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On September 07 2017 17:03 Kickboxer wrote: Brett Weinstein (the guy who refused to walk off-campus for POC day) and Jordan Peterson (the guy half the internet thinks is a savant role model, and the other half considers an alt-righter) on Joe Rogan's podcast. + Show Spoiler +
Since this is not only highly insightful but also easy to consume, I think practically everyone should take a look. These two gentlemen (as well as Joe recently) have repeatedly been characterized as alt-right. Is there a sane-minded person in here who can justify such a characterization?
It's a 2.75 hr podcast. Could you provide me with some assistance, e.g. point out what exactly your point(s) in putting this forward amount to? I've been listening for a couple of minutes and it's multidirectual. Talking about the new testament's dietary requirements or verdicts like "we can't all be experts so we need guidelines", Dawkins and Harris, the wisdom principle has no connection to systemic discrimination we were talking about, not limited to, yesterday that I'm aware of. e: spoilered video
My point is these people are the opposite of the alt-right, which is how they are instead being labeled by a huge segment of the population engaging in political discourse.
My point is you can't know what someone is about without taking the honest time to see ... what they are about.
My point is this is a short video providing a lot of incredibly interesting information, so I don't really know how else to present my other points. Would you like memes instead?
On September 07 2017 17:31 Kickboxer wrote: I've seen people on this site call Peterson alt-right. More than once. It was instantly clear to me they've not taken more than 10 minutes to actually see what he's about. Also, Weinstein seems like the kindest person on planet Earth. Then, there's Joe who is simply a bona fide boss.
So I'm really looking for a level-headed analysis on how any of these three could become remotely associated with a fascist-leaning organization. It's like - either something is wrong with my perspective and a smarter person needs to point it out to me like to a child, or the world is legit going insane.
Well, I don't know anything about these people, nor do I even have a clear understanding of what "the alt-right" actually refers to, so I'm not your guy here.
I just think it's a complete waste of time to have this discussion if you dismiss anybody who disagrees with your position as not fitting your definition of "sane-minded", and the bolded part of the quote above does not reassure me that that isn't going to happen.
Now that I've pointed out this potential pitfall... carry on.
On September 07 2017 17:37 Kickboxer wrote: My point is these people are the opposite of the alt-right, which is how they are instead being labeled by a huge segment of the population engaging in political discourse.
My point is you can't know what someone is about without taking the honest time to see ... what they are about.
My point is this is a short video providing a lot of incredibly interesting information, so I don't really know how else to present my other points. Would you like memes instead?
Thank you and no thanks to the memes I just misunderstood the context in which you posted the video.
If people called Gandhi a Nazi and you were forced to somehow reason with them, you'd be able to understand what I'm talking about.
I don't see another way of engaging people in this particular discussion. The video is legit interesting, you can watch it or not, and provide a relevant answer / critique or not.
REPUBLICAN lawmakers have seen the Trump disaster coming for a while now. They simply have no clue what to do about it.
A couple of months ago — before we learned that Donald Trump Jr. wanted to spend quality time with people he believed represented the Russian government, before the president publicly humiliated his attorney general and was abandoned by top business executives, before he claimed “some very fine people” were marching in Charlottesville, Va., alongside neo-Nazis and white supremacists — a Republican member of Congress I spoke with called the president a “child king,” a “self-pitying fool.”
Even then, the words that came to mind when some congressional Republicans described the president were “incompetent” and “unfit.” There were concerns about his emotional stability. “There’s now a realization this isn’t going to change,” one top Republican aide on Capitol Hill said. Yet there is the simultaneous realization, as a House member told me when talking about Republicans in their home districts, that “we’re never going to have a majority of people against him.”
