Whiteness is one of the biggest and most long-running scams ever perpetrated.
It started in the late 1600s in America, but like so many scams, it spiraled out of control until it had a life of its own.
Source: How White People Got Made – The Message – Medium by Quinn Norton
In many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.
What this study illustrates is another general way — in addition to our cradle-born errors — in which humans frequently generate misbeliefs: We import knowledge from appropriate settings into ones where it is inappropriate.
Some of our most stubborn misbeliefs arise not from primitive childlike intuitions or careless category errors, but from the very values and philosophies that define who we are as individuals.
The way we traditionally conceive of ignorance — as an absence of knowledge — leads us to think of education as its natural antidote. But education can produce illusory confidence.
In the classroom, some of best techniques for disarming misconceptions are essentially variations on the Socratic method. … Then, of course, there is the problem of rampant misinformation in places that, unlike classrooms, are hard to control — like the Internet and news media. In these Wild West settings, it’s best not to repeat common misbeliefs at all.
The most difficult misconceptions to dispel, of course, are those that reflect sacrosanct beliefs. And the truth is that often these notions can’t be changed.
But here is the real challenge: How can we learn to recognize our own ignorance and misbeliefs? … For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect.
Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all.
The built-in features of our brains, and the life experiences we accumulate, do in fact fill our heads with immense knowledge; what they do not confer is insight into the dimensions of our ignorance. As such, wisdom may not involve facts and formulas so much as the ability to recognize when a limit has been reached. Stumbling through all our cognitive clutter just to recognize a true “I don’t know” may not constitute failure as much as it does an enviable success, a crucial signpost that shows us we are traveling in the right direction toward the truth.
Source: We Are All Confident Idiots
The Patriot Act continues to wreak its havoc on civil liberties. Section 213 was included in the Patriot Act over the protests of privacy advocates and granted law enforcement the power to conduct a search while delaying notice to the suspect of the search. Known as a “sneak and peek” warrant, law enforcement was adamant Section 213 was needed to protect against terrorism. But the latest government report detailing the numbers of “sneak and peek” warrants reveals that out of a total of over 11,000 sneak and peek requests, only 51 were used for terrorism.
I think the most frightening thing is considering this information alongside the “targeted killing” drone assassination program permitted to target even American citizens for death, anywhere on Earth, at any time, for secret reasons that a person meets a secret definition of the enemy, based on secret evidence, in a secret process undertaken by unidentified officials. Oh sure, the first few targets were legitimate terrorism targets, but what about the next thousand?
this sense of flow is a monstrous illusion—so says contemporary physics. And Newton was as much a victim of this illusion as the rest of us are. It was Albert Einstein who initiated the revolution in our understanding of time. In 1905, Einstein proved that time, as it had been understood by physicist and plain man alike, was a fiction. Our idea of time, Einstein realized, is abstracted from our experience with rhythmic phenomena: heartbeats, planetary rotations and revolutions, the swinging of pendulums, the ticking of clocks. Time judgments always come down to judgments of what happens at the same time—of simultaneity. … What Einstein had shown was that there is no universal “now.” Whether two events are simultaneous is relative to the observer. And once simultaneity goes by the board, the very division of moments into “past,” “present,” and “future” becomes meaningless.
Does time have a future? Yes, but how much of a future depends on what the ultimate fate of the cosmos turns out to be.
If there is one proposition about time that all scientifically inclined thinkers can agree on, it might be one due to the nonscientist Hector Berlioz, who is reputed to have quipped, “Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”
Similar sexual assault policy changes at Harvard have spurred 28 Harvard Law professors to write a letter of objection, noting that due process and the rights of the accused are seriously threatened by policies that compromise the presumption of innocence and affirmative burden of proof. But those who defend the law likely have a legitimate complaint with the burden of proof as it currently stands: namely, people don’t tend to believe women when they claim they’ve been assaulted.
I agree: the fact that women are not generally perceived to be as credible as men is a real feminist issue. … Affirmative consent laws will not actually address the problem that women are generally viewed as less credible than men.
Nobody is claiming rape isn’t wrong or that it isn’t a problem, but the fact is that it is already illegal, and much of the struggle against the failures of the legal system in handling rape cases will consist of destroying the delusion that women are not credible agents. Affirmative consent laws will be no help there, and may well do some harm.
Source: Prohibition, Affirmative Consent | Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig
archive: Prohibition, Affirmative Consent | Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig
Additional: An Appalling Case for Affirmative-Consent Laws – The Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf