Minions makes a billion

Like any aficionado of supervillainy, I'm a fan of the Despicable Me franchise, the latest instalment of which is the prequel Minions - which I found hilariously funny when I saw it a few weeks ago. I see today that after this past weekend's takings Minions has now climbed to a global box office cume of over one billion US dollars. A lot of people must love those little yellow rascals.

New post at Cogito: "Philosophy versus science versus politics"

Over at Cogito, I have a new post where I explain the need for work and honesty if good arguments are to drive out bad arguments.

My Cogito post on the Ashley Madison data hack

I've written a post about this over at Cogito. Sample: "Whatever you think about adulterous liaisons – even if you regard them as outrageous, destructive, morally wicked breaches of trust – this sort of vigilante justice is unacceptable. When vigilantes set out to punish sinners or wrongdoers, the results can be perverse, disproportionate, sometimes extreme and often irreversible. Even the supposed victims of wrongdoers may end up worse off."

Let me put this out there...

The following can apply to a whole range of situations. All the following propositions can be simultaneously true:

1. A group of people can have some genuine - or at least arguable - grievances. Some, or even much, of what they are trying to say in their complaints may be true. As a complication, groups of people may have grievances against each other.

2. Those people can express their grievances in hyperbolic language and/or via disproportionately harmful or disruptive tactics.

3. The criticisms of those people can then be excessive, disproportionate, and unfair - perhaps out of anger at their language and tactics or perhaps in an attempt to avoid addressing the original grievances.

4. There is then scope for the situation to escalate and complicate indefinitely, as everyone involved feels aggrieved and perceives opponents as unfair (or worse). Everyone has feelings of having been done some sort of injustice.

In the various culture wars (and real wars) that we see, there are often elements of all of this. If the people in 1. are behaving sufficiently upsettingly, as in 2., there may be some priority in stopping them doing that. But if their grievances have even a grain of truth, they had better be dealt with honestly sooner or later. Simply demonizing the people, perhaps to avoid giving their grievances and their arguments any legitimacy at all, is harmful and unfair.

What you think this post is all about may depend on what controversies you have been following or are involved in. I'm actually thinking of a several situations. Indeed, something like this is a common pattern. Knowing that is one thing. Doing something about it that might be effective is another. Still... some general awareness can't hurt.

Hugo Awards outcome - this is all I am going to say

The outcome is not far from my take on it all back in July. But it has still been a mess. Hopefully, no more Sad Puppies, etc., next year. As always, if someone has a grievance, explain it logically and reasonably. Convince us. Don't be a spoiler. Don't engage in these sorts of spiteful antics.

I joined as a supporting member of the worldcon this year specifically so I could have a say in the voting. I didn't vote in many categories, but was able to vote where I did have clear views on the merits. I don't feel vindicated, or anything of the sort, by the outcome. The fact is, the awards were pretty much sabotaged by all this nonsense. My more detailed views are in the July post, if you want them, and I won't repeat them here.

One-day philosophy conference in Melbourne

I'm just back from a one-day philosophy conference in Melbourne, convened by Preshil and aimed at Year 12 philosophy students. It was held at the University of Melbourne, and it focused on issues relating to bioethics and technoethics.

I had a great time - I always enjoy interacting with smart young adults who have an interest in philosophy - and I was honoured to be part of a small cast of guest speakers whose other members were Julian Savulescu, Rob Sparrow, and (via Skype) Luciano Floridi. Julian and Rob certainly sparked off each other! The Preshil people looked after us well, and the whole day was a joy to be involved in.

IHEU open letter to Prime Minister and President of Bangladesh

This open letter, organised by the International Humanist and Ethical Union, has been signed by numerous individuals, including me.

