We live in a world of imperfect information, and we have little control over that fact. No one is not prepared either, nor can anyone be fully prepared for unforeseen events.

I have a question for you: Are you prepared to deal with those who attempt to manipulate your emotions for fun or profit? The line between important events and salacious scandal is often too vague to discriminate in the moment. It’s only after we see the consequences that we know.

We are most vulnerable to delusion when in a heightened emotional state. Watch that video of Alex Jones again and look for emotional triggers like waving arms, voice inflection, facial expression, pounding the paper, etc. He is as bad as Mad Money with Jim Cramer, or Maury Povich. It is a skill that can be learned. Paul Ekman teaches people how to do this. But, he has been influenced by the Dali Lama. So, for all I know, this could be Buddhism.

Yes.

But…I’m not confident at all that the information that will be provided to me is 1) accurate or 2) beneficial. The individual who doesn’t know is at the mercy of the person(s) who do. I find this power unbalance to be unsettling, especially considering that I have been lied to repeatedly by persons who supposedly have my best interests at heart, not to mention by organizations who don’t (but that’s to be expected I guess).

But, of course, solipsism is never the answer.

I’m comfortable with “I don’t know.” One of my favorite quotes is “I’d rather have the ugly truth than a pretty lie” or something like that.

BTW, I’m not saying that haters mean people shouldn’t splinter, just that when you’ve already got a group of active and persistent haters that have a demonstrated ability to repeatedly get under your skin, those haters and your reaction to them are going to have a major impact on whatever group you try and create (intentionally or not). Taking some precautions to try and separate the haters of the group from the people who are just there to be douchebags to you because they get a reaction (or a thrill) out of it takes a lot of work, and it’s easy to conflate the two.

My one quibble would be this. A game is the product a few people put out. A movement, on the other hand, is comprised of the collective efforts and discussion of its supporters. How can they create the movement and decide what it’s going to be if every 5 seconds a dudebro interrupts with (often misogynistic) insults and calls to justify the existence of the fledgling idea? I am astounded at how committed opponents are at drowning out people who are just trying to discuss it or learn about it. If the reaction from the antis was simply “hmm, I don’t see the need for that, but more power to you,” that’d be great. Even “that’s a stupid idea, fuck off and don’t let the door hit you on the way out” would be understandable. But the actual reaction and the level of aggro seems shockingly disproportionate and irrational to me.

I agree with many of the sentiments expressed here: http://morewomeninskepticism.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/49-let-splinter-groups-splinter

Now, I do have my own passionate criticism of SJ movements as a whole, and that is they usually drown out (or block/ban/otherwise silence) those who aren’t lockstep with movement leaders, but I’m not entirely sure how to fix that as it’s not an A+-specific problem. I agree with having some opponent-free spaces if opponents are particularly aggressive and derailing, but across most SJ movements you often see leaders lumping moderates in with opponents. Why on earth would they limit the size of their base and alienate sympathizers? I’ve come to the conclusion this is because extremists don’t understand themselves as extremists, which essentially erases moderates or makes them indistinguishable from opponents (if that makes any sense…still a working theory). Anyway, from that worldview, I can see why many self-described moderates would be banned, even if I disagree with it and think it’s incredibly harmful to SJ movements.

I think a lot of these moderates are those who can bridge the gap between neutrals and leaders. If a neutral would first need years of SJ education to get to the point where they have the option to intelligently accept or reject the leaders’ viewpoints, there’s no way you win over new people. They’ll just write the movement off as crazy, as has happened with PETA, and maybe even become opponents. If a neutral person can instead identify with members who are not won over to the most extreme viewpoints, and see that moderate viewpoints can exist within the movement, I see that as nothing but helpful. A receptive mind is, in my opinion, the biggest victory you can achieve in bringing someone over to your side…and a receptive mind is something much better accomplished with honey than with banhammers. (At the same time, I do agree it’s not the responsibility of SJ movements to educate and be friendly, especially if they’ve found it to be a high-investment/low-reward activity. So…hmmmm…I guess my next wish would be to see some sort of comparative ROI analysis before forming an opinion about their ban trigger fingers.)

PS: I place the utmost value on friends whom I can disagree with and still remain friends. :)

Most likely he grew up in a very homophobic house and he is trying to please his daddy and mommy by bashing his own, instead of standing up to the years of oppression and ignorance the poor sad lifeless gay, he is like a cooked noodle that just blimps and fades into his own arrogance, self-pity and hatred trying to compensate his lack of anything with dreams of grandiose and false intelligence. What a waste of flesh and bones.

Not, as you say, the actions of a future priest, even a Catholic one. More the actions of a deranged ex-former priest now shunned and disowned by the very church he pretends to support and which expelled him from seminary before he did them even more damage that the other hypocritical perverts who use piety as a cover for their nefarious activities.