I did two podcast interviews this week – with Gad Saad on the Saad Truth, and with Ciaron O Floinn and Ashling O’Brien on Freethought Friday.
My interviews with Gad Saad and Freethought Friday
I did two podcast interviews this week – with Gad Saad on the Saad Truth, and with Ciaron O Floinn and Ashling O’Brien on Freethought Friday.
FIVE cats?!?
And I thought I was overdoing it with just three.
That was a great interview with Gad, enlightening.
Saad seems to have flown under my radar until recently but he did an excellent talk on free speech that I watched on YouTube last week:
http://youtu.be/G5-oG0L6ZnU
It’s an hour long but it’s well worth the time.
Saw the one with Saad Gad, who had some interesting guests in the past, too — that was good, Michael. My only criticism is that we have the goals, i.e. robust debate, but we all are short on ideas how to get there.
{1} What can we do against the baseless smearing? Unjust smears are applied easily, in order to mobilize an audience against a person.
{2} What can we do about the “narrative” that is written, where (say) every mentioning of Dawkins is done with a judgmental and serious label (e.g. “bigot”) that create, and reinforces a certain image that bears little resemblence with the truth? In some quarters, the politicially confused warp the entire political spectrum so that those disagreeing with them become “right wingers”, “reactionary”, “neocon” and the likes.
{3} And what exactly is going on, so that we have some idea what we oppose (do we even oppose something concretely?) I offered my perspective many times. It’s often attempted to capture as social justice warriors, regressive left, or as a a shift from “dignity culture” to “victim culture”. Others chalk it off as “the kids today” or blame it on the influence of shock bloggers, but is this sufficient? Yet others think there’s a culture war, or there was even cultural marxism at play. I don’t believe the latter proposals are accurate, but it looks like the opponents particularily on the left still run around like headless chicken.
{4} What are actionable steps? The other side did rally around a few opinion leaders like PZ Myers and Rebecca Watson and from this organized position (two blog networks and excellent connections) they essentially did the divide and conquer routine. There is not an “opposing team” even when the social justice movement think there is one. Should there be one, i.e. should atheists and skeptics opinion leaders begin to treat PZ etc like they did treat Ken Ham and Ray Comfort? Should we ignore the thing altogether? i.e. the situation is characterized that one group started to define the rules of play and started playing, including copious amounts of foul play. We mostly stand around and scatch our heads. If they want to play a different game than we do (they want pomo social justice, we want sketicism-atheism) can we help them go their own way and leave us alone?
{5} Something I forgot, …