Rationally Speaking #227 - Sarah Haider on "Dissent and free speech"

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2019

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode features Sarah Haider, the president of Ex-Muslims of North America. Julia and Sarah discuss why it's important to talk about the challenges of leaving Islam, and why that makes people uncomfortable or angry. They also explore whether being intellectually honest helps or hurts your effectiveness as an activist; Sarah's concerns with the Intellectual Dark Web; and whether Sarah would draw any lines when it comes to giving offensive views a platform.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today's episode of Rationally Speaking is sponsored by Givewell.
0:03.5	Givewell takes a data-driven approach to identifying charities where your donation can make a big impact.
0:09.3	Givewell spends thousands of hours every year vetting and analyzing nonprofits so that it can produce a list of charity recommendations that are backed by rigorous evidence.
0:17.9	The list is free and available to everyone online.
0:20.6	The New York Times has
0:21.3	referred to Givewell as, quote, the spreadsheet method of giving. Givewell's recommendations are
0:26.2	for donors who are interested in having a high altruistic return on investment in their giving.
0:30.7	Its current recommended charities fight malaria, treat intestinal parasites, provide vitamin A supplements,
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0:39.6	Check them out at give well.org.
0:57.6	Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
1:02.3	I'm your host, Julia Galef, and my guest today is Sarah Hater.
1:09.2	Sarah is a writer, speaker, and the executive director of the ex-Muslims of North America.
1:11.4	Sarah, welcome to rationally speaking.
1:17.6	Really good to be here, Julia. Thank you for having me. I'm a big fan of your presence on Twitter for what that's worth. You're one of my role models for engaging with disagreement in, you know,
1:23.0	a careful and eloquent and intellectually honest way. So I'm having a fan girl moment right now.
1:29.3	That's in itself such a compliment, because I love your presence on Twitter as well.
1:34.8	So the arc for this conversation that I was thinking made sense is I'd really like to talk first
1:41.5	about your work with the ex-Muslims of North America, what you do, what you've learned from the experience about the issues or about sort of successful activism.
1:52.0	And then transition from there into some broader topics that I've seen you discuss interestingly on Twitter and some of your other interviews having to do with free speech and liberalism
2:03.8	and justice and things like that. So, you know, small talk. Yeah. Why don't we start by just
2:12.6	describing what the ex-Muslims of North America does? Right. So ex-Muslims in North America, we are now in our
	...

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