Saturday Link Love: Delete Your Social Media

Saturday Link Love is a feature where I collect and post links to various articles I’ve come upon over the past week. Feel free to share any interesting articles you’ve come along as well! The more the merrier!

Inside the World of Misinformation, on the New Republic—“Pomerantsev’s thesis is simple: In an age of information abundance, the belief that the best ideas will triumph has been discredited.”

‘Being Careful’ Won’t Prevent Revenge Porn, on The Cut—“Care is not the problem. Care is not a defense against malice. In the second Hill story, there is only one villain, and it’s whoever leaked her photos.”

She was called the n-word and given instructions to slit her wrists. What did Facebook do? on CNN—“Whoever sent these messages should be off social media forever. All of them.” (Just so we’re clear, Facebook did nothing.)

New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed, on Slate Star Codex—“Thucydides predicted that future generations would underestimate the power of Sparta. It built no great temples, left no magnificent ruins. Absent any tangible signs of the sway it once held, memories of its past importance would sound like ridiculous exaggerations. This is how I feel about New Atheism.”

Note: I do not agree with every assertion in the article above, and I strongly disagree with some of the author’s beliefs on race and gender (which are not discussed in his above article). I include the piece here because I think he opens an interesting conversation about shifts over time in the internet and new atheism. 

Richard Dawkins Loves Evangelicals if They Hate Social Justice, on Skepchick—“Dawkins is saying he does not care about the spread of evangelical Christianity, he does not mind supporting people attempting to introduce a theocracy, and he does not mind promoting actual frauds, if he gets to bash ‘social justice’ while doing those things.”

Note: I share the above as an accompaniment to the Slate Star Codex article. There’s this idea among some male atheists that social justice distracts from the “pure” motivations that previously existed in mainstream atheism as manifest by men like Richard Dawkins. Dawkins’ willingness to throw in with evangelicals if it means trashing promoters of social justice suggests that something was rotten from the very beginning. 

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