High Plains Skeptic

A (MOSTLY) CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF SCIENCE, CULTURE, POLITICS, AND ART.

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Forgiveness and Reckoning: Preserving American Democracy in the 21st Century

Forgiveness and Reckoning: Preserving American Democracy in the 21st Century

On January 6, 2021, a mob of frenzied insurrectionists, fueled by the lies of Donald J. Trump and his allies in the Republican Party, stormed the U.S. Capitol building. Their aim, it has become clear, was to overturn the outcome of a free and open election by force of violence.  Most of us are still processing what happened. It’s going to take a while—certainly months, quite possibly years. But…

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Partisan Identity and the Death of Representative Governance

Partisan Identity and the Death of Representative Governance

  There is a danger in thinking of ourselves as political and—more precisely—partisan animals. A big chunk of our modern political derangement flows directly from incorporating ideas like “liberal” and “conservative” into our individual identities. As I write in an essay at MerionWest, this is dry kindling from the spread of partisan discord.

On either side of the political spectrum, discourse is…

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Postmodernism Isn’t A Scourge on Civil Society—It’s Just a Pointless Indulgence

Postmodernism Isn’t A Scourge on Civil Society—It’s Just a Pointless Indulgence

I wrote a new thing for Areo Magazine. Here are some excerpts:

Science is first and foremost a cultural phenomenon. Individual scientists are riddled with biases and blind spots. Their views are subtly influenced by their sociopolitical contexts. The scope of their thought and investigation is substantially curtailed by the limits of extant knowledge and technology, some of which might well be…

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Can't We All Agree to Just Not F*@king Touch Each Other?

Can’t We All Agree to Just Not F*@king Touch Each Other?

Everyone’s seen the headlines by now. Grabby grandpa Joe Biden is in trouble for making a growing list of women feel uncomfortable with his unhinged displays of physical affection. A few months back it was Neil DeGrasse Tyson, excoriated in the social media-sphere for getting too goddamn handsy with colleagues and coworkers.

From my understanding, none of the offending events was sufficient to…

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The Dull Art of Problematizing Everything

The Dull Art of Problematizing Everything

Here’s an essay for Areo Magazine, a very fine place to go if you like to read interesting things:

Few things in life are certain. Some will populate a short list of inevitabilities with death and taxes, but really, only the former is guaranteed—just ask the sitting president of the United States. If you have spent any amount of time on the internet, however, I’d wager a lofty sum that you’ve…

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Back in the days of my youth–roughly between the middle 80s and middle 90s–I would sometimes build model airplanes or spaceships. B2 bombers and Miranda Class starships fell together in sloppy assemblages of glue and shoddily applied decals. It was truly atrocious work, owing largely to the fact that I didn’t have the attention span to build things with greater care.

Fast-forward a couple decades. I watch some YouTube videos, as one does, and come across some of former Mythbuster Adam Savage putting together models for tested.com. It occurs to me that, as a thirty year old man, I might have finally developed the patience and general wherewithal necessary to do a halfway decent job of putting those things together. Moreover, it occurs to me that building models might be really fun.

Well, turns out I was right. Building models, while tremendously nerdy, is an activity ripe with unexpected narrative potential. Even a very simple model can be a canvas for projecting rich object histories. These, of course, are vague and obtusely written histories. No one is going to be able to look at model and tell exactly what the builder intended. But the act of composing them–layering in bits of paint and grime that tell an evolving story of where an object has been and how it has been used–is enormously gratifying.

These examples come from some very simple kits made by Bandai. The YT-1300 (the Falcon) is 1/144 scale. The Y-wing is 1/72 scale. For me, the fun in these is playing around in the Star Wars Universe without feeling particularly beholden to canon. These are familiar-looking ships, but in putting them together, in painting and weathering them, they were never the ones we saw in the movies. Instead, they’re lost bits of history from a massive universe.

Anyway, enjoy:

Old Hobbies, Reinvigorated: Building Models Back in the days of my youth--roughly between the middle 80s and middle 90s--I would sometimes build model airplanes or spaceships.

