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Don't know if it was in this Jrod thread or the other one, but I finally got around to listening to the group podcasts Paragon has on Youtube -- the one on libertarianism and the other on Bitcoin. They were super interesting. It was actually the first time I had ever heard Ludwig von Mises described in context.
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Feb 1, 2016 07:22
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Oh man, Stossel. I remember him for starting up a "Stossel in the Classroom" series about economics for high school students. The very thought of it gave me chills, but I can't really stomach more than a few minutes of the videos there are -- the one that has the highest search return is just one that rants about how stupid millennials are for not liking capitalism enough. Not the best way to make a first impression on students by not-so-subtlety implying them to be idiots, but there is still a nonzero chance that this form of libertarianism will continue to at least one new generation. I asked about Stossel in the Classroom in the Right Wing Media thread ages ago, but nobody knew about it back then. I can't help but feel like it is going to indirectly cause plenty of problems sometime in the future... especially if "economics education" remains so one-sided as it is with libertarian thought.
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May 18, 2016 19:24
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Under normal circumstances, I think the effect of continued automation on the workforce and its effect on the cohesion of society is a thing that needs to be examined closely or else it will result in amplifying the effects of economic inequality. But in the case of Jrod's automation, I will happily make an exception.
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Nov 20, 2016 03:23
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One of my favourite critics of libertarianism is Karl Polanyi. He was a contemporary of Von Mises back when libertarianism was still a European thing. He was one of the first to come up with most of the retorts and responses to a lot of common libertarian talking points. (Rather poetically, the "stark Utopianism" of the lassiez-faire.) Sadly, Polanyi was very much a communal socialist, so you have to already be leaning in that direction in order to view his arguments as legitimate. His work is also very terribly aged due to how long ago it was written. Even I only got into it through radio programs talking about him before even trying to read the very-difficult-to-find books by him. While good, he is not the most helpful in convincing others away from market fundamentalism.
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Dec 28, 2017 18:34
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Discendo Vox posted:See, that's what I don't get. A hiring and promotion process that irregular, I promise with sufficient scrutiny it'd be possible to find an irregularity that would let you unwind it. While I am not necessarily against the idea of that, I doubt you'd find much. I don't say that because of some conceit that he was ever an actually good academic -- that ship has sailed ever since he threatened to hand over every liberal arts and humanities professor he worked with to his personal lynch mob -- but rather because of the kind of person he used to be. Everything we understand about Peterson follows after the incident in which he manufactured transphobia in order to gain partisan ascent within the Canadian right-wing press of the National Post (via Christie Blatchford) and later through The Rebel (via Ezra Levant). I used to follow Peterson rather closely before that time, when he was still a relative unknown. Back then it was never clear what exactly his own political beliefs were. I was only able to figure out he was "a conservative" after a long time of listening to and reading his stuff. Because he wasn't a partisan figure at this time, he was still willing to work with objective facts, even if he may have found them personally disagreeable. I remember a few times when he was the only one still speaking sympathetically about disadvantaged millennials around the time in which it was still fashionable in the media to disparage them. Every time he was asked if there was something mentally wrong about the supposed over-coddled generation who were refusing to grow up and start families, he would flatly respond with economic data about housing prices and the lingering effects of the Great Recession. (At the time, he was essentially the only one in the local media, no less the mainstream, who was doing so without being painted with hyperbole.) He used to do nice, little things like that all the time; even if doing so lost him the cred he obviously wanted from other conservatives. I thought it was cool, and actually looked to him quite a bit. That was back when I wanted to truly believe that, in the supposedly grand culture war between liberal and conservative thought, the other side would was not made of reprehensible monsters who were out to figuratively and literally slit my throat. That maybe, just maybe, the differences in thought were actually were running to some equilibrium point where one side could help make up the weaknesses of the other, and vice versa. I used Peterson as that "needed, alternate perspective" in that process. I suppose others must have too. But appearances can be deceiving. Given what we know of him now following his partisan ascension, it is clear that I was gravely naive to trust him. It is important to understand both why-and-how were duped as such. While that "conservative-whisperer" might have been how most saw it, it certainly wasn't how Peterson himself considered it. Those "little, nice things" were not done out of the kindness of his heart, but instead out of material necessity. In his Darwinian and hierarchical view of the world, he probably always viewed younger persons as utterly deserving of any contempt they would receive; a kind of authoritarian prime directive where all life must "earn" the right to continued existence, completely without regard for how hierarchies exist where actually "earning" that right is rendered effectively impossible. However, his personal views would've been put into conflict with the actual complexities of the world. He might have became a professor to secure his place as a much-vaunted male authority figure, but doing so required him to be constant -- and outnumbered -- contact with people his authoritarian thought demanded be forever unworthy. This meant actually acting upon his authoritarian impulses would've always put him at a disadvantage. So when he used to say that he totally understood how economic forces were pushing young people towards socialism, because they were demanded to perform a lot of very hard and stressful