Maybe, but for now this presents Republican members of Congress who are privately alarmed by Mr. Trump with a predicament. Regardless of what he does, a vast majority of his core supporters are sticking with him. A recent Monmouth University poll found that of the 41 percent of Americans who currently approve of the job he’s doing, 61 percent said they cannot see Mr. Trump doing anything that would make them disapprove of him. Mr. Trump was on to something when he said in January 2016, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
The political problem facing Republicans is that Mr. Trump’s presidency is a wreck. His agenda is dead in the water. A special counsel is overseeing an investigation of his campaign. The West Wing is dysfunctional. And President Trump is deeply unpopular with most Americans.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll illustrates the dilemma Republican politicians face. It found that 28 percent of polled voters say they approved of Mr. Trump’s response to Charlottesville. But among Republican voters, the figure was 62 percent, while 72 percent of conservative Republicans approved.
The more offensive Mr. Trump is to the rest of America, the more popular he becomes with his core supporters. One policy example: At a recent rally in Phoenix, the president said he was willing to shut down the government over the question of funding for a border wall, which most of his base favors but only about a third of all Americans want.
Much of this mess is of the Republican Party’s own making. Let’s not forget that Mr. Trump’s political rise began with his promulgation of the racist conspiracy theory that President Obama was not a natural-born American citizen. The Trump presidency is the result of years of destructive mental habits and moral decay. So there’s no easy solution for responsible Republicans. But there is a step they have to take.
They need to accept, finally, the reality — evident from the moment he declared his candidacy — that Mr. Trump is unfit to govern. He will prove unable to salvage his presidency. As the failures pile up, he’ll act in an even more erratic fashion.
The mental hurdle Republicans have to clear is that in important respects the interests of the Republican Party and those of Donald Trump no longer align. The party has to highlight ways in which it can separate itself from the president.
So far the response of many Republican leaders to Mr. Trump’s offenses has been silence or at most veiled, timid criticism. The effect is to rile up Trump supporters and Mr. Trump himself without rallying opposition to him. It’s the worst of all worlds.
What’s required now is a comprehensive, consistent case by Republican leaders at the state and national levels that signals their opposition to the moral ugliness and intellectual incoherence of Mr. Trump. Rather than standing by the president, they should consider themselves liberated and offer a constructive, humane and appealing alternative to him. They need to think in terms of a shadow government during the Trump era, with the elevation of alternative leaders on a range of matters.
This approach involves risk and may not work. It will certainly provoke an angry response from the Breitbart-alt-right-talk-radio part of the party. So be it. Republicans who don’t share Mr. Trump’s approach have to hope that his imploding presidency has created an opening to offer a profoundly different vision of America, one that is based on opportunity, openness, mobility and inclusion.
This requires a new intellectual infrastructure to address what may prove to be one of the largest economic disruptions in history. People in positions of influence need to make arguments on behalf of principles and ideas that have for too long gone undefended. They must appeal to moral idealism. And the party needs leaders who will fight with as much passionate intensity for their cause as Mr. Trump fights for his — which is simply himself. There’s no shortcut to forging a separate Republican identity during the Trump presidency. Half-measures and fainthearted opposition are certain to fail.
If Republicans need more encouragement to break with Mr. Trump, they might note that the president, who has no institutional or party loyalty, is positioning himself as a critic not just of Democrats but also of Republicans. During his rally in Arizona, he went out of his way to attack both of that state’s Republican senators, including one battling brain cancer. He followed that up with tweets attacking the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and other Republican lawmakers.
A confrontation is inevitable. The alternative is to continue to further tie the fate and the reputation of the Republican Party to a president who seems destined for epic failure and whose words stir the hearts of white supremacists.
We are well past the point where equivocations are defensible, and we’re nearly past the point where a moral reconstitution is possible. The damage Mr. Trump has inflicted on the Republican Party is already enormous. If the party doesn’t make a clean break with him, it will be generational.
On September 07 2017 17:41 Kickboxer wrote: If people called Gandhi a Nazi and you were forced to somehow reason with them, you'd be able to understand what I'm talking about.
I don't see another way of engaging people in this particular discussion. The video is legit interesting, you can watch it or not, and provide a relevant answer / critique or not.
Petersons problem is that "the wrong people" made him one of their heroes. Just look at the Youtube-Comments or anywhere else where his stuff is discussed, big parts of his fanbase are plain disgusting.
I watched that podcasts a few days ago, it was good.