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Star Trek: Discovery—A Case Study in Shoddy Writing

Star Trek: Discovery—A Case Study in Shoddy Writing

Star Trek: Discovery is an odd show. A common refrain is that it’s good—it’s just not Star Trek. There’s an interesting debate to be had there. One could mount a compelling case that the show both fails to honor the thematic legacy of Trek and honors the thematic legacy of Trek in new and interesting ways. Discovery’sreal problem is not how well it fits into established canon. It is how…

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Stop Stigmatizing Cultural Appropriation This one is hosted over at Areo Magazine. Here's a taste: Cultural appropriation. The term alone leaves many people primed for offense.

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What Critics Get Wrong (and Right) About ‘Sokal 2.0’

What Critics Get Wrong (and Right) About ‘Sokal 2.0’

Much has been written about the recent hoax perpetrated against segments of postmodern academia, most of it fairly binary. People are either enthusiastic fans or strident critics. For my part, I’m in the former camp. The fields targeted by the hoax are, at best, silly and indulgent. Less generously, a case can be made that these fields are actively harmful. They not only spread, but actively…

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An Expansive Sokal-Style Hoax Exposes Academic Fraudulence

An Expansive Sokal-Style Hoax Exposes Academic Fraudulence

An impressive Sokal-style hoax came to light this week and, frankly, I could not be more pleased. The same should be true of anyone who value evidenced-based reasoning and thoughtful, honest scholarship. It took aim at the ideological fanaticism, rampant bias, and pseudo-intellectualism poisoning large swaths of the humanities. There’s an excellent and extensive write-up on this in Areo Magazine,…

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Atheism and the Public Sphere

Atheism and the Public Sphere

Religious liberals and conservative moderates often recoil in the face of hard atheism. To them, atheism represents a sort callous disdain for an inoffensive source of succor and support. Why, they wonder, are people subjected to such rancorous ridicule for believing in something that brings them comfort?

Doubtless this reaction springs from a place of authenticity. There are plenty of atheists…

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How Liberal PC Culture Feeds the Conservative Persecution Complex

How Liberal PC Culture Feeds the Conservative Persecution Complex

PC Police and Conservative Persecution Complex

A lot of conservatives are under the impression that they are a widely maligned, politically persecuted group in the United States. Read this delusional piece by professional fabulist Dennis Prager as a good for instance. If you’re partial to statistics, this might do the trick: Around 73% of Republicansthink the FBI and Department of Justice are…

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Dennis Prager is an Idiot and the Republican Party is a Cult

Dennis Prager is an Idiot and the Republican Party is a Cult

A High Priest in the First Church of Anti-Liberalism

Let me tell you about a man named Dennis Prager. An extreme right-wing pundit, Dennis Prager is an idiot cloaked in a thin-veneer of intellect – a white-knuckle blowhard who has troubled telling the difference between loud voices and good arguments. But more to the point, he is also a High Priest in new religious order: The First Church of…

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Climate Change: A Dialogue

Climate Change: A Dialogue

An aide walks into a Republican Senator’s office. She has just finished a report on climate change and is giving the Senator a brief summary of her findings:

Aide: If we continue to burn fossil fuels, there’s a good chance we’ll cause significant ecological, political, and economic disruption. It could get very bad.

Senator: But it’s not 100%?

A: No. But–

S: Okay. Let’s keep burning fossil fuels.…

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McCarthy Muddles the Origins of Language

McCarthy Muddles the Origins of Language

Here’s an old but interesting bit of news. A few months back Cormac McCarthy wrote an article for Nautilus on the nature of human language. It was a largely speculative, rangy piece, enjoyable and thought-provoking in its own way. A few months later he wrote another article addressing some of the criticisms spawned by the original.

McCarthy’s most interesting claim is also his most misguided. He…

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More incoherent nonsense on cultural appropriation

More incoherent nonsense on cultural appropriation

https://twitter.com/splcenter/status/992886675452977152

  More and more, I am under the impression that the people who cry foul at cultural appropriation are obstinately indifferent to any sensible understanding of what culture actually is. As pointed out at whyevolutionistrue, the Southern Poverty Law Center seems to be under the impression that a person who engages in an activity inspired by or…

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Avengers - Infinity War: Adventures in Innumeracy

Avengers – Infinity War: Adventures in Innumeracy

Infinity War was a fun movie. Not only that, it’s a hell of an accomplishment. I had nurtured deep doubts that the filmmakers could pull off. Juggling that many characters seemed a gargantuan, if not definitively insurmountable, task. But hats off to the Russo brothers, the writers (Christopher Marcus and Stephen McFeely), and the rest of the crew – they made a pretty damn good flick.

Now for…

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