"Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

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Re: "Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

Post by Seabass » Mon May 21, 2018 5:18 pm

:shock:
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Re: "Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

Post by Animavore » Mon May 21, 2018 7:12 pm

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Re: "Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

Post by Seabass » Mon May 21, 2018 7:30 pm

"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." —Voltaire
"They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved." —Sebastian Gorka


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Re: "Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

Post by Animavore » Mon May 21, 2018 8:37 pm

And Jordan Peterson has them all eating out of the palm of his hand. At a price.
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Re: "Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Tue May 22, 2018 12:21 pm

Call the waaahmbulance, there are victims in need of halp!

'Pretty Loud for Being so Silenced'
Irony can be a difficult concept to grasp, but some hypothetical examples can illustrate it clearly. It would be ironic, for instance, if people who claimed their free speech was being trampled on were actually being heard more than anybody else. It would be ironic if television hosts and podcasters who believe in “engaging in debate with the other side” never actually engaged in any debate with the other side. And it would be ironic if a journalist who believes in “facts” and “listening to critics” ignored facts and never listened to critics.

Of course, you might think that ironies this obvious rarely occur in the real world. Surely life is much more subtle. But if you assume this, you haven’t yet read Bari Weiss’ New York Times op-ed/fawning profile, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.” Weiss uses the nation’s paper of record to introduce audiences to a group of people whose voices are supposedly being kept out of mainstream institutions, but who for some reason I seem to hear about all the damn time.

The “intellectual dark web” is neither on the dark web nor comprised of intellectuals. It is a phrase coined by one of Peter Thiel’s deputies to describe a group of people who share the following traits in common: (1) they are bitter about and feel persecuted by Leftist Social Justice Identity Politics, which they think is silencing important truths and (2) they inhabit the internet, disseminating their opinions through podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, etc. The group includes: Eric Weinstein, the aforementioned Thiel subordinate; vacuous charlatan Jordan Peterson; cool kids’ philosopher Ben Shapiro; deferential interview host Dave Rubin; ex-neuroscientist Sam Harris; former Man Show host Joe Rogan; American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers; and former Evergreen State University professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Weiss says that together these people form:
…a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation—on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums—that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels…
Weiss says they have three things in common:
[First,] they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought—and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.
Weiss says that “offline and in the real world, members of the I.D.W. are often found speaking to one another in packed venues around the globe,” such as the O2 Arena, where they dare to say “That Which Cannot Be Said,” offering “taboo” thoughts like “There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.” (Gosh, perhaps it’s just the fringe conservative circles I move in, but I seem to hear that stuff constantly!)

Well, are they right? Are they being “purged” as part of a “siege” on free speech by the illiberal left? It’s interesting that Weiss chooses to use the formulation “feeling locked out of legacy outlets,” since I seem to remember a great philosopher once saying that Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings. These people may feel as if they are persecuted renegades, suppressed at every turn by Postmodern Neo-Marxists. But there are a lot of facts to say otherwise.

First, even from the evidence in Weiss’ article, we can see that freely speaking about the “siege on free speech” is impressively lucrative. Dave Rubin’s show “makes at least $30,000 a month on Patreon” while Jordan Peterson “pulls in some $80,000 in fan donations each month” and recently released a bestseller. Ben Shapiro gets 15 million downloads a month and has published five books, Sam Harris gets a million listeners per episode and has published seven books. Though Joe Rogan insists “he’s not an interviewer or a journalist” (I wouldn’t disagree) his three-hour podcast conversations are among the most downloaded in the world. These dissident “intellectuals” each seem to make about as much money in a month, with far larger audiences, than is made annually by the critical race theorists and gender studies professors they think are keeping them from being heard.

...

In fact, all of the persecuted intellectuals appear constantly in major outlets with huge reach. Whether it’s Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson appearing on HBO’s Real Time, Christina Hoff Sommers writing for Slate, the Atlantic, and the New York Times, Milo going on CNN, Bret Weinstein being interviewed on FOX News, Andrew Sullivan being racist in New York magazine, Peterson getting invited on the NBC Nightly News, or Ben Shapiro being profiled in the New York Times, not one of these individuals ever seems to lack for a mainstream perch from which to squawk. It’s a strange kind of oppression in which silenced dissidents keep getting book deals, op-eds, sold-out speaking tours, lucrative Patreons, millions of YouTube views, and sympathetic profiles in the world’s leading newspapers. How much more attention do they want? How much freer can speech be? Weiss’ article itself pushes the absurdity to its limits. It features half a dozen staged photographs of its subjects moodily lurking amidst topiaries, and is the longest piece yet in Weiss’ ongoing series on the illiberalism and repressiveness of the left. As one commenter put it, Weiss’ argument is “that unseen forces are preventing her and those like her from making the exact arguments that she’s making, right now, in the exact venue where she’s making them, right now.”
Of course it continues, should you care to read further. :smoke:

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Re: "Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

Post by Brian Peacock » Tue May 22, 2018 12:39 pm

I've never seen these people 'persecuted intellectuals' - and I guess if Hitchens was still alive he'd be on that list too. The diversity of their income streams is interesting, as is their reach, but it doesn't lend any weight or credence to their ideas. Wiess is just peddling a good old-fashioned brand of anti-intellectualism, and the irony is that anti-intellectuals always object to intellectuals intellectually - like those who say that political correctness is going mad are always making a claim for the correct kind of politics.



