Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/3/26/17148350/ready-player-one-book-backlash-controversy-gamergate-explained This piece makes me sad. Not because anything about it particularly wrong. But because hearing how a cultural phenomenon can 'cause' a work to go from innocuous fun to being a sinister reinstantiation of toxic ideas is terrifying to me as a person who likes to make innocuous fun. I do think Constance is mostly correct about the book having the woman-as-a-trophy trope, but I also think that's a problem with 90% of fiction in this niche. I don't think it's a matter of an author consciously promoting an ideology as much as an author not innovating on ALL fronts. Very few writers can do that. Those that do, alienate most readers because every subversion usually requires overhead; on the part of the writer's time/energy, the story's infrastructure, and the reader's ability to roll with thinking/processing the story differently tha...

I never believed that vaccines cause autism or that fluoride in the water has a nefarious purpose.  But I was raised in a culture that lead me to believe that evolution is a lie used to convert Christians to atheists, and that the idea of anthropogenic climate change is merely a tool to bring about socialism.   I think it’s natural to lump all theories about how science and/or government is misleading us to our doom (chemtrails, evolution, fluoride, flat-earth, vaccines, 9/11, etc.) into one conceptual category. My background of buying into some, but not all of them, makes me believe there’s a spectrum. The fact that I’ve turned my thinking around on these issues gives me some anecdotal experiential data that leads me to think that arguing over “the facts” is not a generally successful strategy for convincing someone who believes that some well-established scientific consensus is bunk. The problem with deep conspiracy thinking is that there is no possibility for error-cor...