Obliquely Weekly #5 - salty insights into uncleverness and religion
Recommendations you'll enjoy in direct proportion to your intellectual humility
Look at those idiots…
We've all done that thing where other people are saying something that we're inclined to strongly contest, so we accuse them of motivated reasoning.
Awww, bless us, eh.
There's a growing list of cognitive biases to wave around whenever we're disputing things and knowing about them has become something of a credential.
'Oh, that's just the availability heuristic' we'll say, sounding a lot cleverer than if we just pointed out that someone always gets their information from the nearest available source.
'Ah, they're displaying anchoring bias' is a comforting thought, meaning that someone seems to have failed to update a belief that they held long ago.
It's as if knowing about some cognitive biases with fancy names prevents us from realising that they affect us.
Various Rarely Certain explorations of cognitive bias in action exist already, in which your writer has surprised himself by noticing and overcoming one, but
has written perhaps the most honest and amusing guide to our reasoning flaws I've seen for a while.Guess what. The cleverer you are, the more prone you are.
This is why I bang on so much about humility and curiosity beating knowledge accumulation hands down. But enough about my shining halo and enjoy Gurwinder, who's got this.
For Allah’s sake…
Somehow I missed the existence of Andrew Tate until quite recently.
He seems to be the very last thing we need in a world where feminism is subject to reasonable critiques that deserve to be taken seriously. And which are being discussed seriously, by some feminists (always a welcome development, when people in a particular camp take up an issue that's mostly aired by idiots outside the camp).
So, there's Andrew Tate. A blowhard influencer who thinks women are unterwomensch and is now under arrest for sex trafficking.
But I had no idea that he had converted to Islam because it's a religion where men are really men, as he sees it.
So this is just in case you missed
's piece for The Free Press on Tate's conversion and what it says about religious overlaps with politics.
[Insert better word here], unite!
Although I wrote long ago (about a year ago in Rarely Certain time) that I wasn't convinced that Wokeism is really a secular religion, I was wrong.
Having recanted in the face of overwhelming evidence it's one of those things you end up being unable to unsee.
And also having thought that everything that could be said about Wokeism's religious qualities has now been said, along come Leighton Woodhouse and Michael Shellenberger with the neatest synopsis yet of the Wokeist Trinity and a plausible account of why it seems so unassailable.
In short, Wokeists are united whereas the rest of us are a hopelessly ragtag collection of lefties (like me), conservatives, some feminists, some black people and most ordinary apolitical folk who tend to see eye-to-eye on little else beyond the incoherences and harms caused by gender ideology, racial essentialism and the sillier end of climate apocalypse chatter.
We have less than a cat in hell's chance of ever speaking with one voice, despite being a clear majority.
Unfortunately Leighton and Michael commit an obvious faux pas by suggesting that we brand ourselves 'Normies', which is already a label used by denizens of the chans to describe people who don't spend all their time on the chans. I'd prefer to be known simply as a 'moderate', to signal what are actually moderate opinions. But the piece is still a helpful distillation of the issues and the challenge of confronting it, so that we can crack on with the multifarious real problems everyone worries about.
Moderate to me is a wishy - washy opinion-less mouth piece of the establishment. "Left wing" Tories, "Right wing" Labour, these people call themselves moderates. They all say the same thing and none of it is original. I could not think of a worse phrase to call myself. I am Liberal, I am Conservative, I have a wide range of opinions which may sum to some supposed centre but each opinion alone deviates further in some direction than any moderate new speak. Moderates are bound to the establishment window of permissible opinion. This applies to all old media. Who replaced the unhinged Liz Truss with her radical tax cuts but a moderate. We need to coalesce around individualism and respect people who dare to think differently.
On reading your latest piece I have became further intrigued. Could you please explain how you are of the left, who you characteristice as of the right and how they are of the right? To me a traditional left and right no longer exist so would like to know how you feel so confident flagrantly throwing these terms around?