censoring. It’s called curation. There’s only so much time in a school year; only so much room in a text book. Many, many points of view—often from otherwise respected scholars and researchers—are ruled unworthy of publication or promotion: Poorly argued, under-evidenced claims don’t get into journals, etc.