Harper’s Letter on Justice and Open Debate

We are now beginning to hear the other side of a much-needed debate advocating for the need for robust and open debate. Too many careers have already been threatened or ended by a misstep or two on an invisible ever-changing minefield containing far too many untethered and unsustainable ideas. And whatever happened to do unto others? Here is the final paragraph of the Harper's Letter signed by numerous artists, thinkers and writers who fear for the future. The document is titled: "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate":

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

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The Two Starkly Different Meanings of “Black Lives Matter,” and Political Ideas That Must Never Be Criticized

"Black Lives Matter" is a simple looking phrase, but it functions as a Trojan Horse. Many people don't understand that there is a big difference between A) stating the obvious fact that Black lives do, indeed, matter and B) embracing the controversial political agenda of the Black Lives Matter organizations. Just because one believes A doesn't necessarily mean that one believes B, but this conflation flies under the radars of many people who embrace both A and B even though the only part that they have carefully considered is A.

Consider this excerpt from a recent news article about Nick Buckley, a man who has spent many years of his life helping desperate others through a charity he founded in 2011, Mancunian Way, based in Manchester, England. The problem started when Nick dared to write an article:

In the article the 52-year-old started by saying: “Of course black lives matter. Let’s get this obvious point over and done with at the beginning”, but went on to criticise the political agenda of the organisation BLM which sought to repudiate the values expressed by Martin Luther King.

I am sympathetic to Nick Buckley's clearly stated concerns. Like Buckley, I am concerned that some of the political ends of BLM sharply conflict with the wisdom of Martin Luther King. The fact that Nick Buckley dared to speak up about this critical issue cost him his job and that is a tragedy.

In some circles, the phrase "Black Lives Matter" has taken on the status of an unassailable fundamentalist religion, which is extremely unfortunate. Whenever this phrase is uttered, we should be asking whether the speaker is asserting A, B or both A and B.  Whereas A is self-evident truth to me, B is a complex set of ideas, many of them ill-defined and/or problematic.

Every idea, especially every political idea, should be open to vigorous criticism and discussion. There should be no exceptions, for the reasons carefully stated by John Stuart Mill in his work, On Liberty. To every claim I respond: "Let's test it." To the extent that any ideas are declared to be sacrosanct, off-limits to discussion and criticism based on science, statistical analyses and the diverse wisdom collected by thinking people from the beginning of time, our democracies are dead.

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The Big Things that Aren’t Obvious, Until They Are

Rather than staring at the things in front of you, it’s sometimes better to step back and ask yourself what is missing in order to understand what happened. Sometimes, the things that you can directly see and hear simply don’t add up.

My favorite illustration of this process involves one of Charles Darwin’s epiphanies:

On this tour I had a striking instance of how easy it is to overlook phenomena, however conspicuous, before they have been observed by any one. We spent many hours in Cwm Idwal, examining all the rocks with extreme care, as Sedgwick was anxious to find fossils in them; but neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena all around us; we did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, the lateral and terminal moraines. Yet these phenomena are so conspicuous that, as I declared in a paper published many years afterwards in the 'Philosophical Magazine' ('Philosophical Magazine,' 1842.), a house burnt down by fire did not tell its story more plainly than did this valley. If it had still been filled by a glacier, the phenomena would have been less distinct than they now are.


Sometimes it takes the first person to recognize a two-step process and only then does it become always obvious for everyone who follows. Sometimes the person who first "gets it" is you. You might have tried to figure something out for a month or more before you finally saw it for what it was. And then, of course, it's obvious for you and for everyone else you mention it to, whether it be a puzzle solution, how to make your software do a task or figuring out a person's secret motivation.

"The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply." Khalil Gibran

Because I work as a trial lawyer, this also reminds me that many people assume that circumstantial evidence is "second rate" evidence; that it is not as persuasive as the things and events that people observe directly. There is no basis for believing this. Some circumstantial evidence is sometimes much more persuasive than some direct evidence. A well-known example of powerful circumstantial evidence is a “smoking gun.” Circumstantial evidence is often sufficient to convict a criminal defendant even when the burden of proof for guilt is "beyond a reasonable doubt." A multi-step puzzle involving circumstantial evidence can evoke such an "A-ha!" moment that it can even leave you no doubt at all.

If you want a great example of how something can suddenly become obvious, go to Andy Clark's Edge video on Predictive Processing, Minute 11:30, and listen to the sine wave speech pattern examples. It will hit you like a ton of bricks. The entire lecture is phenomenal, but the examples will only take a couple minutes and it's worth your while.

The (obvious) take-away: Don't give up, even where the solution is not obvious.

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Lee Camp Replies to “Neo-McCarthyite” smears of RT Network

Lee Camp refuses to let go of important issues of the day, and that is why he, and others who follow the facts where they lead, ended up at RT. But RT's shows are now being smeared with a broad brush, as though all of its shows are the product of Russian propaganda. Lee Camp's response:

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On interfering with elections

The U.S. has accused Russia of interfering with the recent U.S. Presidential election. That accusation needs to be viewed in context:

The U.S. has a long history of attempting to influence presidential elections in other countries – it’s done so as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000, according to a database amassed by political scientist Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University. That number doesn’t include military coups and regime change efforts following the election of candidates the U.S. didn’t like, notably those in Iran, Guatemala and Chile. Nor does it include general assistance with the electoral process, such as election monitoring.
This  information is from a detailed article in the LA Times, with many specifics. For instance, the U.S. tried to interfere with the election of the Russian leader in 1996. According to the same article, Russia attempted to interfere with "36 foreign elections from the end of World War II to the turn of the century."

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