Hello and this is a show for you if you're bored of watching people argue on the internet about subjects they know nothing about.

At trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts. We ask the experts.

Our fantastic expert guest this week is the editor in chief of Area magazine.

Helen Pluckrose, welcome to Trigonometry.

Thank you for having me.

It's great that you're here. Thank you so much for coming and listen before we get get into the interview itself, tell our viewers and I listen

is a little bit about who you are, how are you where you are.

Well, I'm here from here in East London,

and my background is in English literature and early modern studies but I came into

the culture was kind of via the new atheist movement. I've always been very concerned about

epistemology, how we know what is true, and about liberal ethics. So I was very critical of religion making unfounded truth claims

and having all kinds of illiberal ideas about women and LGBT so and that was the same for Peter and James who did their recent project with us.

So we'll get on to that but we'll get right into that.

So from that when I was studying English literature

and trying to look at women's history,

then the whole problem of post-modernism and theory

that's derived from post-modernism just kept coming up and getting

in the way of looking at anything rigorously and ethically.

So I gradually my attention has turned from religious truth claims and

human rights issues to to ones rooted in in theory and in activism that's sort of currently most known as the

social justice approach.

Well we'll get into all of that and the postmodernism and all of that in the second, but

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