How do they hold their dangerous conversations?
The Graun did a sarcastic Q&A about the Intellecshual Dark Web:
How do they hold their dangerous conversations? Through some kind of shadowy underground network? They go on Rubin’s YouTube show, which has 700,000 subscribers. Or they host popular podcasts, attracting thousands in monthly donations.
Talk about being sidelined.Who are these people? Among those often included are former Breitbart editor-at-large Ben Shapiro; husband and wife “professors in exile” Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, who resigned from Evergreen State College after denouncing a planned Day of Absence, where white students were asked to leave the campus; and psychologist and political correctness scourge Jordan Peterson.
You mean it’s all just … terrible people? Professional controversialists, I would call them. They come from both the right and sometimes left extremes of the political spectrum, but they all tend to combine some form of hardcore libertarianism with an unfortunate manner.
Libertarian plus obnoxious; a decent summary.
And this is popular? Oh yes. IDW members expound their dangerous ideas in front of packed houses – out of necessity, having been denied the more direct public forum of a professorship at a college you’ve never heard of.
It must be hard to to talk about being no-platformed in front of so many people. The bigger problem is that the movement is so ill-defined. Its free-thinking, “anything goes” nature means that mainstream intellectuals such as Steven Pinker are often included alongside cranks and show-offs including Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones.
Well it’s probably not so much the free-thinking, “anything goes” nature as it is the fact that a list of random cranks like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones is just that, while if you add people like Steven Pinker it seems more serious. I’m pretty sure Bari Weiss had that firmly in mind, writing for the Times and all.
Sam Harris is a kind of bridge between the two. He’s not an academic and he doesn’t write or think or discuss like an academic, but he did get that there PhD, so a lot of people are fooled into thinking he’s more thoughtful or disciplined or evidence-based than he really is. It’s a bit like the Templeton Foundation setting up all those think tanks and fellowships with names like “Cambridge” and “Faraday” in the title so that people will think they’re academic and serious and rigorous.
Are there non-obnoxious libertarians?
@Jeff Engel #1, Ken White of Popehat describes himself as libertarian, or at least as someone who has libertarian leanings. He seems like an overall non-obnoxious guy, but then whenever he does discuss his political leanings it always seems to me as though the main thread in his story is police corruption. He somehow equates the police doing what’s good for them and getting away with it with government overreach.
David @2,
I’d add Will Wilkinson to that list.
That’s the thing about libertarianism: it’s the rotten several million who ruin it for the decent dozen or so.
Are Weinstein/ Heying ‘terrible people?’ Is Alice Dreger?
Thanks to the trans-bullies, Ophelia could be roped into this group too.
Alice Dreger isn’t in the article. I don’t know enough about Weinstein and Heying to have an opinion. Also it’s a sarcastic Q and A, so “terrible people” isn’t entirely literal. But there are several shits on the list, yes.
I was just this afternoon regaled by a colleague of mine about the important thinking of Jordan Peterson. Sigh.
Dan Drezner has taken the measure of the IDW, and is not impressed.
Dreger is listed on the website, and was asked to appear in the article but declined.
Am I off base in thinking that the list on the website is a rather strange assemblage? I thought Weiss’ article was about the list website, with some specific examples, rather than about only the people mentioned.
Interesting article, Screechy. There was something I noticed, though, that I seem to notice a lot. The article was critical of the idea that they were marginalized, that their speech was being shut down, or that their ideas were new. But a lot of people are missing the core point – their thinking is wrongheaded. Yes, there are people on the left who are shutting out speech, and they have some whacked out and goofy ideas. But these thinkers are looking more at basic things. They are traveling into the zone where women don’t do rationality, people of color are just genetically less intelligent, and so forth. The articles will talk about the ideas they have, question whether they are marginalized when they are best selling authors speaking to sold out crowds, but never point out that the very ideas they are espousing , while popular, are not scientifically or ethically sound.
These IDW “thinkers” are promoting racism, sexism, and white nationalism in most cases, and too many people seem willing to suggest that they have something to say, they’re just going about it wrong. The people who have something to say about the excesses of the left, the people who need to be listened to, are people like Ophelia who try to engage with ridiculous ideas, not those who are promoting the same tired old misogynistic, racist stuff that has been with us for 2000 years, and is still the undercurrent of belief for more people than are willing to admit that.
iknklast,
I think Drezner at least nods in that direction a couple of times, in part through some of the critiques he links, but I agree that most of the article is about the unoriginality and the overreliance on supposed “oppression.”
Still, that’s sort of the problem with the “IDW” — it’s such a grab-bag of claims that it’s hard to say too much about their substance without being overly broad in one’s dismissal, or getting lost in the weeds. I mean, discussing gender differences and their implications alone is at least a full article in itself. Sam Harris alone presents you with the Charles Murray racial stuff, the anti-Islam rhetoric, and torture apologia, just off the top of my head. And Jordan Petersen seems to have a billion different pet issues, from “clean your room and stand up straight” (which I can’t believe grown men are finding compelling, but whatever, it’s innocuous enough I guess) to all the anti-feminist stuff.
It’s ironic — I bet that a lot of Sam Harris fans are rabid “dictionary atheists” who are appalled at any suggestion that atheists should stand for anything other than a literal non-belief in deities, and yet they’re perfectly willing to declare their allegiance to a concept whose only unifying point is a persecution complex.
Hmmm Ken White of Popehat as a non-obnoxious libertarian (David Rutten @ 2)…I’m not so sure. A few years back he tweeted (wording approximate) “I don’t usually use this word but this guy is so terrible I will” and proceeded to call the guy in question a cunt. I replied to the tweet pointing out that using it only for the very worst people=saying only the very worst people are female genitalia and that that’s pretty insulting to women. He immediately blocked me. Since we’d been kind of friendly until then I took the liberty of emailing him to say that seemed harsh and he replied dismissively.
So, I dunno. Sure, people can block anybody they feel like blocking, nobody owes us anything, but still…I thought that was pretty harsh (and I thought he was dead wrong about not using “cunt” except for a really terrible guy).
Pete Carroll, head coach of the Seattle Seahawks (National Football League, US), just had Jordan Peterson in to give a talk or something to members of his staff, and/or members of the team. On an unrelated note, Coach Carroll is a 9/11 “truther”…
‘“clean your room and stand up straight” (which I can’t believe grown men are finding compelling, but whatever, it’s innocuous enough I guess)’
I’ve read people pointing out that these are men who couldn’t hear these kinds of messages from a woman (i.e. their mothers) but find them compelling when they hear them from a male authority figure.
Oh ICK – the Seattle Seahawks are local to me and the reason the city is plagued with flags and decals and posters and every form of image you can think of of –>12<--- for months of every year. I hate US football, I hate the Seahawks, and now I know to hate their coach.
I’m loving Alice Dreger’s explanation of how she dropped out of the article. (I think someone linked it in another thread, but I’m just reading it now.) It’s both funny and insightful:
I read the Dreger piece, and I don’t think she’s aware of the website, nor that she is listed on it. I get the impression she thinks Weiss chose the people to contact totally independently. Unless Weiss is the anonymous person who created the web site, that is not the case.