I am an organizer in the secular community. We hear this same origin story a lot from new atheists.

I am baffled why so many people are reflexively okay with the use of coercive force was deployed in a situation where words would have sufficed.

Not because the plots are terribly similar, but the tones are: makes me think of the novel “The Pilo Family Circus.”

I fear it isn't a sound critical argument to imply that those who found this sketch amusing are either lacking in good taste or I sufficiently educated. Not strong reviewery there.

(Typo above: should have been “shouldn’t.”)

I don’t know, my point was quite narrow: that there is evidence that the sound of words can convey meaning quite apart from their semantic content (given the parameters of a culturally-trained language faculty as it exists in the brain, and of the universal aural and semantic processing systems which emerge from the…

Studies from market psychology and cognitive linguistics suggest that there are good reasons why one word would promote the success of a brand, and another option would work against its success. If you want to begin wading into that body of work, you might begin at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kik…

In philosophy, specifically the branch called “disproof atheism”, there is a line of reasoning against the existence of a creator called “the argument from epistemic inaccessibility.” Short put, it seems unlikely that a creator deity created the universe for us (or: at all), since so much of the universe (in terms of…

That’s a reasonable interpretation, yes. Well noted.

Great books should have an effect on you without having to read them.

Ibn Khaldun’s Muqqadimah talks about the pattern of decay over generations: the first creating value, the second enjoying it, the third destroying it. Should be required reading for all undergrads...

I worry when I see groups of young men like this. That kind of enclave is good for perpetuating cultural traditions, sure, but can also foster extremism when ideology isolates and amplifies itself in an echo chamber. (Setting aside the fact that some of those traditions are in and of themselves deplorable.)

Excuse me: How do they know he made it to the ocean?

No worries, really. I think we’re coming from the same place.

<<Reasons are not excuses.>>

There are plenty of reasons though, eh? And if you don’t keep them in mind, you’ll have a harder time bringing her around. Amazingly, hate and hostility don’t do much to dissolve hate and eradicate ignorance. On the other hand, making known the expectations we have of each other, given our understanding of the…

Why not both? She can take responsibility for being insufficiently uncritical of the views she inherited.

I think it important to keep in mind that this person didn’t invent religiously-motivated bigotry; she inherited it. She’s a victim of the same system of ugly ideas and self-perpetuating belief systems, even if she is helping to propagate that bigotry.

You’re right. The register of “groceries” is fantastic — vernacular, spontaneous, juicy. Love that sibilance.

New journalism, literary journalism, creative nonfiction — I’d expect you’d find different nomenclature in use even among different English departments. The jargon of lit is much more various than that of some other fields. Perhaps unsurprising, given that these are wordies?