Hi, if we discuss this in your other thread, will you stay out of this one?
I can understand why you’d want to clear an anti-IDW thread of anyone who might defend some members of the IDW. But why would I want to help you with that?
No, it’s really just you. Dacien, come back baby, all is forgiven.
He fits what I noted, the DW guys do fall for reactionary ideas (and conspiracy ones too) and they are in the process of starting a new right wing that, while less crazy than the current right wing in power, it has its own failings. As noted, that some do confuse a developing center-right position as continuing to be center left or leftist is what people like you do miss.
So imagine for a moment you’re a 16-year-old kid. And you do something dumb with your friends in a public space. Imagine, then, that Harvard discovers this dumb thing between accepting you and enrolling you, and rescinds your invitation on account of that. That’s unfortunate for you, right? Kind of unfortunate, but hey, sometimes, you do shitty things, and face consequences for those shitty things. Maybe you don’t get into the school of your choice because of that shitty thing you did as a kid. Whatever, life goes on.
Unless you’re a conservative.
And unless the shitty thing you did was “shout the N-word”.
In that case, you get famed “Intellectual Dark Web” titan Ben Shapiro saying that “Our universities may be irrevocably broken” and that not saying the N-word is an “impossible standard” that nobody can meet.
There’s a discussion to be had about forgiveness, repentance, and all that jazz. Hell, the kid’s own tweets seem thoughtful and reasonable.
But here’s the thing. People get denied their first choice of school for all kinds of reasons. Harvard enrolls maybe a few thousand people per year. It accepts less than one in twenty applications. Being denied access to Harvard is not some gigantic blow to your life. It’s more like… say… not being given a seat on the supreme court.
But no, let’s have another stupid bullshit news story about how, because a conservative was not granted a position of massive privilege and status, someone’s getting persecuted. That aforementioned discussion cannot reasonably be had at this level. This may be the most petty thing I’ve seen conservatives get pissy about, and that’s really saying something.
Right-wing grift is the easiest thing in the world to do.
I’m fine with Harvard rescinding, but assuming the kid’s tweets are honest (and no reason to think otherwise), he’s a bit screwed because of how late the rescission came - this is very late to get into another school, particularly one that doesn’t advertise on TV for students.
He wasn’t planning on attending until 2020. That’s too short of notice?
He wanted to be a public figure by speaking at NRA conventions and doing Fox News interviews? Well the first lesson about being a public figure is that people usually record what you have to say, and they’re usually more interested in what you have to say than people who are less public.
Harvard has a right to protect its image as a place that values inclusiveness and ethnic tolerance, and the words of Kyle Kashuv seem to be antithetical to these principles. Tough break, kid. Oh well, maybe he can get in to Liberty University.
Missed that, thanks for pointing it out.
Glenn Greenwald is prone to some accelerationist excesses from time to time. But he is a good reminder that Trump-era tribalism has driven much of the left unconsciously into the arms of right-authoritarians. Gonna repost this quote right here:
All of this is true. Had someone told us, in 2002 as Mueller was rounding up Muslims on behalf of George Bush, that one day Mueller would be hailed as the last check against an authoritarian president, we’d have branded that person crazy. Yet for 2 years we hoped he’d be the savior who would take Trump down. And 2 years later, he turned out to be just another Bush-appointed balls-and-strikes lackey who let his golfing buddy boss bury 2 years of investigation while punting the tough political calculation over to a Democratic-controlled House. It’s not crazy to observe that nobody is upholding the rule of law, unless we redefine the rule of law as an administrative cabal of white conservative property-owners watching each other’s backs.
It literally played out in front of us, in realtime, while we were attentively anticipating the outcome. Mueller did not deliver the anticipated reckoning. Congress is failing to deliver any real reckoning. Whatever excesses Greenwald is guilty of, he got this right, and it’s a mistake to dismiss him because of the enemy-of-my-enemy tribalism that determines his audience.
All of this may well be true, but it doesn’t make this any less funny. Because it’s not funny. It’s disgusting and saddening. Going on Tucker Carlson’s show to attack “the media” is like going on a public health campaign with Andrew Wakefield, or, more accurately, going on a public health campaign with Pestilence. The man isn’t “prone to some accelerationist excesses”, he pals around with white supremacists and is far more eager to call out the democrats for minor excesses in misguided, stupid ways than to call out white nationalists for being white nationalists or fascists for being fascists. The idea that he can talk about anyone “driving the left into the arms of right-authoritarians” is kind of hilarious, in a sick way.
(FWIW I think the argument is both entirely too simple and kind of wrongheaded. Why yes, Brennan, Muller, and co have done shitty things. That doesn’t mean we can or should disregard when they do the right thing, nor that we should disregard them as sources of information, particularly when what they’re saying can be backed up by others. And if they are the main people in a position to say something, or in a position to do something about the Trump administration… Well, I’d rather it be someone else, but at this point I’ll take what I can get.)
