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Since I have gained about 400 new followers recently: here are some of my most controversial opinions. Buckle in.
1/ Free will does not exist. It's ALL luck, all the way down. And I do mean ALL THE WAY.
1/ Free will does not exist. It's ALL luck, all the way down. And I do mean ALL THE WAY.
2/ Universal Basic Income would free us up to create more art, to nurture our interpersonal relationships, to look after our elderly & sick & would enrich our lives with many of the things that have no monetary but tremendous human value.
3/ I practise a religion & it's personally meaningful to me. I'm not an atheist. However, religion is a net evil &, given the power, I would remove all belief in the supernatural from the world. This existence is all the magic, grandeur & beauty we need.
4/ Personal ancestry can be meaningful but race is a pernicious fiction, a collective delusion. Skin colour alleles code for one thing alone: your epidermal pigment. We are one humanity.
5/ While psychological and neurological racial differences are largely meaningless, average sex differences are real, significant, meaningful & culturally universal. They need not & should not constrain individual freedoms, however.
6/ Despite the above: gender critical feminists are wrong. The way to go is not to try to uphold woman as a social & political status marker but to ensure that we live together with men in safety & harmony. This is realistic & achievable. We don't need sex-segregated spaces.
7/ Racism, sexism & homophobia exist but are far less important factors in most people's hatred of each other than rivalry, antisocial behaviour, jealousy, cruelty, neglect & other interpersonal factors.
8/ Freedom of expression has the worst trade offs of any fundamental human right, but it is also the foundation of all significant human achievement. We need a bottom-up culture of free speech. Some people will say hateful things: we must let them.
9/ We must not hold morality hostage to scientific beliefs (including my own in (4) & (5) above), which could be proven wrong. Reality doesn't arrange itself to suit our convenience & we will need to have the ethical fortitude to be unaffected by whatever we discover.
10/ Individual ideas aren't wrong or harmful because bad people share them. Guilt by association should be applied to neither people NOR opinions. We should do more fearless & freeform thinking aloud, correcting as we go.
11/ I've written about some of these things, for anyone who would like to hear my more in-depth thoughts. On free will, for @AreoMagazine & @LetterWiki https://areomagazine.com/2019/07/28/on-free-will-a-letter-exchange/
12/ On race & ancestry (a) https://fireandvultures.wordpress.com/2016/10/25/the-half-caste/
13/ On race & ancestry (b) I've also made a brief YouTube video on this:
14/ See also my conversation with @thomaschattwill on @LetterWiki 
: https://letter.wiki/conversation/206
: https://letter.wiki/conversation/206
15/ I've written on free speech several times, most recently here, for @AreoMagazine & @LetterWiki : https://areomagazine.com/2020/07/30/possible-conversations/
: https://areomagazine.com/2020/07/30/possible-conversations/
16/ Finally, since it's often controversial for older Americans: I am strongly opposed to all forms of infant genital cutting, both ritual & social. I have written about this for @AreoMagazine here, fact checked by the amazing @briandavidearp: https://areomagazine.com/2019/09/24/a-wrong-against-boys-an-impossible-conversation-about-circumcision/