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Re: "Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

Post by Forty Two » Tue May 22, 2018 5:53 pm

L'Emmerdeur wrote:
Tue May 22, 2018 12:21 pm
Call the waaahmbulance, there are victims in need of halp!

'Pretty Loud for Being so Silenced'
Irony can be a difficult concept to grasp, but some hypothetical examples can illustrate it clearly. It would be ironic, for instance, if people who claimed their free speech was being trampled on were actually being heard more than anybody else. It would be ironic if television hosts and podcasters who believe in “engaging in debate with the other side” never actually engaged in any debate with the other side. And it would be ironic if a journalist who believes in “facts” and “listening to critics” ignored facts and never listened to critics.
Freedom of speech is not related to who is being heard more than other people. A person who has a channel with 10,000,000 listeners does not have "more free speech" than someone on a soapbox in the town square. If the government limits the right of the person with 10,000,000 listeners to publish or write, it is no less a violation of the right of free speech than if the government does the same to the guy on a soapbox. It is no answer to a violation of an individual's right to free speech to say "you've had enough speech already - you've had your say." Freedom of speech has nothing to do with the speaker's willingness to debate, or willingness to listen to the opinions of other. Wisdom does. Intellectual honesty does. But freedom of speech does not require those things.


Of course, you might think that ironies this obvious rarely occur in the real world. Surely life is much more subtle. But if you assume this, you haven’t yet read Bari Weiss’ New York Times op-ed/fawning profile, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.” Weiss uses the nation’s paper of record to introduce audiences to a group of people whose voices are supposedly being kept out of mainstream institutions, but who for some reason I seem to hear about all the damn time.
The only free speech issue with "mainstream institutions" is whether they are subject to the same limitations as government in limiting speech. I.e., a public university, for example, has an obligation to remain content-neutral on speech, and cannot shut down speakers. If a public institution (government funded or run) is "keeping out" a voice, then it's violating that person's right to free speech. The institution doesn't have to invite anyone to speak, but it can't tell the Students for a Democratic Society that it can't invite a communist to speak on campus, and it can't tell the Federalist Society that it can't invite Milo Yiannopoulos.

The “intellectual dark web” is neither on the dark web nor comprised of intellectuals. It is a phrase coined by one of Peter Thiel’s deputies to describe a group of people who share the following traits in common: (1) they are bitter about and feel persecuted by Leftist Social Justice Identity Politics, which they think is silencing important truths


Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. If you listen to Leftist SJW identity politickers, you can see that they want to silence some views. Whether those are "truths" is up to debate.
and (2) they inhabit the internet, disseminating their opinions through podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, etc. The group includes: Eric Weinstein, the aforementioned Thiel subordinate; vacuous charlatan Jordan Peterson; cool kids’ philosopher Ben Shapiro; deferential interview host Dave Rubin; ex-neuroscientist Sam Harris; former Man Show host Joe Rogan; American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers; and former Evergreen State University professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Weiss says that together these people form:
That's a pretty smart group, with disparate views on many issues. None of them have claimed they have been silenced. However, I think it's quite clear that if given the opportunity and the power, the Leftist SJW identity politickers would have no problem shutting them up.


…a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation—on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums—that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels…
Weiss says they have three things in common:
[First,] they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought—and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.
[/quote]

Sounds pretty accurate.

Weiss says that “offline and in the real world, members of the I.D.W. are often found speaking to one another in packed venues around the globe,” such as the O2 Arena, where they dare to say “That Which Cannot Be Said,” offering “taboo” thoughts like “There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.” (Gosh, perhaps it’s just the fringe conservative circles I move in, but I seem to hear that stuff constantly!)
Sure, and they are commonly confronted with Leftist SJW identity politickers screaming bloody murder about such banal and commonplace points. The Leftist SJW identity politickers call Ben Shapiro (a Jew) a Nazi, and Christina Hoff-Sommers a white supremacist. They call Jordan Peterson an "alt right" white supremacist misogynist. They've shouted Christina Hoff-Sommers down, while others huddled in "safe rooms" to squeeze play-doh to cope with her banal and commonplace comments. They confronted Jordan Peterson at Queens College in Kingston, Ontario by jumping into the stained glass window compartments and pounding on them (some breaking) while chanting and threatening harm to the attendees. They chased Brett Weinstein, a left-leaning professor and Bernie Sanders supporter, off Evergreen State College campus under threats of physical harm, after trapping him and at least one administrator and blocking their exit. They've confronted Milo Yiannopoulis with violence, breaking windows, setting fires, hitting people, assaulting police officers, assaulting police horses, and the like.