It protests the attacks on humanists, atheists, and secularists, including the brutal murders of five bloggers in the past two year - four of them since February this year. Note that the government of Bangladesh is deeply complicit in the culture of violent suppression of humanist/atheist/secular thought. For example, as stated in the letter:

Furthermore, your Cabinet Committee for Law and Order, headed by Minister of Industries Amir Hossain Amu, on their 9 August 2015 meeting decided “to declare Atheist authors as criminals”, thereby making them subject to prosecution, and intelligence agencies have been asked to monitor blogs to find those atheist writers. Even under the current law, such a mass arrest of people who profess non-religious views in their online communications would represent a grave violation of the international human rights obligations to which Bangladesh is committed. The Home Minister in a separate speech was seen repeating the same warning message.

The letter concludes by imploring the Prime Minister and President to take decisive steps to ensure the safety of individuals whose lives are threatened by religious extremists, and to ensure Bangladesh's compliance with international norms relating to freedom of conscience and expression.

Please check out the full text, which contains much detail about the present deplorable situation in Bangladesh.

"The important thing is that you get to feel superior to both..." - a frustrating, dangerous meme

This is a meme that I am heartily sick of.

In Ron Lindsay's post about prostitution on the CFI site yesterday, he addresses what he sees as rival preconceptions that hinder the debate. One of the first comments is:

The important part here, is that Ron gets to tell everyone they are doing feminism wrong: the pro sex workers and the anti-sex workers. Well done!

Just great. Although Ron is a friend of mine, I wouldn't comment on just this one cynical remark. The problem is that this kind of remark has become a recurrent motif on the internet, hindering the efforts of anyone who searches for common ground, tries to clarify issues, attempts to understand the underlying causes of polarisation on issues, and so on.

Often when we are looking at current controversies we will see polarisation, with both of the main sides making assumptions that lack solid empirical support. Often we'll find that both sides are engaging in tribalism, and thus giving a free pass to dubious arguments (while punishing opponents). Often both sides are engaging in propaganda exercises: attempting to deceive us and/or manipulate our emotions, rather than appealing to our intellects with relevant evidence and cogent logic. Often both sides are, at least to some extent, displaying a certain amount of conceptual confusion and/or trading on equivocations (and the reasons for this may be apparent - they may, for example, include the genuine complexity of the issues and their hot-button emotional salience for those involved in the debate).

Attempts to cut through all this and obtain some clarity - without prior commitment to one or other of the main rival tribes - are valuable. It's difficult to do this, both intellectually and socially (since it can be a good way of becoming distrusted, and perhaps even demonised, by both sides of an argument).

We need to encourage more of it, and to find ways of rewarding people who are prepared to attempt the task. But so often, instead, we get cynical comments, such as the one I quoted, to the effect that the person doing this is merely finding a way of feeling superior to other participants. Give me a break.

This meme is frustrating, discouraging, anti-intellectual, and even dangerous, since it punishes a socially valuable impulse.

Ron Lindsay on the debate over prostitution

Ron Lindsay, the Center for Inquiry's president and CEO has a good, thoughtful, balanced post on sex work - provoked by the recent (and continuing) decision-making processes within Amnesty International.

Once again, I wrote about this at Cogito a few days ago, setting out some of the detail relating to what has happened at Amnesty International. I'm planning to write a follow-up post, but it will probably be along similar lines to Ron Lindsay's.

Jurassic World still roars

I see at Box Office Mojo this morning that Jurassic World has now passed a figure of $1.6 billion for its global takings at the box office. It is now well ahead of The Avengers for third place as an all-time money spinner, and it hasn't quite run out of steam.

It's behind only Avatar and Titanic, although it has no chance of catching up with those two hugely successful  movies directed by James Cameron. (And I always put all this in perspective by pointing out that if we were to talk in inflation-adjusted terms there would be a different order: Gone with the Wind still rules, in real terms, as the most commercially successful movie ever).

Despite the failure of Terminator: Genisys at the box office - and the far worse failure of Fantastic Four - 2015 is shaping as an extraordinarily lucrative year for the movie industry, with a new movie from the Star Wars franchise yet to come.