On September 07 2017 18:05 Velr wrote: Petersons problem is that "the wrong people" made him one of their heroes. Just look at the Youtube-Comments or anywhere else where his stuff is discussed, big parts of his fanbase are plain disgusting.
I watched that podcasts a few days ago, it was good.
That's definitely correct. A lot of alt-righters and 4chan trolls have taken him up as their hero though he's disavowed them on several occasions already. Most of what he's talking about with considerable authority, though, is diametrically opposed to fascism, he's basically a foremost expert on totalitarian systems and how they develop.
Another unfortunate thing he's done is associate himself with Molyneux who is personally strikes me as a feeble-minded bigot. But still, I'm completely gobsmacked how someone like him can be labeled alt-right which then gets repeated until it somehow becomes "fact". People like me look at people like that and see blubbering fools, and that's how we get divisions.
I think the issue here is multi-fold. Firstly, the alt-right is, as has been thoroughly debated in this thread, hard to define in a clear cut manner. To some, it's only the stormfront crowd, and defining Jordan Peterson as such is obviously completely unfair. To others, it's a bigger umbrella term that encompasses people who to various degrees subscribe to isolationism and nativism, anti-islamic immigration and anti-feminism. While I myself have not really bothered listening to long podcasts of Jordan Peterson (I think he's obviously a highly intelligent individual, but I also think he's pretty boring, and from what I have seen, not particularly insightful, especially when he departs from his actual field of expertise, psychology), I think it's fair to describe him as nativist and opposed to immigration from islamic countries, and I think he offers strong, hard to refute arguments relating to how some of the pro-feminism policies of western societies have not produced more 'gender-workplace-diversity', and that this is proof that differences in gender are more anchored in biology than a lot of leftists think is the case. I also remember reading some tweet of his I thought was really stupid about how immigration should be permitted on a percentage base by country determined by how in line with 'the values of western countries' the average member of said country is, but overall, I don't have a problem with Jordan Peterson.
More than anything though, I feel like he's the intellectual alibi of groups that certainly identify as the alt-right, even if he himself does not, and he ends up looking kinda guilty by association. This isn't really fair, but nevertheless, it is to be expected. If the people who quote Jordan Peterson virtually all share certain traits (opposition to immigration from islamic countries and feminist policies to name two), and all people from the alt right are opposed to immigration from islamic countries and feminist policies, and there happens to be quite some overlap, where the more intellectually able segments of the alt-right use Jordan Peterson as a source of authority, then it's not weird that Jordan Peterson ends up being associated with the alt-right, especially not when, from a cursory glance, he's so much part of that group that we don't actually feel like spending two hours educating ourselves on where he differs from them.
Anyway, I think another big issue, imo, is that you continue to use wide-ranging terms for large groups of people that ends up being very inaccurate in much the same way describing Jordan Peterson as part of the Alt-right is. You essentially start your 'invitation to a discussion' by stating that 'this is an insane opinion' and 'he has repeatedly been characterized as' (characterized as, by whom? 100000 out of the 300 million left-of-center people living in western europe and northern america?), that's not a great point of departure.
Imo, one central element to having a successful discussion on the internet (this is different from strict academic discussions) is to avoid a) broad characterizations of your would-be debate opponents, and b) using authority figures as proof of the point you are making. Firstly, 'the left' is an incredibly diverse group with opinions ranking all the way from Kwark (apparently, although I'm quite certain he'd be right of center in Norway, where our conservative party is totally reasonable) to Igne. Secondly, reiterate his argument with your own words rather than link him stating it, and you won't see the answers tainted by people's (often faulty) preconceptions of him. In addition, it's just not polite to ask us to invest far more into answering your question than you invested into asking it - and linking long youtube videos does just this. Not that they never have a place, but use them as supplements and give specific points of time in the video if he is articulating something in a way that you yourself don't feel able to.
Kickboxer there's a deeper problem with Peterson. I personally really like him, although he does talk and talk to the point where he loses his own point sometimes. He's a good guy, and explains centre right/conservative attitudes very eloquently
The problem is that he knows who he appeals to and that colours what he will say. He never says anything bad about Trump (like never) because its Trump supporters he's trying to get through to. This can lead to accusations about his political leanings even though he's a bog standard conservative really.