They have a policy of "no platforming" to deny people not only the right to speak, but to deny other people the right to listen to ideas and concepts.

Well, are they right? Are they being “purged” as part of a “siege” on free speech by the illiberal left? It’s interesting that Weiss chooses to use the formulation “feeling locked out of legacy outlets,” since I seem to remember a great philosopher once saying that Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings. These people may feel as if they are persecuted renegades, suppressed at every turn by Postmodern Neo-Marxists. But there are a lot of facts to say otherwise.
We presently live in countries, Canada and the US, where freedom of expression is very broadly protected. But the illiberal left is in favor of restricting that protection, so long as it allows leftist ideas and speech to be unfettered, while restricting right wing, conservative, libertarian, and other speech which they seek to limit. They're having a hard time overall, of course, because they can't - in the US anyway - achieve their goal without violating the law now, and there is little to no chance that they'll get the constitution amended.

Where they have achieved success is on college campuses, which is concerning enough. The problem is, the college campuses are training these leftist sjw identity politicker scumbag motherfuckers, and that training is being brought to society at large, over time. We're at a point now, where the idea of free speech itself being a racist and patriarchal idea is growing in popularity. The notion that "hate speech" is not protected speech under the constitution in the US is spreading too. People are having a hard time understanding the longstanding US constitutional law on this topic. And, at schools, as low as kindergarten, the leftist sjw identity politick ideology is creeping in.

First, even from the evidence in Weiss’ article, we can see that freely speaking about the “siege on free speech” is impressively lucrative. Dave Rubin’s show “makes at least $30,000 a month on Patreon” while Jordan Peterson “pulls in some $80,000 in fan donations each month” and recently released a bestseller. Ben Shapiro gets 15 million downloads a month and has published five books, Sam Harris gets a million listeners per episode and has published seven books. Though Joe Rogan insists “he’s not an interviewer or a journalist” (I wouldn’t disagree) his three-hour podcast conversations are among the most downloaded in the world. These dissident “intellectuals” each seem to make about as much money in a month, with far larger audiences, than is made annually by the critical race theorists and gender studies professors they think are keeping them from being heard.
Well, yeah, because there are a lot of people don't like the leftist, sjw identity politickers, because leftist sjws are full of shit, intellectually dishonest, and all around scumbag pieces of shit, so being one of these articulate members of the opposition is lucrative, because the message of the Leftist SJW piece of shit identity politickers are becoming so pervasive, and are being taken seriously in the mainstream media and in mainstream institutions. So, the appeal of folks opposing them is not hard to see.

It's like how people oppose the far right white supremacists - the far right white supremacists aren't supreme - they don't control us. They are a far right fringe group of racist assholes. But, we oppose them not because they've won or have achieved their goals. We oppose them for what their goals are. That's why a lot of people are against the leftist sjw identity politics - it's their ideas - their goals - their dreams - their intent - what they're trying to achieve. Many people want nothing to do with it, because they see it as oppressive, awful, racist, and pernicious.

One thing the leftist sjw assholes need to understand. A lot of people really don't like your stupid ideas, and we don't agree that you're on the side of right or virtue. You're illiberal assholes, trying to shut people up, and control what people say, think and feel.
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Re: "Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

Post by Animavore » Tue May 22, 2018 8:00 pm

Reminds me of this.

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Re: "Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

Post by Animavore » Wed May 23, 2018 8:25 pm

Apparently this looks really bad for Peterson. He argues against atheism. Argues that there's no such thing as an atheist.

If the hyperbole of the internet is correct Dilahunty apparently "destroys" him.

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Re: "Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

Post by JimC » Wed May 23, 2018 8:57 pm

I am not imaginary! :lay:
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Re: "Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

Post by Brian Peacock » Wed May 23, 2018 11:17 pm

I imagine you're right. :tea:
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Re: "Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

Post by Hermit » Wed May 23, 2018 11:21 pm

Brian Peacock wrote:
Wed May 23, 2018 11:17 pm
I imagine you're right. :tea:
I've been telling him for yonks. Does he admit? Nooooooooooooooooo, he keeps insisting that he is centre. Never checked the Thesaurus, did he? He would have discovered that "centre" is just another word for "right". :irate:
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Re: "Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

Post by JimC » Thu May 24, 2018 3:35 am

This from the former leader of the Marxist Liberation Front of South Australia... :nono:

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Re: "Alt-right" Parading Ignorance, Stupidity, Malice, Etc.

Post by Animavore » Thu May 24, 2018 12:30 pm

The Alt-Right are pissed at the new Battlefield game; which is set in WW2.



Can you guess why.
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