Geraldine Green details the ground she has covered in the course of her intellectual journey.

Look, I realize I really need to set the record straight here about me and how I arrive at the views I come to hold.

I am not one who just jumps on to any bandwagon when everyone else seems to be jumping on. I am one of those people who always holds a very skeptical eye towards nearly all social movements and their claims. I am not interested in proving whether I’m virtuous or not to anyone. I do not just blindly believe what people say just because they say it. I look into everything. Everything. 

I actually spend hours and hours every single day investigating claims online. I look for critical essays about everything. I read massive amounts of essays written by all kinds of thinkers, left, right, and center. I look for facts in each of them and I look to see where each essay overlaps with another. I look for the similarities and the differences in every piece I read. I take copious notes and refer to them often. I do all this before I even think of posting the most socially critical ones here online.

Over the decades since my days in grad school I have gone from being a radical feminist leftist socialist Christian to potential conversion to Orthodox Judaism to animist pagan spirituality to skeptical atheist humanism. My family was extremely conservative politically so I was taught a great deal about US History and the Constitution. My family was very active in politics at the regional and national level so they made sure I knew what was going on and their take on it. I was basically required to read everything, even including socialist and communist tomes so I would be thoroughly informed. This was very important to my family. They were nothing like what many people today think conservatives are like. No, my family were real intellectuals who made sure they were fully informed about everything, from every direction. Their deep reading had a profound effect on me, one that taught me to investigate everything, every claim that came my way, so that I could determine the facts behind those claims. 

My mother and my gran always told me that if I didn’t fully investigate I’d never have all the information to properly form my opinions. Though they’d both undoubtedly chafe at where I’ve arrived at my rejection of what they held most dearly to them, religion, they would most certainly respect the intellectual rigor I applied to reach my completely secular conclusions. I read everything I could find about religious and spiritual indoctrination and found great solace in the works of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maryam Namazie, Brendan O’Neill, and especially Christopher Hitchens. And as a direct result of reading all of them my thinking became even more critically honed, especially because several of those authors had originally been Marxist or leftist who later found deep interest in conservative thought. I found it fascinating that they originally came from the left and how their thinking changed over time.

Over the last eight years I’ve grown very weary of what passes as leftist socialist progressivism and how its adherents tend to quell intellectual dissent and enforce conformity within the rank and file. Disagreement and dissent are met with ad hominem attacks, call outs, and doxxing. They have become the champions of censorship and cancel culture, though they would roundly reject that depiction. Nonetheless, those of us who often express dissent with them are basically silenced and deleted, as if our studied notions do not deserve respect or attention. And they do not seem to understand that this is at great cost to them. So many of us who once held fast to them no longer support anything they’re saying. We are tired of being called insulting names and being summarily dismissed simply for disagreeing with them. They really don’t want to actually participate in any conversation unless you already agree with them! That’s no conversation where I come from.

So I don’t just buy in to everything that everyone is pushing. I read profusely in order to arrive at my conclusions. This is not a quick or mindless process. I engage in much deep thinking before I tell you anything. You may just see the links I post and automatically assume I’m just regurgitating what I happen to have seen. You couldn’t be more wrong! It doesn’t matter to me whether the links I post come from the right or the left or the center. What matters to me is how they present their arguments and their reasoning. 

Consequently I’ve found the conservative writers and speakers to be far more rigorous and thusly more convincing. I realize that bothers many of my friends. That’s really too bad, though, because if they really understood how much time and effort I actually put in to studying and contemplating these things they might be far less bothered by my conclusions. Maybe then they could finally begin to respect where I’m actually coming from.

Geraldine Green runs in the age of Covid!

Critical Thinking Along The Way

Geraldine Green details the ground she has covered in the course of her intellectual journey.

Look, I realize I really need to set the record straight here about me and how I arrive at the views I come to hold.

I am not one who just jumps on to any bandwagon when everyone else seems to be jumping on. I am one of those people who always holds a very skeptical eye towards nearly all social movements and their claims. I am not interested in proving whether I’m virtuous or not to anyone. I do not just blindly believe what people say just because they say it. I look into everything. Everything. 

I actually spend hours and hours every single day investigating claims online. I look for critical essays about everything. I read massive amounts of essays written by all kinds of thinkers, left, right, and center. I look for facts in each of them and I look to see where each essay overlaps with another. I look for the similarities and the differences in every piece I read. I take copious notes and refer to them often. I do all this before I even think of posting the most socially critical ones here online.

Over the decades since my days in grad school I have gone from being a radical feminist leftist socialist Christian to potential conversion to Orthodox Judaism to animist pagan spirituality to skeptical atheist humanism. My family was extremely conservative politically so I was taught a great deal about US History and the Constitution. My family was very active in politics at the regional and national level so they made sure I knew what was going on and their take on it. I was basically required to read everything, even including socialist and communist tomes so I would be thoroughly informed. This was very important to my family. They were nothing like what many people today think conservatives are like. No, my family were real intellectuals who made sure they were fully informed about everything, from every direction. Their deep reading had a profound effect on me, one that taught me to investigate everything, every claim that came my way, so that I could determine the facts behind those claims. 

My mother and my gran always told me that if I didn’t fully investigate I’d never have all the information to properly form my opinions. Though they’d both undoubtedly chafe at where I’ve arrived at my rejection of what they held most dearly to them, religion, they would most certainly respect the intellectual rigor I applied to reach my completely secular conclusions. I read everything I could find about religious and spiritual indoctrination and found great solace in the works of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maryam Namazie, Brendan O’Neill, and especially Christopher Hitchens. And as a direct result of reading all of them my thinking became even more critically honed, especially because several of those authors had originally been Marxist or leftist who later found deep interest in conservative thought. I found it fascinating that they originally came from the left and how their thinking changed over time.

Over the last eight years I’ve grown very weary of what passes as leftist socialist progressivism and how its adherents tend to quell intellectual dissent and enforce conformity within the rank and file. Disagreement and dissent are met with ad hominem attacks, call outs, and doxxing. They have become the champions of censorship and cancel culture, though they would roundly reject that depiction. Nonetheless, those of us who often express dissent with them are basically silenced and deleted, as if our studied notions do not deserve respect or attention. And they do not seem to understand that this is at great cost to them. So many of us who once held fast to them no longer support anything they’re saying. We are tired of being called insulting names and being summarily dismissed simply for disagreeing with them. They really don’t want to actually participate in any conversation unless you already agree with them! That’s no conversation where I come from.

So I don’t just buy in to everything that everyone is pushing. I read profusely in order to arrive at my conclusions. This is not a quick or mindless process. I engage in much deep thinking before I tell you anything. You may just see the links I post and automatically assume I’m just regurgitating what I happen to have seen. You couldn’t be more wrong! It doesn’t matter to me whether the links I post come from the right or the left or the center. What matters to me is how they present their arguments and their reasoning. 

Consequently I’ve found the conservative writers and speakers to be far more rigorous and thusly more convincing. I realize that bothers many of my friends. That’s really too bad, though, because if they really understood how much time and effort I actually put in to studying and contemplating these things they might be far less bothered by my conclusions. Maybe then they could finally begin to respect where I’m actually coming from.

Geraldine Green runs in the age of Covid!

1 comment:

  1. Love it...I want to buy you a pint Geraldine. You get my vote.

    ReplyDelete