skepticism

– the rigorous methodology summed up by Carl Sagan as a Baloney Detection Kit

Debate vs Inquiry and “Reasonable Debate” as a silencing tactic

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Debate is not inquiry. Argument is not skepticism. Fetishizing debate makes us less knowledgeable as a culture and even as a movement, not more.

<okay, sure, we’ve been having these debates for decades now. But let’s dredge it up again. Let’s treat the basic bodily autonomy of people with uteruses** as a subject that’s up for discussion, a subject that reasonable people can disagree about. And let’s be calm and reasonable about it.

Rifts getting riftier: naming and shaming the harassers

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Well, this got interesting fast. The floodgates appear to be opening in the atheoskeptosphere with regard to people deciding that keeping names out of the we-need-anti-harassment-policies discussion wasn’t doing much good for effecting change.

While we’re talking about workplace and convention harassment incidents (particularly amongst the groups for which conventions are also workplaces), I’ve been meaning to link to this excellent post from last month about why conventions are harassment hotspots (there’s Science! on this).

a thumbnail graphic: text reads BLAST FROM THE PAST

BFTP: Popularity of long-debunked rape myths: talk about disheartening

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Sites aimed at rape prevention should do a better job of checking their facts if they really want to help women and other potential rape victims: parroting long-debunked factoids does more harm than good.

This is a repost: originally published in 2008. Over the last week it’s suddenly started getting first dozens and now hundreds of views per day. Since the original post’s comments were closed long ago, please comment here if you have something to say.

Torture was central to both the witch scares and the Inquisition

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… under such duress, people confessed at length and in great detail to the fantastic and impossible, often also indicting others, in a spreading, spiraling cascade of fantasies. Remember also that terror regimes the world over use it delightedly to terrify and suppress dissidents within their populations. […] And they can do this only in an environment in which there are people naive enough to believe the absurd perjuries concocted under such conditions.

Don’t be one of those people.

Well done rationalia forum, you’re my final Skeptic straw

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A page on this blog is now titled “Critical Thinking” instead of its previous title “Skepticism”, because that name has become tarnished by the long-lasting and widespread ‘Skepchicks should STFU’ campaign being waged by so-called “skeptics” and “rationalists” who reject the utility of applying critical thinking to social structures, at least if that critical thinking is being done by feminists.