Twitter Suspends Prominent Alt-Right Accounts

No, but we can hope that people would at least listen to those who dedicate their lives to a rigorous study of society rather than dismiss their views based on nothing of the sort. Academics (and journalists) don't explain those terms and the reasoning behind them only in academic publications.

And someone already addressed that alternative flavor of absurdity yesterday too. Twitter has purged hundreds of thousands of terrorism-related accounts and continues to do so. (I'm sure you'll counter with the Hamas account, but you already know why that's a poor counter example when faced with hundreds of thousands of accounts being purged).

BTW, this is called "moving the goalposts". Are you now asserting that Twitter intentionally allows terrorism accounts to proliferate? Or are you implying that they have an account banning quota and they use it all up on conservatives and have none left over for terrorists? God damn, the mental gymnastics here are just something else.

People believe (mostly) in modern medicine not because of our fancy jargon, or our explained logic about why the cell does this or that, but because it obviously works.

I am a liberal living in a conservative state, with many conservative friends and family. I can assure you that many of them have never heard the reasoning and arguments you're referring to. Sure, you can find it on Slate. But they don't read Slate.

But if and when these conservatives are confronted with these arguments, they will mostly agree that implicit bias exists, and accept data about unconscious associations, police profiling, etc.

But they do NOT accept the conclusion drawn from it -- that we are all therefore "racist". Because to them that term is as much or more a political tool for moral condemnation as it is a description of objective reality. And we liberals (I assume) would be kidding ourselves if we didn't admit it has been used this way frequently.

And they also tend to resist the conclusion that we ought to do this or that about it -- because science, if sociology claims to be one, never does or can tell us what we ought to do, only what is reality (the is-ought problem). Once we start talking about what we should do, we are completely outside the realm of science.

That's actually closer to what I'd consider preferable, which would be no changes to existing marriage rights, but a federal civil union statute with marriage-level financial benefits contingent upon child-rearing. But such a thing would never be taken seriously on either side of the political crevasse - far too much for conservatives, far too little for progressives, thus decried from both sides. Is it too soon to bemoan the equation of nuance with assault in the modern American political environment?

> deny one of humanity's oldest and most important rituals [...] to an entire group of people

An entire group of people who have never in Western history, perhaps not even in human history overall, had access to that ritual, until the Supreme Court last year discovered in the Constitution a right heretofore unknown. It is very hard to overstate the extent to which this represents an upheaval of tradition, and such things don't happen in a vacuum - or, utopianism notwithstanding, without consequence. Being myself a member of that roughly one percent of the population which has been led to believe it may enforce its will upon the whole without fear of backlash, I don't think it is too hard to imagine what kind of "gut feeling" there might be somewhere in the back of my mind as I speak on this subject, as I've so often done over the last few years.

It's possible my analysis lacks accuracy, although that's yet to be demonstrated, and falling back on insinuations of bigotry doesn't really indicate confidence in one's arguments. But if you want to know what motivates me to concern myself with the subject in the first place, you need look no further than fear. I don't want to find myself in a war, and I really don't want to find myself in a war my side is all but guaranteed to lose - and one in a hundred isn't the kind of proportion that's conducive to a win. But some people seem to want to start one, and to put me and mine in it. They say it's for our benefit, but I've been observing and comparing their claims and their actions for some decades now, and I think they are lying. I also see no reason to expect that, when all the heavy things they've so blithely flung into the air start coming down on people's heads, they'll feel any need to stick around and share the horror they've let us in for. That seems to me like an outcome toward which it's eminently reasonable to look with trepidation.

We'd got by this long without being able to marry. We could've been satisfied with Lawrence v. Texas, which is an amazing accomplishment in its own right, and given it another generation or two before we told the rest of America again that it could take its morality and shove it even further this time. No, that's not ideal, but what is? Nobody ever promised us, or anyone else, an easy life. Nobody ever promised us a just world, by our lights or anyone else's. And the whole concept of progressivism revolves around gradualism, or so I'd been given to understand - the idea, I gather, being that of modifying morality over successive generations by a process mainly centered on education and subtle social pressure, rather than forcible reengineering of whole swaths of society at a time. Quibble though I may with the nature of such a process and the purposes to which it might be put, I at least have to admit that it has a reasonable chance of working. Trying to do everything in the space of half a generation like this is liable to get a hell of a lot of us killed, and to leave those who aren't worse off than they were at the start. I guess that's easy to contemplate for people who don't stand to suffer as a result of it. Here on what's liable to be the pointy end, maybe not so much.