He also goes on podcasts with people who ARE associated with the alt right, which doesn't help really.
I'd like to see him talk to some left leaning intellectuals.
The first 2 minutes of this video are a good summary of where JP is coming from re: the current political climate: + Show Spoiler +
Ok fair take. I posted the video mostly because I want people to see it, since me and my friends who hold various beliefs all though it was very interesting - as well as his last appearance on Rogan. The self-authoring program is also amazing.
I'm curious, though, is being opposed to immigration from Islamic countries and things like building mosques in the West, and also being opposed to anything past early second wave feminism enough to be characterized as "alt-right" these days? Because those, to me at least, are perfectly reasonable positions to hold.
On September 07 2017 10:17 GreenHorizons wrote: Is it not weird that so many of the islands being hit are under European control/influence in the 21st century? Or is the imperialist nature of those relationships still supposed to be normal?
If your actually curious about this then research the situation around the Dutch Antilles. There was a lot of discussions and negotiations around their status in 2006, probably the most recent dependency discussion from former colonies in the world.
On September 07 2017 18:37 Kickboxer wrote: Ok fair take. I posted the video mostly because I want people to see it, since me and my friends who hold various beliefs all though it was very interesting - as well as his last appearance on Rogan. The self-authoring program is also amazing.
I'm curious, though, is being opposed to immigration from Islamic countries and things like building mosques in the West, and also being opposed to anything past early second wave feminism enough to be characterized as "alt-right" these days? Because those, to me at least, are perfectly reasonable positions to hold.
Would you mind sharing your views on women in society and whether there's an actual necessity of feminism in different countries right now? Bullet points would suffice.
It has been 20 years, that's 13 less than I live on this planet, that it has been acknowledged by the German parliament, that a husband forcing himself on his wife is an actual crime, is rape. In 1997. Before the law was this: "Whoever compels a woman to have extramarital intercourse with him, or with a third person, by force or the threat of present danger to life or limb, shall be punished by not less than two years’ imprisonment."
On September 07 2017 18:37 Kickboxer wrote: Ok fair take. I posted the video mostly because I want people to see it, since me and my friends who hold various beliefs all though it was very interesting - as well as his last appearance on Rogan. The self-authoring program is also amazing.
I'm curious, though, is being opposed to immigration from Islamic countries and things like building mosques in the West, and also being opposed to anything past early second wave feminism enough to be characterized as "alt-right" these days? Because those, to me at least, are perfectly reasonable positions to hold.
The point is that even if a lot of individuals from the left characterize a perfectly reasonable position as alt-right, that's ultimately pretty meaningless, because there are a lot of individuals with some loose association with a lot of different groups who post stuff they really don't have any clue about on the internet. It's best to try to ignore those individuals and focus on the ones who show that they have the understanding, will and capacity to engage in a productive discussion, rather than be upset or outraged by the inevitable realization that there are idiots everywhere.
I think it sucks that pro-immigration people (and I am most certainly in this group) describe anti-immigration people as nazis or white supremacists or whatever before delving into what the actual reasoning behind your position is. If you actually think the reason is that we should not mongrel up the white gene pool, then it's ends up being a more fair characteristic, but I don't actually think this is the primary motivator behind opposition to islamic immigration. But I also think it sucks when anti-immigration people make statements like 'they are trying to import more people who will vote for their failing policies' as a way of describing why pro-immigration politicians are pro-immigration. This problem exists on both sides and the best we can do, imo, is to avoid those discussion pitfalls.
On September 07 2017 18:56 Artisreal wrote: Would you mind sharing your views on women in society and whether there's an actual necessity of feminism in different countries right now? Bullet points would suffice.
And a simple, yet loaded, yes or no question:
Do you agree that there can't be rape in a marital relationship?
I think in the West, due to certain legal aspects particularly pertaining to marriage, and due to gaining relatively all the same rights as men have without losing any of the privileges they have historically held (which are many), women are currently in a slightly better position compared to men, overall. Provided they are at least moderately attractive, which is basically up to them.
