Serpents and Doves
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On Checking Your Privilege
For the record, the real reason privilege checking fell out of favor is because checking your privilege doesn’t do anything. Like so much of cultural studies-inflected pseudo-left practices, it’s an entirely symbolic and semantic ritual. It turns out that even in the rare event that members of privileged groups actually checked their own privilege, they’re
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My What Big Teeth You Have
This post was written in March 2006: Con artists understand that most people operate in a symbolically patterned world, and that reality, whatever is really there, is hidden behind the symbols. We tend to accept the world as it appears at face value. We can't live without a certain minimum level of trust that things
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Left Authoritarians?
This Atlantic article entitled "The Experts Somehow Overlooked the Authoritarians on the Left" bolsters the argument I made in Naive Idealists posted on 9/6. All authoritarians, whether on the Left or Right, work with the energies of one-sided Doves, aka Naive Idealists. You don't have to be a Dove like Robespierre or John Brown to be
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Naive Idealism
During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of confessional religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever