Robin Ince quits working for the BBC over his support for men in dresses and terrorists

[SingleSexSpacesInSchools]

Shame really he’s a nice guy, a huge bibliophile, met him a few times at book signings, the last live show of his I saw he did shoehorn in “and of course trans women are real women” or some such nonsense.

guessing the infinite monkey cage is cancelled now, that was in my top five podcasts.

can’t do a popular science show and think women can have a penis though. Wonder what Brian thinks?

the video of his love resignation , presumably at the end of a monkey cage recording, is here
https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1plg02g/bbc_presenter_robert_ince_claims_he_has_been/

notably he doesn’t say how men in dresses are being treated badly. Everyone has a blind spot.

One problem the skeptic movement has is that in some respects it moved from a reasoned position to an identity.

For most atheists, including Richard Dawkins, the word is a shorthand. We know you can’t prove a negative- but you also can’t prove that the sun is going to rise in the east tomorrow. So while it conceivable that the sun will rise in the west tomorrow, it would be a waste of time and ink to qualify every reference to tomorrow’s dawn. So in common usage an atheist is someone who believes that reasonable doubt does not apply to the existence of a god or gods and an agnostic is someone who would not be gobsmackingly surprised if it turned out there was a god or gods. This is not the “gotcha” some people think it is!

and an intangible soul.

That's the odd thing, though. Of course if you're an atheist/agnostic like Ince you can't believe in a soul. But apparently if you squint enough, you can believe and insist upon some kind of gendered essence 🤔

Well, I'll put up my hand and say I'm a user of homeopathy and I've had good results with it with animals. I don't expect everyone (or indeed anyone) to agree with me and I'm absolutely the first to say that it is a complimentary medicine so anyone who says something like "Stop taking your cancer treatment and use these pills" is a dangerous individual who should be shot ignored.

I also have a strong faith. I don't expect people to agree with me on that either, it's based on my personal experiences but I totally get why anyone would not believe in deities or oppose what humans do in the name of their beliefs.

I do expect to have my views respected though, and that's where the likes of Ince piss me off. You can disagree respectfully (even if you privately think the other person is a deluded fool ) without being a sneering arse about it.

An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Agnosticism is not about hedging your bets (you would be better following a faith to do that) it is about accepting we do not know. I don’t any faith that believes in ‘bearded men in the sky’ but I can’t offer any evidence that such a faith does not exist so I will remain open to the possibility of it.

Do you not think homeopathy offers any placebo effect?

My recollection of Goldacre's Bad Science book is that he said homeopathy works for some people with self-limiting conditions (illnesses that would naturally resolve on their own after a period of time) and that this is due entirely to the placebo effect. I don't recall that he mentions religion in the book, but I read elsewhere that he is an apatheist.

There's a peculiar trend in academia that cross cuts the trans debate - materialism is seen as a philosophical dead end because it's complete, coherent, demonstrably (though not provably) true and settled, and thus there is no productive knowlege-work to be had labouring in its vineyards.

Analytic idealism on the other hand has blossomed into a framework intersecting all the social sciences since it provides rich fields for endless reification. Atheism in particular has been absorbed into that world were ideas behave as supernatural, creative entities and material reality is merely the surface upon which their shadow is cast. So, there are a great many atheists who've been seduced from materialism to idealism while using the machinery of language to pretend that they're still rational, sceptical and grounded.

I am prepared to disagree respectfully with some people. However, not with people who make money out of evidence free therapies. Or people who impose their beliefs on others in any way. Christians in particular are prone to say they don’t do this-but they do.

That’s a really good point.

I don’t understand-can you say more? Can’t it be both?

The latter negates the former.

Excellent post.

Humans have deep tendencies to tribalism.

Far more than any of us are generally willing to admit, yes. This is built in at core instinctual levels.

Fairly unsurprising, really. We rely on the herd for survival.

Well indeed but we parade around as if we are all
rational Actors with free will who aren’t very recently evolved from monkeys. We are not as smart as we can pretend.

Tribalism might run deep in the human psyche, but I still wouldn't choose to be part of a tribe exemplified by Robin Ince and David Allen Green and Tim Ireland chortling away about how much cleverer they are than the general public.

They were like that years before Brexit. I can't swear that Jolyon Maugham was at any of those pub nights - many of the blokes looked very similar - but it would not astonish me if he were.

That kind of tribalism would be like being stuck in a lift with the most annoying members of a HIGNFY studio audience.

And they sold themselves as being rational and evidence-based, and it turned out that was just the identity they'd constructed for themselves, and the main thing was their self-image of being clever. In about 2010 you did that by leaning into a Big Bang Theory shtick of having a poster of an asteroid on your wall and wibbling on about how much you loved science. In 2018 it was buying massively into Queer Theory and Butlerian word salad.

And they unpersoned Richard Dawkins because he's an actual philosophical materialist. If Dawkins and Glinner are anything to go by, the people cast out of their club are much more interesting than those who stayed.

It does seem to have. It is concerning to see this.

One thing you learn if you've spent time in the world of polling and focus groups is that hardly anyone has a worked out political philosophy, and hardly anyone reads manifestos or sits up at night studying the Transport White Paper.

Most voters go on vibes, and especially on which figurehead vibes with their self-image.

• I'm a progressive, inclusive cosmopolitan with a degree in "studies", so I like Zack Polanski.
• I'm a disgruntled patriot and I think the country has gone to the dogs, so I like Nigel Farage.
• I'm mad, me, so Ed Davey is my man.

Then they pick their tribes, and on issues that they don't know or care much about, they adapt to the consensus view of their tribes.

The sceptic/rationalist crowd were very like that, and the fact that almost all of them became TRAs overnight shows they were just as prone to fads as any other group.

It makes me appreciate FWR all the more, because this place may have its tribalists, but it's got an unusually high number of posters who have dissented from their tribes and got some sharp critical thinking skills in the process.

Who?

No it doesn’t. There are lots of things that make up the person I am-my identity, if you like. Scepticism and atheism are two of those thibgs.

Yes. Part of my ‘identity ‘ includes those, along with ‘scientist’, ‘mother’ etc.

I think the point is that some people have adopted ‘skeptic’ and ‘atheism’ as an identity without actually having reached those positions through reason. Well, in the case of atheism perhaps that can be ok - religious faith isn’t acquired through reason and so if you lose it that may not require reason either - something like falling out of love perhaps?

Because humans are an animal who evolved on planet earth just like all the rest of the animals.
Tribalism is a survival instinct, natural selection selected for the traits that made it possible for humans to work together, to find food, shelter and to defend themselves against that which would kill them, including other humans.
The basic instincts are still apart of us, the higher learning ability we evolved went of top of it, it didn't replace it.

This thread got me thinking. I saw clip online (X, or a quoted TikTok on X) where a bluehair-type woman is doing a Live with her cat, and someone asks what sex the cat is. She answers (can't remember which sex the cat was), and the commenter says "How do you know?". Literal goldfish mouth as the implications start to occur to her. It was hilarious.

Ince and similar people only seem to think that humans have "gendered souls". Fuckwits.

I read an interesting analysis a year or two ago by Scott Alexander/Slate Star Codex about how Atheism, as it existed as an identity in the mid 2000s, morphed into what we might call wokeism, it's worth a look.

slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/

Many atheists in the UK are just not Christian. They haven't argued their way into atheism, its just that Christianity is not provable, therefore shouldnt be taken seriously.

Thats fine, but why make atheism/not being convince of something an identity? Also, because its really just being critical of the national church, not about religion generally, they are as likely as anyone to develop 'belief' in anything. Including transgenderism.