labour as part of their forced inclusion in the education system, without the necessary renumeration to support themselves independently, causing them to correctly deduce that the larger capitalist system had no place for them -- he didn't actually believe a single word of any one thing he had just said. There was never any actual sympathy or understanding for the plight of post-great-recession young people in him, even as an intellectual deduction; he was just making conversation in a way that wouldn't make awkward his ability to do a job which required him to be in the presence of economically disadvantaged young adults. Sophistry, thus, was the authoritarian salve to the imagined tyranny of so-called political correctness. The moment partisan ascent arrived, all of those little niceties were the first thing out of the window. It was no longer required of him to do them, so he stopped. He even went so far as purposefully make parody of some of his older arguments. (His one post-ascent video in which he goaded anti-muslim bigotry was very much at odds with the multiple pre-ascent times in which he sided with an imam on a few local broadcasts in order to clear up common misconceptions about Islam.) If you've observed this change, as I have, it's easy to deduce that actual truth never really mattered to him. He was just saying whatever pleased the crowd -- he just has a new crowd now, a crowd he obviously likes much better. It's for that reason why I don't think his earlier work will reveal any structural flaws which will demand the withdrawal of his tenure. Even at that time, he was an actor playing the part of a psychology professor, and he would've played that part well enough to pass performance. And he did, as the choice to go partisan was a choice he made himself, and not because any scientific falsifications were about to be uncovered. The majority of his earlier work regarding the psychologies of ancient mythologies is the type of stuff that isn't easily falsifiable, and his open reliance of biotruth-based pseudoscience regarding gender only picked up as time went on and he started to get more adventurous in being his "real" self, if indeed it is. Everything only reveals itself as sophistry with the gift of retrospect. I suppose it's possible I could be wrong and there would be a smoking gun somewhere in there. I only feel it necessary to explain this because I used to like him back before poo poo hit the fan and I've been particularly wounded by his fascist turn; but it is still important to understand how he was able to operate under the radar for so long. I had my own personal doubts about his theories, and silent troubles with them led me to wonder if many of them weren't an intellectual dead-end, but those were things I had to reconcile with what -- at the time -- seemed like obvious benefits. Religious school for elementary and secondary is weirdly common in Ontario, but due to various agreements as part of their operation, only the religious studies classes were designed by those school boards; literally every other subject matter was lifted wholesale from the public system -- including science, even with evolutionary biology as part of that package. This meant that, unlike in the US where religious schools are often unaccredited, graduates of religious schools in Canada were still able to enter secular university and college without trouble. However, the religious curriculum they came up with only ever served their own propagandistic purposes, leaving a lot of students with an anemic understanding of their own religious texts. The reason Peterson was able to "hook in" a lot of undergraduate students was because of this, as he would've been the very first person in their entire lives who could give an explanation of the first few chapters of Genesis that actually made a single degree of sense, unlike the Biblical literalism's "this nonsense happened, 100% true, no questions asked, keep your filthy questions to yourself" that they had gotten. Peterson's opening act was to give them a comprehensible answer to a question which had plagued them for their entire lives due to some weird quirks of the religious education system in this one specific part of the world. Following that, it would've only been natural to want to hear more; even if what was to follow was going to have some... problems. My own experience with Peterson is, in a way, not dissimilar to my experience libertarianism earlier on. When you start off, there is always this one topic, such as the economy or a particularly difficult sacred text, that you obviously understand is important to the way the world works. You don't understand it very well yet, but you can tell it is a thing you should be a little bit more concerned with because a lot of people you know acknowledge it and make mention of it from time to time. But it's also very daunting, and your immediate impulse is to just write it off as a thing for other people to deal with since you don't see a good way in to it. Eventually, some guy comes around and explains it in a way which seems simple enough that a teenage you can understand it perfectly well. "It's the invisible hand of the marketplace allocating resources!" or "It's a way of describing the realization of consciousness, and it's described in this way because of repressed evolutionary memory!" And it all seems well and good. Maybe you leave it there, and go on to the other things out there that interested you personally much more, and keep that simplified explanation in the back of your head to the point where you eventually forget where it came from and it just becomes a fact about the world. Though if you're particularly inquisitive sort -- an unfortunate quality -- you eventually want to know more about it. You dive in and eventually discover that the supposedly-simple thing has a few issues with it; issues that imply some... rather not too happy things. Things that, if followed through to their logical conclusion, leads to a worldly system which disenfranchises a great many people, perhaps even yourself included. This can't be right. You wonder if you're missing something. Surely something this common and widely accepted can't have this many underlying problems with it. You try to ask the nice-sounding expert who obviously seems to have a better handle on this of it is really like that. You expect an answer which would be equally as straightforward as the original concept, but you don't get one. The expert just gives you the runaround. You're not really satisfied. You begin to wonder if all those things about you saw as problems, the other guy thought were were actually good things. Surely it can't be that. In the Just World that the original precept implied, everything should turn out for the better just naturally, including this, right? ... but eventually, one way or another, you somehow end up with a knife in your back.
