Freedom must be built on practical reality — Welcome to a new series, where we analyze the conditions that are required to sustain freedom. The political landscape of the 21st century West is increasingly a battle between moral libertarians and moral authoritarians, and the authoritarians often attempt to take over previously libertarian movements by infiltration and bad…

There needs to be an alternative to the woke vs anti-woke extremism — Over the course of the past year, I repeatedly discussed and analyzed what went wrong with the ‘anti-woke’ movement. While the movement started out as a defense of classical liberalism, it has recently welcomed very illiberal figures and ideas into the tent. Also, while the movement started out being dedicated…

Both sides need to do it. — As my regular readers would know, what I want most out of talking about trans issues is for there to be an open, rational and productive discourse on trans issues. I want the polarization and tribalism to end. I want people to be able to come up with good…

Culture war kills independent thinking and makes philosophical discourse impossible — In recent months, I have been talking a lot about how much I oppose the culture wars, and the fact that I hold both sides responsible for it. Today, I want to talk about why I’m so opposed to the culture wars. The most fundamental reason why I’m vehemently…

A rational examination of the culture war over linguistic norms — Welcome back to my RIDE method series, where I will attempt to systematically apply the RIDE method to various cultural and political controversies, in order to bring back calm, rational and evidence-based discourse. This time, I want to use the RIDE method to examine the two extreme positions on the…

Too many people want their views to prevail at the expense of real lives — Over the past 3–5 years, I’ve been talking a lot about what has gone wrong with the trans discourse. While trans activists who won’t compromise, postmodernists who keep arguing that gender is a social construct, extreme gender critical activists who are opposed to any recognition of trans people at…

We really need to systematically examine the emotionally charged ‘woke wars’ — Welcome to the first article in a new series, where I will attempt to systematically apply the RIDE method to various cultural and political controversies. As I said last time, there is too much emotion, tribalism and irrationality in our discourse right now, and the RIDE method was developed to…

A lot of it is fake, or at least in bad faith — One thing I think people need to remember about the current state of the trans discourse is that it is being flooded with misrepresentations of the truth, and bad faith talking points, as a result of the politicized culture wars. This is being done by people on both sides…

We need to systematically analyze every issue without bias — Recently, I went through my own political evolution, and identified the things that led to major episodes of disappointment and betrayal. My final thoughts were: We need to avoid building up an emotionally charged discourse, whatever the issue is. We need to avoid tribalism. We need to call out hypocrisy…