Y’know, there’s another thread over here about how people are upset you can’t say “Nigger” anymore.
(Very few points for guessing that that thread was started by local incel and shitstain Blalron.)
And there was this little insight in there:
Carl, as someone who has made his personal brand and indeed his career on being a reactionary and punching down at any nut he can pick, is not someone who we can rely on to shout racial slurs in a reasonable manner. Even if the context is “making fun of nazis by comparing them to people they hate”. Actually, come to think of it, that’s a really shitty context no matter how you spin it. “You are acting like a nigger” is still a really shitty thing to say in that context. Sargon continues to be an incredibly shitty person, and the fact that he’s being deplatformed is not something anyone reasonable should lose sleep over.
Speaking of which here is left-libertarian Dave Rubin praising famed leftist Bolsonaro for pushing “SJW things” out of schools and opposing “marxism”. No word on whether the deforestation campaign is a good idea.
He’s not anti-transgender at all. He takes a “let people do what they want if it’s not hurting other people” approach, except when it comes to a biological man who becomes a woman and then destroys women in MMA fights, or any biological man who competes against women and destroys them. That… seems pretty reasonable. Biological males have biological advantages in physical competition.
I have never heard of him saying autism or ADHD were fake, so I looked up the video. Looks like a single clip, which I guess people can make up their own mind about. Sounds like he’s mostly questioning the possibility of over-diagnosis to me, particularly ADHD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1_JNLXZ7-A. He’s also had people on, including very recently, talking about autism solutions.
He pushes back on people plenty of times, including right-wing Steven crowder on marijuana legalization, and right-wing Candace Owens on climate change.
He’s actually a pretty reasonable guy. Maybe I don’t agree with him on everything, maybe I think he’s 100% spot on on some issues, but just because I don’t agree with him about everything, that doesn’t make him “part of the problem”.
And, just asking: is it necessary for so many posters to write out the ‘n’ word? I don’t approve of it’s use in any context, and do not see the necessity of repeating it.
Now, one only needs to go down the web page to find the quote and also: drop to close to end to see the cites, you would had seen that for [33][34][35] Rubin does call the New York Times, CNN, the BBC and USA Today “fake news” so for starters: it was not an editorial source, the source was Dave Rubin himself falling or spreading the manufactured right wing conspiracy of calling other media (including the BBC) fake news.
As for the Alex Jones reference, You Tube banned the ass of Jones so there is no longer a link to the “cult of the left” that had Dave Rubin showing how silly is to see him as center left guy. He is like what I pointed before, (and like many of the Dark Web guys) former left leaning guys or intellectual light ones that fall for Conspiracy Central. Falling for Conspiracy sources that are making conspiracies geared to undermine progressives, leftists, Democrats etc.
First, that is rich coming from a guy that told us that skimmed what a dark web guy was spewing. And then it is clear that I noted that one of the sources was Dave Rubin himself. Not my problem that you are telling all that you can not even identify the horse’s mouth.
So I (pretty much) stopped reading Alexander a couple-three years ago because of his weird rightward drift, but used to really enjoy his early non-fiction blogging. I’d call him not alt-right, but “neoreaction-curious,” if you get my drift. He’s an interesting figure, and the rationalwiki article covers some of his more problematic beliefs.
Neoreaction was/is a more sophisticated precursor of alt-right thought – to grossly overgeneralize. Alexander did an "anti-FAQ" on NrX here. It was a fairly harsh critique, but he was so fair and fact-focused that lots of kooky rightists ended up digging it and becoming online friends of his, either in his comment section, on his sub-reddit, or on their own blogs. He took their ideas seriously. For instance, if someone claimed to prove [insert scientific racist hypothesis], Alexander would … look at the evidence they present, not dismiss them outright. This is much nicer than the average non-mouth-breathing normal person treats them. So his community started swarming with anarcho-capitalists, trad Catholic/Orthodox monarchists, LDS converts, climate change deniers with engineering degrees, Steve Sailer, etc., etc. (This had the side effect of driving all but the most patient left-of-center types away from his community some time ago.)
Another angle: Alexander also has an issue with SJW types (sorry to use that term, but it’s handy shorthand). He has said that this is rooted in some early negative experience. (I don’t know what the mean feminists did to him all those years ago – wedgies?) Anyway, he does this big show of tip-toeing around “tribal” or “culture war” issues like an abused housepet, tagging some posts things I will regret writing and banning “culture war” topics on some threads – not because he disapproves of discussions of edgy far-right ideas but because he doesn’t want to attract too much negative attention. (One of those edgy posts is, indeed, on the IDW, and is typically not-unsympathetic.) It’s a meeker and cringier cousin of the “triggered now libs?!” schtick.
