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.

This is what I like about our terfy corner of MN, we get really interesting tangents discussions where stuff is debated respectfully even if we vociferously disagree

I hadn't thought of this before, but a lot of the New Atheist discourse circa 2010 was very similar to the Ben Shapiro school of conservative polemic.

WATCH Ben DESTROY this liberal diversity advocate with FACTS and LOGIC!!!

Christopher Hitchens fanboys on YouTube were particularly fond of this style.

It's not a style I'm very fond of myself, but Ince is probably closer to the PoliticsJoe style, where they vox pop Reform voters in somewhere like Grimsby, then Olly and Josh (or whatever they're called) in the studio have a good old laugh about the unsophisticated plebs.

The first style isn't very good at winning friends and influencing people, but the second style might even be worse.

But in Christianity there is also free will and original sin, which takes away the poor behaviour from being gods will, and is our misdeeds

I am fairly sure that is something added in way later to deal with the fact that it just doesn't add up and people had been asking awkward questions.

Also, slightly related, we have proven pretty conclusively humans don't have free will in the slightest so...

Yeah and we're generally talking about the Christian God. The Roman, Greek and Egyptian pantheon had some right shockers in their midst.

Terrorists?

I think religion has kept away some of the madness we're seeing at the moment. People needs to believe in something and today's region is trans and the omni cause. It come complete with a doctrine and a chant and even trans substantiation of the flesh . My catholic dd has very easily switched to being an atheist believer in the trans cause .

You had to write that, didn’t you? 😂
yeah… it’s hard to examine the subject without concluding that it feels like we’ve got free will and ‘agency’, and it’s best that we organise our societies on that assumption but coming up with a plausible mechanism …

It's a point Helen Joyce often makes. The trans cause has its credo and its rituals and its holy days of obligation and its caste of mystics who achieve a higher state by mortification of the flesh...

Maybe people who have that religious grounding - whether or not they still believe in it - are quicker to see a new faith rising.

A good point made by the 'Book of Mormon' musical is that to survive, humans have to do seemingly impossible things that have very little chance of success.

The whole point of religion is that it is based on faith, not logic.

Maybe.
But I’m not at all sure religion is much of a shield against other forms of ‘faith’ - some of the churches seem very ready to adopt various other dogmas. You can find ‘omnicause’ Christians at odds with the ‘fundie’ etc etc branches.

Isn’t this one of the central themes of Pratchett’s “Hogfather”? There’s a finite amount of belief and if it isn’t being applied to something then it causes chaos…

thank you for the reminder to re-read this seasonal classic!

It's not a shield against societal fashion, but I'd say it might give you a countercultural grounding from which to look at that fashion.

I keep an eye on Mormon news. The church leadership has for decades resisted ordaining women to the priesthood, though there's a theological argument for it (scripture suggests that Emma Smith was ordained to some kind of priestly role) and the current Prophet, Dallin Oaks, has long championed women in leadership.

But they're probably under much more societal pressure to embrace all things rainbow community, which has much less theological justification in their tradition.

The thing I'm looking out for - as a bit of a cynic - is them arriving at a fudge where natal females still can't be ordained priests, but a male member who "transitions" can both be recognised as a woman and still keep the priesthood ordination he received as a man.

I suppose my point is that if you stand on theological tradition, or if you're at least aware of it, you can resist the Current Thing. If you throw away the idea of a transcendent moral order that stands above society, not so much.

Ooh, no freewill? That's fighting talk! 😄

I'm wondering what Ince will do now. I'm assuming podcasts and that they'll be out in a few days if so.

He might get some work via channel 4, isn't he on taskmaster? Or what I suspect is their more lucrative programming which is the "scenic walks with your favourite middle aged comedy dads" genre

Can you explain how free will doesn't exist ,

@SionnachRuadh

Oh hey! I'm a former Mormon, was raised in it, but don't keep much of an eye on it, though I do happen to follow a group on FB promoting all things LGBTQ+ in the church (but I don't really read their posts, oops.)

But they're probably under much more societal pressure to embrace all things rainbow community, which has much less theological justification in their tradition.

Yeah. Putting out the Proclamation to the World when they did, and giving it quasi-scripture status, was a brilliant strategical move in that regard, I must say. It pre-empts all attempts to integrate anything LGBT into the doctrine.

I only recently realised that there are many overlaps between Mormon temple rituals and Mason rituals, and obviously UK Masons have been quite happy to follow the lead of Edward Lord.

I sometimes lurk on the LDS subreddits. I know Reddit doesn't reflect the median member, but it's very weird - the "orthodox" Mormon subs are all in on incorporating LGBT into the doctrine, but are very hot on excluding tea drinkers and Trump voters from the church. They've set their own boundaries.

It's not a tradition I was raised in, but I've learned a lot more about it through genealogy. A bunch of my extended family converted in the 19th century, and thanks to polygamy, I have thousands of cousins in Utah.

Can you explain how it actually does?

On two levels we have no free will -

First. Inherently, if you rewound the universe, didn't change anything, I would still be typing this sentence. Thats the easiest one.

But more practically and tied to observation - (I am putting the following in quotes as I got it summarised for me, the take away is that actions are set significantly before we think we make a choice)

"A bunch of “free choice” lab studies suggest that what you experience as a conscious decision is often a late step in a longer chain of brain processes. In classic decoding work, patterns of activity in frontal and parietal regions carry information about which option someone will pick several seconds before they report being aware of deciding, implying the choice is already being shaped before conscious intention shows up.

EEG studies of voluntary movement show a readiness potential (a slow build-up before action). More recent interpretations model this as noisy brain activity accumulating toward a threshold, which makes “the brain ramps up, then you move” less like a single moment of conscious initiation and more like an unfolding preconscious process. A neat twist is BCI work showing people can sometimes still veto an about-to-happen movement, but only up to a short “point of no return” close to movement onset, suggesting conscious control may be limited to a late, narrow window. "

Soon et al. (2008) - Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain (Nature Neuroscience)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2112

Schurger et al. (2012) - An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-initiated movement (PNAS)
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1210467109

Schultze-Kraft et al. (2016) - The point of no return in vetoing self-initiated movements (PNAS)
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1513569112

Maoz et al. (2019) - Neural precursors of decisions that matter (eLife)
https://elifesciences.org/articles/39787

I also think we live in a block time universe which constantly tickles me.

Whether the ‘free won’t’ is any more free than ‘free will’ is unclear.

Exclude Trump voters from the church?? That's definitely an extreme view. I highly doubt these members are anywhere in line with the stance of the church leaders. I put myself through a session of General Conference a couple of years ago, and while a few details here and there had changed, the main body of the doctrine was still the same as ever.

And I don't see how that could change, without the LDS church losing itself and dissolving into insignificance. It's its entire thing, refusing to embrace the world. They are proud of it, of being "the last ones holding out for truth".

Mind you, if I'm wrong, I'll be utterly fascinated to see how it goes!

'The whole point of religion is that it is based on faith, not logic.'

One person's 'faith' is another person's delusion.