About Counterweight

It's time to take back the word "liberal" from a relatively small number of loud boorish illiberal people who happen to be strategically placed in our sense-making institutions. Counterweight, founded by Helen Pluckrose, is there to help you.

Helen Pluckrose:

When I say that attaching social or moral significance to ‘race’ is bad, I am told that this attitude will make me blind to racism. That makes no sense. Racism is the worst form of attaching social & moral significance to race which is the very thing I oppose.

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The Problems with Being Too Honest

Michael Leviton has written quite a thought-provoking article. He was raised to be too honest and when he encounter the real world as an adult, he found that it kept him from getting hired and made romance impossible. He discovered that he needed to be less honest, but how? Here's an excerpt from "What I Learned About Love When I Stopped Being Honest."

There were no support groups for people who wanted to be less honest. Therapists advised people to speak their truth, not to shut up for once. Whatever advice everybody else needed, I needed the opposite. So I came up with my own system, made myself lists of subjects that I’d no longer discuss and various rules for myself, such as:

Hide your feelings and observations.

Instead of searching for people who will appreciate who you really are, try to be what the person in front of you wants. Learn to make small talk.

Do NOT be yourself.

This felt both stupid and impossible. My brain had been built to be honest. I couldn’t even answer “How are you?” with “Fine” without feeling ill.

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The Long Tradition of Dividing People Into Good People and Bad People

Matt Taibbi, writing about Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States:

No matter how interesting a book he or she is able to write, any author who admits to looking out at the world and seeing only “victims and executioners” needs psychological help. Unfortunately, Zinn in this respect turned out to be a pioneer, presaging a generation of comic-book thinkers who understand things in binary terms, forever preoccupied with cramming people in neat categories of oppressors and oppressed.

Such mental habits are the fashion now and will definitely put you in a bind on Thanksgiving. How can I eat turkey and stuffing with a smile, when Columbus massacred the Arawaks? When the English forced the Wampanoags off their land and made many convert to Christianity? When Lincoln told Horace Greeley, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it”?

How? Maybe because you’re more than three years old, and don’t need fairy tales to be real in order to enjoy dinner with family and a football game?

Taibbi's article is "Thanksgiving is Awesome: In reply to the haters. Happy holiday, everyone."

On a more serious note, I read Zinn's book when I was a teenager and it was a much needed shock to my system, given that I had, to that point, been exposed to a steady stream of textbooks and teachers who argued American Exceptionalism. I agree with Taibbi that both of these approaches are simplistic.

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Caitlin Flanagan and Greg Lukianoff Discuss Free Speech and Much More

This is one of the most engaging podcasts I've heard in quite a while. Conversation includes author Caitlin Flanagan and First Amendment Attorney Greg Lukianoff (From FIRE - The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). The topics are varied but repeatedly come back to free speech. Flanagan claims that far too many college students don't understand the importance or free speech and the First Amendment.

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The Political Left Needs to Start Judging More Wisely

I saw this Rogan interview with Krystal and Saagar. I've watched a lot of Joe Rogan for the past two years. He leans far left on most issues he discusses, but that's not good enough for most people and news media on the political left, who seek to purification, not nuanced discussion. Many of them have no idea what to do with people like Rogan, who hold heterodox opinions. They reject the idea of human complexity and they are increasibly thinking in cartoons. That is the subject of Krystal Ball's 7-minute commentary. It was spot on. I've seen this rejection of the "impure" on FB over and over. IMO, this is ruining the political left and sending many voters over to the political right, which is morally bankrupt.

My advice to people on the political left: Quit demonizing people who are not aligned with your views. Quit writing off everyone who voted differently than you. Engage openly and respectfully with your family, neighbors and friends who think differently than you. I'm an atheist, but Jesus had it right when he gave the Sermon on the Mount: "Love your enemies." I give thanks today that we don't all think alike. And I give thanks for the wisdom of John Stuart Mill. And I give thanks for the courage and soaring inspirational thoughts of Martin Luther King: Hate cannot drive out hate and we should judge each other only by the content of our character. Let's start judging each other more wisely starting today.

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