I think ongoing feminism in the West is not only unnecessary but also counterproductive. As far as third and now fourth wave feminism, I consider these open misandry and very harmful to the relationship between the genders, and especially to the women themselves.
In Islamic countries and much of the second world, and all over the third world, I think feminism is absolutely critical. I find it very hard to understand why Western feminists, instead of picking an imaginary fight with white men at home, don't instead invest their political leverage and resources into helping their actually oppressed sisters, especially under Islam where acid revenge and honor killings are still a thing in 2017.
As for the loaded question, I think marriage is a stupid concept. Regardless, there can certainly be rape under any circumstances, as soon as there is explicit lack of consent. I also think many women manipulate their partners by withholding sex, or through false accusations, so the issue is a little more complicated. But still, I certainly do not agree with your Q.
I wholeheartedly agree that feminism is needed outside of Europe. But I disagree that it isn't here as well.
Please excuse me asking all the time, but I find it necessary to question your assertions. Also please excuse me that I'm assuming that you are a bloke.
Can you name a privilege that exlusively applies to women and has affected you or any acquaintance negatively? Can you think of an example of the opposite?
What do you think about the idea, that women know better what's good for them, than men? Why do you feel the need to tell women where their efforts are needed most? Do you feel that you have the authority or legitimacy to do so? If so, why?
Do you think that as long as a woman has good looks, she automatically has an advantage over a, equally handsome or less handsome, bloke? How did you come to this conclusion?
State how withholding sex is manipulation and not just behaviour according to one's desires. Why would men not go their own way and leave a partner that is manipulative?
Can you provide proof that false accusations are actually a wide-spread, systemic occurence? Basically a conspiration of women against men. The only thing I found was the false rape timeling from 1674 till now
Sorry, that's way too many questions and I need to work :p but long story short:
1) Female beauty is an incredibly powerful form of social capital. Using the dreaded 10 scale for the sake of argument, any woman above 7 will have men doing favors for them and basically can receive a multitude of free perks and advantageous positions simply in exchange for time and attention. It's a dangerous game, in some aspects, but it's absolutely true.
Being a handsome man, unless you're gay, carries none of those connotations, except for making it easier for you to get women. And even then, if your socioeconomic status is low, it's basically a non-factor. But there is no corresponding factor to the extreme attention and fawning a truly beautiful woman gets from all men, all the time.
2) whenever shit hits the fan, men need to do all the heavy work. Firemen, miners, waste cleaners, disaster relief, all the dangerous jobs are basically reserved for men. In the middle of the night, if there is a noise in the garden, who gets to go and see what's wrong?
3) now that genders are more or less equal on the career front, alimony is a trap that forces many men into a position of literal servitude. I personally have friends who can't stand their wives, but since they have children and they are the owners of their home (property), it is simply not feasible for them to seek divorce. It's a bizarre situation.
Can you name a privilege that exlusively applies to women and has affected you or any acquaintance negatively?
There's quite a few of them, and I want to be very clear that I don't think mentioning them implies that women are better off than men in general. It's just that for every male privilege, no matter how major, you will find an equal one. I'm not an MRA, I'm pretty sure either of the two genders is on pretty equal footing.
Just to name a couple that are major: women live longer, yet more money is spent on female health care (even if you completely take maternal care out of the equation). Men are the majority of CEOs, but they're also the majority of suicide "vicitims", homeless, prison population, combat fatalities, workplace accidents, workplace deaths, are virtually hopeless in custody battles, get higher sentences for the same crimes. Women do better in academia, make more money per hour (so much for the wage gap lie) and the empathy-gap is actually larger than most people realize.
Now, what's so cancerous about feminism is that they take all of these disadvantages men have and pretend those are actually signs of FEMALE oppression. Now that's fucked up.
Again, I would never claim men are worse off than women in general, I'm just saying that either gender has major advantages over the other and it's not a clear cut case of either being discriminated against.
EPT
I just misunderstood the context in which you posted the video.
