Twitter Suspends Prominent Alt-Right Accounts

What sort of evidence? This argument smells a bit circular. Sociologists know more about society because they're Sociologists? The entire field appears to be little more than a collection of fallacies in action. People ignorant of the conclusions of sociologists would likely intuit their way to better outcomes.

> The entire field appears to be little more than a collection of fallacies in action

It "appears" this way only to someone who is completely uninterested in anything more than a cursory look. After getting my bachelor's degree in mathematics, I went to grad school to study history (which entails studying some sociology), and I can tell you first hand that it is no such thing. Even a shallow overview of the social sciences and the rigorous methodologies they employ will convince you of that. Obviously, those are not exact sciences, and social researchers are well aware of that. But the rigor of their methods is not much different from those employed in, say, medicine. Does every social science result deserve the same degree of epistemological confidence as a mathematical theorem or a physics experiment? Of course not! Are there false or even ridiculous "results"? Certainly, although the field as a whole eventually rejects them. But it is far, far, more rigorous and valid than the beliefs of people based on personal observation and gut feeling. And I hope this is obvious: even an ancient Greek who looked up at the skies and took notes of stars' positions but knew nothing about gravity or Copernicus, knew more about astronomy that a person who isn't even interested in studying the skies and recording observations, regardless of how incomplete the Greek's knowledge was.

It's odd that you focus on race when it's not even remotely the focus of the article.

I don't think you have understood the pro-life stance, then. One of the main functions of sex is to produce children, and it is well-known that sex has a decent likelihood of producing children. So if you choose have sex, you are also choosing to accept the responsibility to care for any children that come.

This is kind of tied in with the Judaeo-Christian worldview, which says that sex is only designed to be done within the context of an unbreakable covenant (marriage), because it bonds you together in a deep way. Sex isn't just an act, which is why divorce is so traumatic. Children are supposed to be conceived out of an act of love into a safe, loving environment. (Everyone is aware that this is often not the reality, but this is what the design is.)

All that is hard to explain, though, so it's easier for people say "it's morally wrong because God says so," which really isn't a helpful or even appropriate way of interacting with non-Christians. An appeal to authority doesn't work if the other person doesn't accept the authority...

Obviously, you are free to reject this view. You can even reject the moral part, but I think that fundamentally the conservative stance is taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions. We take a dim view of people who get drunk, drive, and kill someone, because driving carries a responsibility. So why are we okay with people who have sex and then kill someone to get out of their responsibility?

Hopefully this makes the pro-life position more understandable, even if you don't agree.

Wikipedia contains interesting sections on the etymology of both "racism" and "sexism". "Racism" (and the older term, "racialism") have been around since at least 1900. It originally seemed to have mostly related to pseudo-scientific methods of categorizing people by race, and circa WWII, acquired its now most-familiar meaning of "belief in the superiority of a particular race".

"Sexism" was coined by analogy to "racism" in the 1960s, within an academic context, but had not yet acquired the additional connotation you're talking about (the "systemic" part). The first occurrence in print defines it thusly: "Sexism is judging people by their sex when sex doesn't matter." No apparent mention of institutional or systemic effects; those probably came later.

So what we have here is a word, "racism", which acquired a well-known public meaning c. WWII that meant what we would now call "extreme, overt racism", and a word, "sexism" defined by analogy to it in the 1960s. It seems plain to me that much of the public is still going by these older definitions.

The fundamental problem is that, under the old definitions, calling someone "racist" (and probably "sexist"), is a very serious accusation. There is a reason Nazis seemingly come up in every discussion about racism: they are the ones who gave the word its modern, common meaning. In some ways, calling someone "racist" is therefore a direct, linguistic analogy comparing someone to a Nazi.

Academics later refined and repurposed these words. If they, and media surrogates explaining their ideas to the public, had stuck to terms like "(institutional) bias/prejudice", we wouldn't have nearly the degree of problems we have. Certainly it is important to distinguish between implicit, explicit, and systemic biases, which is exactly why we shouldn't use the same word for all of them. And if the goal is progress and understanding, we probably shouldn't use an emotionally charged word that gained its modern definitions from the Nazis.

We cannot realistically expect the public to read academic publications before voting. I'm in biology, and it would surely be nice if voters would read my papers so that they understand issues in medicine better (maybe they would increase NIH funding!), but that's completely unrealistic. No, it is up to academics and media to communicate clearly with the public, and I am arguing sociologists have failed miserably in this regard.