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May 31, 2018 02:23
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Caros posted:Sir, this is an arby's drive through. Sorry. It's just funny to me that when a new JRod shows up, they've traded out Libertarianism for whatever the hell Jordypete is about. I suppose it would be easy to say it was all a Prester-Jane-style "outer narrative" and such, but it is at least interesting in how alike the two subjects are in how they are experienced, even if they're supposed to be entire fields apart. They both claim to be about something which is an intractable -- but obscure -- part of the social makeup; they both make grand scientific claims while taking steps to make sure that nothing they say can be falsified or actually put to the test; they both present themselves as made up of simple ideas which only remain true so long as you don't investigate them further because they fall apart at higher levels of analysis; they both only provide the guise of continued debate by strawmanning to imagined opponents, while actual contact to actual opponents (or even just curious inquiries) are structurally kept at bay; they both provide plausible cover for all manner of egotistic bigotries and seem to be only promoted such that otherwise selfish and unacceptable things could be crammed in under anyone's radar; they both do a lot of things in the exact same way. Even the way they set people up only to betray them later is similar enough. The whole thing has a sense of déjŕ vu about it. Anyway, uh, I'll have some curly fries, I guess? You still have those? Morroque fucked around with this message at 05:05 on May 31, 2018 |
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May 31, 2018 04:52
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RealTalk posted:Okay, this was more of a discussion that I had hoped to provoke when I mentioned Jordan Peterson's name. You heard it here, folks: he hoped to provoke. Morroque fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Jun 2, 2018 |
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Jun 2, 2018 05:20
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QuarkJets posted:It's not the left that hates him, it's anyone with a common sense of decency or a repulsion from metaphysical garbage. Coincidentally, the altright has largely attracted the opposite of the decent and the intelligent Metaphysical garbage is one thing; extremely physical garbage is another. Ol' Jordy only really turned persona-non-grata as far as the academy goes when he started threatening to doxx his coworkers with his newfound boytoys. A lot of people were perfectly willing to still consider him an intellectual equal until that point, in which he crossed a very serious line. Debate clubs only work as debate clubs if you've been assured that your opponent won't pull a gun on you halfway through your argument; he pulled that gun, freaked everyone out, and then had the gall to claim he won by default because everyone else fled the stage. (And then had his cheerleaders cry censorship when the rest of the debate club didn't want him to ever come back.) It's why Žižek, who is definitely more of a deranged right-winger than Jord will ever be, is still able to operate in this sphere; because Žižek doesn't need to threaten anyone's personhood in order to get his points across. I might be romanticizing it a little, as I'm nothing more than an untethered scholar who can only look at it through the shop window, but the purpose of a university -- especially a Canadian one, which he was from -- is to build up and maintain a common set of knowledge in both science and culture, in order for it to be of benefit to everyone in society at large. If it manages to remain true to that ideal or not is a struggle which it will never be exempt from, but it is what the institution was designed to do; including the way it awards titles and doctorates to those who have sufficiently proven their trustworthiness in that cause. (Even as it inspires mountains of Quit Lit in the process.) From engineers and doctors, to sociologists and literary critics, all of the professors who attain that rank then have their part to contribute, and each contribution is of value to that grand opus. Every new innovation rests on the shoulders of the giants who came before us, carved out from the hard work they did, lighting our path forward. Therefore, everything that happens must happen in relation to that grand opus. This was something he forgot. He could've threatened his coworker's theories as he liked, but when those threats stopped being directed at the theories and started being directed at individual people, he betrayed the purpose of his tenure. (As possibly ill-gotten as it was.) He betrayed the purpose of the university, and now all of his previous contributions have been marred by it. And that has effects on things. I used to have this idea for a particular paper about critical pedagogy -- about the concept of "pedagogical masking" in particular. Something Ol' Jordy once said in a random impromptu actually provided as missing piece of the puzzle necessary to complete the argument -- an argument I had to run far outside of my own comfort zones to even research in the first place. But it's too bad, because now, even if I know the answer, I still can't write it. Why? Because if I did, I would have to include one hell of a footnote to justify why a key component of the argument relies on the word of a known sophist like Jord. Y'know, perhaps I'm wrong about this, (it wouldn't actually surprise me if I'm wrong because libertarians always surprise) but at least the original libertarians, like Von Mises or whoever, actually worked in their own fields and didn't make any pretensions otherwise. The ulterior-motives and outer-narrative bullshit all came after when other parties sought to adapt it to their own purposes, like when libertarianism moved from Austria to the Southern US. That's something libertarians might even have over Ol' Jord's faux-traditionalism. Sure, they got sophistry in spades, but at least you could claim they didn't make it first-hand.
