After two years of investigation and constant media coverage, the Mueller Report is finally finished. While anyone outside the Justice Department has yet to read the full report, Attorney General William Barr has released a summary. The so-called Russiagate story is not yet over, however, as there are now calls for the entire Mueller Report to be made public. Exactly what the Russiagate story is and how it started is expertly told by Matt Taibbi in his “It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD” piece. What I’m more interested in is how this whole story is indicative of human nature.
truth
Jordan Peterson and God: Truth, Myth, and the Bible
In this post, I am going to write a response/review of Jordan Peteron’s 2017 lecture titled Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God, which is available to watch on Youtube.
A Primer on Evolution pt 2: Evidence
In part two, I will give a brief overview of the evidence for the theory of evolution. This is not an exhaustive compendium of all the evidence in support of the theory of evolution. It is already a long post, so I keep all my descriptions brief. If you are interested in learning more, I provide plenty of links to websites and peer reviewed papers all throughout.
If you’re interested in how evolution relates to religion and whether it gives us any reason not to believe in God, check out this post. The current discussion will not touch on the subject, sticking strictly to the science.
Part 1: How Natural Selection Works
Part 3: Higher Concepts in Evolutionary Theory
Twitter and the Right to be Heard
Social media, and twitter in particular, has recently become popular in the conversation about freedom of speech. This surrounds the issue of Twitter punishing people for posting right-wing and conservative ideas more than people on the left. Alex Jones being banned and Kathy Griffin not being banned are two exemplary cases.
The fear here is that Twitter is policing people for wrongthink. Only left-wing and liberal ideas are allowed, and with Twitter being a primary hub for communication, this threatens to silence right-wing and conservative views from the public conversation. This would give left-wing and liberal ideas de facto hegemony in western culture. This has prompted people to call for Twitter usage to be treated like a utility or even a human right, in the sense that humans have a right to free speech.
I think this is a misguided way of thinking about Twitter. Being banned from Twitter does not infringe on a person’s right to free speech. It only infringes on their ability to have that speech heard by a larger audience. This brings up the questions: do humans have a fundamental right to be heard? Is being heard a part of our right to free speech?
Your Truth, My Truth, Our Truth, Right Truth
In this day and age, with social media and politically biased news media, it seems that truth isn’t truth. Thus it has become popular to talk about ‘my truth‘ when people talk about their opinion. It’s interesting that people can believe wildly different versions of things that happen. From Russiagate to Uranium One, it all seems to depend what ‘our truth’ is for any particular group.
The alternative, unfortunately, is to have some version of a single, orthodox ‘right Truth’ that we all must agree on, possibly enforced by a Ministry of Truth or a Truth Force.
I’m okay with a US Space Force. But what we need most is a Truth Force — one that defends against all enemies of accurate information, both foreign & domestic.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) August 20, 2018
The problem with this is obvious: who gets to say what the Right Truth is? What are their motivations for saying that A is the Right Truth but B is not the Right Truth? Is it ever possible for one source to give the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
And, there are more ways of controlling what becomes the ‘Right Truth’ than just lies of commission. There is also the illusory truth effect and lies of omission.