Oh, and one more way he’s right-adjacent: Alexander was, and I assume still is, some kind of transhumanist/singularitarian. He believes that a god-level AI is very likely to be built in the fairly near future, and that humanity’s top priority should be surviving as a species until we all get uploaded into its loving arms/revived from our cryogenic slumbers. Seriously. So if a democratic welfare state is going to be less survival-focused than an an-cap theocratic ethno-state where we create genius CRISPR-kids (or whatever), Alexander is at least willing to muse about whether the latter might be a better choice than boring old democracy with its SJW mobs and street crime and stuff, where incels don’t get to have girlfriends. (In this way, he’s a bit analogous to the pre-tribulation rapture believers who don’t care about the environment.)
Of what little I know of him, Scott Alexander does have detailed annual readership surveys on his site. Taking a glance at the comments on last year’s, it seems around two-thirds of readers are left-leaning; however those folks are apparently not the majority of regular community participants.
I have seen the OP link to Alexander’s blog before, so maybe I’ll let him handle, if he wants, the post above that is informative and also marinating in bias. (An incel mention apropos of nothing more than the singularity???)
Okay. When I called you on your strawman before, that wasn’t an invitation to make more. I never once said that he was “part of the problem” because I disagreed with him. He’s part of the problem because he promotes the IDW people and their ideas.
I literally just went to his Twitter when I posted that, and he is openly supporting Jordan Peterson’s cries of censorship. He promotes Andrew Shulz defending Louis CK for going after the Parkland students. He promotes this guy named Jonathan Heigt, who pushes the canard about fighting bigotry being limiting freedom of speech.
You can pick any of the IDWs and see them on his program, spewing their lies without any push back. Just now, I ran into one about Caitlyn Jenner where Crowder called her a man and Joe’s response is to make jokes about being triggered.
You can sit here and lie to my face all you want, but this guy would not be linked to this IDW group if not for his constant actions that show he is a part of it.
Since we are a board about fighting ignorance, not perpetuating, we don’t like this bullshit. If someone spews nonsense, you don’t give them a platform to spew their ideas without challenge. You debunk them. Without them even there, because science and facts are not a fucking debate where you need people fighting back. Just cite the fucking sources.
And, well, he himself appears to claim the IDW label along with the others. If he’s so at odds with them, being the one guy who goes against their garbage, why does he consider himself one of them?
Finally, I believe Rational Wiki over your claims. I pulled the stuff you argued with from there. The way you argue has not led me to believe you are particularly honest. And you act very much like an IDW followers, isolating the one guy you think you can make palatable.
I’ve cooled on Alexander significantly over the past year, mostly because I noticed a lot of the same dynamics at play with him that I noticed with Harris. Specifically, it’s really fucking weird when you’ve got this liberal free-thinker who supports a lot of leftist policies and is thoroughly reasonable… And the comments section is full of terrible garbage people. Like, if the blog in question regularly publishes deep dives into the evidence on certain subjects, what the hell is going on when they do a deep-dive into environmentalism and the comments section is full of garden-variety global warming denialists? It’s a pretty accurate take (although, let’s be clear - his anti-feminist writing is some of the best and clearest I have ever seen). I certainly doubt he’s a cryptofascist or any shit like that, but he does give certain really bad ideas far more airtime than he should.
As I stated, his assessment of media sources tells us nothing about his placement on a political spectrum. Political ideology has to do with beliefs about the role of the state in society. If you listen to his opinions, he’s center left.
Your insistence on placing him based on his assessment of private’s organizations makes about as much sense as placing him on the spectrum based on whether he prefers a PC to a Mac.
Now we have to add reading comprehension to your many faults, read it again, I mentioned already that many of the ones from the Dark Web do follow issues that are supported by people that are left leaning, but fall for disinformers that want to add weaponized wedge issues. My point is also that conspiracy minded folks can be intelligent in their field of research or left leaning, but fall for many conspiracies that are propped up by groups with lots of time and money for the purposes of preventing change, like in the case of telling us to not control emissions to prevent further climate change.
I go for Linux, so on even that you demonstrate what an ignoramus you are.
Better to be there than in the bat-shit insane one.
In a nutshell, he talks about the representation of entwined snakes in ancient art meant those people had knowledge of the structure of DNA, in some instances gained by “tripping” on natural plants (insert Big Pharma conspiracy here). Because this double helix motif is found everywhere, Peterson says he believes these are representations of DNA. When challenged about that, he backs off and says he “suspects”.
The video maker points out that ancient people on every inhabited continent would have had occasion to have seen two snakes fucking in nature.