TFoot – lost me YEARS ago when he proved to be as pigheaded and obtuse about questions around the intersections of race/ethnicity/religion – as he has proven to be about sexism. I suspect he lost a lot of viewers that go round…and gained the ones who were AS obtuse.

Hence, the poll thing is hilarious…if he has a skeptic card to lose…he should lose it on that basis alone.

I was shocked to hear he had a place to blog here and relieved to hear it didn’t work out.

As for his free speech….he can blog/vlog where ever he wants.

It’s obvious he wants to demonstrate that PZ Meyers is being an idiot even if he may feel unprofessional saying so. I kinda wish he just would say something of the sort, if that’s how he sees it, though.

Of course, only if he backs it up with evidence (like he’s been doing pretty well so far).

The left/right axis is also false, though in that case, mainly because both ends are ill-defined. Libertarianism and authoritarianism are relative well-defined, but not opposites.

The main problem is that maximally libertarian policies do not provide the most liberty/least control. An organization needs some authority to ensure liberty. In the convention example, if the organizers didn’t tell anyone what to do or say and people took advantage of this to bully other people because no could tell them to leave, that does not provide the most freedom for the most people.

How is the “libertarian/authoritarian” axis false in a way that “left/right” aren’t? And why is any kind of anti-authoritarianism so wrong (even from the point of view of leaning that way somewhere along a scale) from a “social justice” point of view, that actually leaning somewhere toward authoritarianism is preferable. I’d really like to at least understand where the ideology being pushed around these parts is coming from, even if I can’t say I’m exactly a convert so far.

You’re reading a lot into that comment. The idea that is that completely anti-authoritarian, hands-off leadership will just lead to some other group exploiting their power over another. Protecting freedom does require some amount of coercion and the libertarian/authoritarian axis is false.