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.

Great, maybe I can finally start listening to the infnite monkey cage again.

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.

Would that not mean that you're simply part of the non-Ince-and-his-ilk tribe?

I think tribalism and its entrenchment in human nature goes a long way to explain cancel culture, purity spirals, virtue signalling and all the other shite that's come to the fore in the last decade or two. It's "Please don't cast me out into the social dark and cold alone where I could be accused of being a bad person, PLEASE" on steroids.

Every subculture eventually becomes Mean Girls, the same way every public institution eventually becomes the DVLA.

⬆This, a thousand times this!

Lousy religious education (in the sense of Comparative Religion, not religious formation) means that most people who describe themselves as atheists haven't got a tiny foggy clue what it is they think they don't believe. Dawkins himself can be guilty of this - he assumes that arguments against some contemporary Protestant versions of Creationism constitute full & sufficient arguments against any divine origin of the world, and yet Christians who are not literalist bibical Creationists are ten a penny.

This ignorance means that all sorts of religious/ magical thinking persisted into fashion atheism (the very idea of it being a "movement" was suss from the get-go) & so we have an "atheism" that nonetheless encompasses gender souls, a clerisy, liturgical language (TWAWTMAMNBIAV & so forth), the sorrowful mysteries of "the Resistance", holy days of obligation (Trans Pride, Trans Day of Rememberance, etc), & even the pitiably laughable sight of organised soi-disant atheists gathering on Sundays to sing uplifting songs, listen to homilies & impassioned addresses, attempt to experience awe & practice brief interludes of entry-level meditation. Unironically.

[sighs atheistically]

Edited for typo

Today I saw a woman with pronouns announce on socials that she had just found out she was carrying a baby boy, and share ultrasound pics.

I had to sit on my hands not to ask her that very question.

Given she's about to be plunged into the most female of experiences, she may eventually twig that those twee little signals she chooses to display are in fact utterly vapid irrelevances when sprinkled over the immovable, undeniable facts of her biological sex.

she/her for a woman is starting to look a lot like a 'live, laugh, love' sign.

Massive thread diversion but Ben Goldacres Mum was a proto Goldfrapp singer in the band Fox

she/her for a woman is starting to look a lot like a 'live, laugh, love' sign.

Brilliant! I’ve long thought that pronouns in email signatures are the mark of an idiot (although I will temper that with the knowledge that some friends have done it because a) they had to or b) they thought it was a vaguely nice thing to do but aren’t really sure why…)

Well, you can do whatever you like. But I'd say a sceptic attitude means constantly questioning things. That should include one's own scepticism and ideas about 'identity'.

It's one reason I think 'atheism' is brittle - it becomes too wedded to the idea of itself, rather than the practise that supposedly led one to that position.

Would someone take one for the team and post the poem here please.

I posted it last night not realising it had already been posted the night 🌉 before.

Take a bow @SidewaysOtter

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5459300-robin-ince-quits-working-for-the-bbc-over-his-support-for-men-in-dresses-and-terrorists?reply=149199230&utm_campaign=reply&utm_medium=share

Oh aye, in other times plenty of the people who are now fashion atheists would be cluttering up ashrams, fidgeting through Vispassana practice, intoning the Shahada, or inventing "the true pagan traditions" of their particular location.

I think homeopathy is a useful tool as a placebo and a non harmful 'medication' for the worried well. It might be a placebo but it also doesn't have any side effects. I think thd loss of religion is ine of the causes of wokeness, it's the new religion, I think most people want to have allegiance to a cause

The nocebo effect is just as real as placebo.

What's the nocebo effect ?

It's when you believe the thing you're taking will make you sick, so you become sick. The power of suggestion is quite a thing, though I still wouldn't suggest going to Zack Polanski for therapy.

Is that because spending more than 30 seconds talking to Hypnotits would leave you feeling less well than when you started?

I don't think the "skepic movemenr" is really sceptical, either in the philosophical sense or even in the everyday language sense. They are logical positivists, as far as I can see. Which is a belief system like any other.

The problem is, they think it isn't a belief system, which is a massive blind spot.

I mean - secular materials are pretty persistent about trying to impose their ideas on others.

@SionnachRuadh

"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."

Totally agree with this.

The new atheists are just not as serious as the old ones. Dawkins book the God Delusion was quite disappointing really. He never bothers with the ontology, why is there something rather than nothing and all that. Instead he amuses himself by taking the piss out of allegorical stories from the Old Testament and so on. Much easier than delving into Spinoza , Aquinas, Berkeley etc al. Brian Cox follows the same worn out routine. But at least Dawkins is consistent and his skepticism extends to gendered souls.

I have posted this before, but I am fully committed to atheism because there’s just as much a likelihood that that is the Test.

Say Judgment Day comes around. God gathers humanity and says “I started the Big Bang. I allowed the Universe to expand. I created physics to give it the conditions for planets to form. I made sure evolution of life happened on Earth and I made sure humans developed the powers of critical thinking. Most importantly, I hid myself completely. I am omnipotent, and there is no way you could have possibly seen evidence of my existence.

The Test was to see if you correctly concluded that there’s no evidence for my existence. What you (not me) created as science meant you should have got to this. So all those who came to this conclusion, congratulations, you passed, you get into Heaven!

Those that saw me in places I didn’t exist, came to conclusions you shouldn’t have made, just blatantly made stuff up, and wasted that reasoning I gave you? That was all inside your own heads. Fail! Down you go!”

That would be hilarious.

With a well thumbed catalogue of cliches such as " don't believe in skyfairies" and so on. So dismissive and oppressive to other ways of navigating the world and the human condition within it. People talk about "the scientific method" and "peer review" when putting down others....yet science at its most exciting is wide and open to wonder. Scientists can be every bit as conforming and prone to group think as anyone else.

I found this from Andrea Dworkin a couple of years ago and it struck a chord

“When theory becomes an impediment to action, it is time to discard the theory and return naked, that is, without theory, to the world of reality. People become slaves to theory because people are used to meeting expectations they have not originated—to doing what they are told, to having everything mapped out, to having reality prepackaged. People can have antiauthoritarian intention and yet function in a way totally consonant with the demands of authority. The deepest struggle is to root out of us and the institutions in which we participate the requirement that we slavishly conform. But an adherence to ideology, any ideology, can give us the grand illusion of freedom when in fact we are being manipulated and used by those whom the theory serves.”

I was thinking more in terms of art and the avant garde, and why it can't really exist in institutions like universities because as soon as it it gathered in it just becomes orthodox, but it seems relevant here too. She is dead right about it being a struggle.

From memory they often have religious people on TIMC.

However, Ince does lean heavily on getting 'clapter' for mentioning complaints from creationists. (I'm not convinced that that many are writing to Radio 4 comedy programmes).

So I think sometimes he is just after a cheap laugh.