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Jun 2, 2018 09:08
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I was a latecomer to this thread, so this is probably the first time I'm seeing the real-time version of a libert publicly self-flagellating for some unknown purpose, be it the actual Jrod or not. It's quite the sight to behold. It's really impressive how you're able to keep at it, Caros. If I did what you did, after a while I would just lose heart.
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Jun 2, 2018 18:54
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Oh my goodness, that really was Jrod. I just thought it was an off-brand generic, but no, it really was Jrod who quoted my entire post and asked me to explain the thing which the post already explained. Should I feel blessed? ... or should I start ingesting iodine pills to counteract the radiation? We really need the government to mandate putting warning signs on Jrod and Jrod-related substances, otherwise you get malicious market actors trying to repackage Jrod and pass him off as something else. How on earth can consumers possibly make the best rational choices in their decisions if the only available information was the product of lies? Yes, yes, I know Jrod would insist that is not a bug, but a feature.
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Jun 3, 2018 18:37
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I first recall CSPAM appearing because of a weird time in which a lot of different countries had elections going on near the same time, by random chance. A lot of the DD election threads were moved there. At the time, it included the Canpol thread, and I wondered for a few days where it went. Once all the elections passed, CSPAM became what it is now.
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Oct 27, 2019 10:31
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In fairness, if I met someone who did describe themselves as a neoliberal, I'd be incredibly creeped out by it.
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May 13, 2022 07:17
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Fear of mental health is actually rather strange and something I've been curious about for some time now. Someone can have what might be observably and verifiably a disorder as found in the DSM; however, there are edge cases such that this person may genuinely believe -- or at least be under the very strong impression that -- this disorder is of benefit to them in some way and it would hurt them to be deprived of it. Statistically speaking, they are nearly always mistaken, but it does still happen. It's called the Oldest Story In Psychiatry whenever someone in the manic phase of Bipolar Disorder will seek out any possible excuse to avoid taking their medication. Perhaps the most worrying example is the Dark Triad, who are overrepresented in both criminal activity and positions of leadership in the business world. Their disorders are terrible for everyone around them, but are beneficial to themselves as individuals. A lack of empathy for others does indeed give them an edge in these worlds, if only temporarily enough to get ahead. They would likely need to justify these impulses somehow, and coincidentally, libertarian-style thought does gel neatly with that. It is a mode of thinking that seems nice, precisely until the moment when one realizes its utterly psychopathic qualities; and those have to be of genuine use to someone for libertarianism to be as wide-spread as it is. ... but for the sake of this example, fear of "mental hygenine" might also be an older form of this dynamic that may predate libertarianism's more modern form. (Perhaps not for the older variants.) People who have had the unfortunate experience of having known-or-suspected a psychopath/scoicopath or narcissist in their families are keenly aware of the absolute damage they can cause. I'm aware there is a small movement in the mid-size business world to begin screening procedures to keep the Dark Triad out of leadership positions, especially since those business can't really withstand the eventual repercussions like a large business could. (If this is a form of discrimination or not is going to end up being a serious question one of these days.) The disordered must be aware that any diagnosis would be a kiss-of-death towards them being able to operate effectively, ergo they would need to seek out justifications to protect their interests. Attempts at discrediting the very idea of "mental health" would work towards that. Even a cursory glance at the history of Scientology would reveal it as a giant scam perpetuated by a triadic to enrich himself, so it makes a degree of sense that it wouldn't have a kind opinion of actual psychology. Its almost a stereotype that most cults and other high-pressure groups tend to have a narcissist as their beating heart, but having a doctrinal stance against psychiatry does tend to give the game away here.
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Feb 22, 2024 16:00
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