Update: also, he talks about making a Counterstrike: Global Offensive map of Douglas High to “practice”, to which one of his classmates responds with “KILL ALL THE FUCKING JEWS, KILL THE JEWS, HITLER DID NOTHING WRONG”.
Dude… Forget Harvard for a moment. that’s the kind of shit that gets you expelled from public school and stuck with felony charges.
But apparently it’s the inquisition because this kid lost his place in harvard over comments that would get most kids kicked out of school.
Again, I find it hard to sympathize with the kind of chucklefucks that would endorse this shit. Like, in the “I don’t feel general human empathy towards them and see them more as aliens wearing human flesh suits” sense.
Ben Shapiro is a super right wing dickhead. I’m not sure why anyone is lumping him into the “IDW”, unless it’s just to indirectly try to discredit the center-left truth-tellers also classified under that general label, like Sam Harris, Sarah Haider, Coleman Hughes, and Steven Pinker.
Because he’s one of the people listed prominently in the article that canonized the “Intellectual Dark Web”.
The closest thing to a phone book for the I.D.W. is a sleek website that lists the dramatis personae of the network, including Mr. Harris; Mr. Weinstein and his brother and sister-in-law, the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers. But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.
[…]
“You have to understand that the I.D.W. emerged as a response to a world where perfectly reasonable intellectuals were being regularly mislabeled by activists, institutions and mainstream journalists with every career-ending epithet from ‘Islamophobe’ to ‘Nazi,’” Eric Weinstein said. “Once I.D.W. folks saw that people like Ben Shapiro were generally smart, highly informed and often princely in difficult conversations, it’s more understandable that occasionally a few frogs got kissed here and there as some I.D.W. members went in search of other maligned princes.”
(Coincidentally not on that list: Sarah Haider, Coleman Hughes, and Steven Pinker.)
And uh… not to put it too finely, but Ben Shapiro wasn’t somehow better a year ago. He didn’t spontaneously go from “garbage fire” to “even worse garbage fire”. He was this awful when Bari Weiss profiled him a year ago. The IDW has always been a place for incredibly shitty people to congregate and share incredibly shitty ideas. Otherwise, Ben Shapiro wouldn’t be a member. And neither would Jordan Peterson, come to think of it. Or Douglas Murray. And boy, Sam Harris has been looking pretty shitty of late too, between his spirited defense of Carl “help the media is lying about me by quoting my exact words” Benjamin and this fucking bizarro tweet.
Come to think of it, is there anyone in the IDW whose intellectual esteem hasn’t fucking cratered recently?
Stupid question - when you’re proud to associate with people like Peterson and Shapiro, it’s proof that you’re not smart or wise, and people will notice. When you keep having to think your way into pretzels to defend the idiotic positions people like Peterson and Shapiro take, people notice. When your entire identity is focused upon how the “SJWs” and “IdPols” are out to get you, and how you’re so silenced that you have a massively influential podcast and columns dedicated to you in the NYTimes, people tend to notice.
Speaking of Bari Weiss, how has this stalwart defender of campus free speech been doing?
One example of this involves progressive Jewish political cartoonist Eli Valley’s recent trip to Stanford University. Days before his scheduled appearance, the Stanford College Republicans posted flyers around campus containing some of Valley’s work alongside clippings from Der Stürmer, a Nazi-era German newspaper known for publishing vicious anti-Semitic propaganda. The group acknowledged that it did this in retaliation because posters for one of their events were covered up by posters of the group sponsoring Valley’s appearance.
[…]
This seemed like precisely the kind of campus controversy that would grab the attention of Weiss, Stephens, and the rest of conservative media: Here was a student group trying to intimidate a speaker out of appearing on campus as scheduled. On the principles of free speech and academic freedom, taking a stand for Valley seemed to be the obvious call. Instead, Weiss praised the article calling for Valley’s cancellation on Twitter, thanking its author.
Oops.
The article continues by quoting Eli Valley:
“Bari Weiss’s attempt to get me de-platformed at Stanford, and her smear that my celebration of non-Zionist Jewish culture, politics, and art is tantamount to Nazism, should put an end to the myth that she is interested in a free exchange of ideas,” Valley said in a Twitter direct message. “She is interested [in] silencing the Left and in mainstreaming far-right ideology.”
It’s pretty hard to argue that he’s wrong.
So, let me try to pin you down: is it your position that because a NYT writer wrote an article which included a grab bag of figures from the right and left, that someone like me who greatly admires those on the center-left must also answer for what the right wingers do or say? :dubious:
ETA: Oh, NOW Sam’s podcast is “massively influential”, instead of whatever insignificant annoyance everyone was dismissing it as last year. :rolleyes:
What is the “intellectual dark web”?
Is it more or less this group of pseudocentrists and conservatives described by Bari Weiss, plus minus a few figures in the years since? If so, Ben Shapiro is definitely a member.
Is it “whoever SlackerInc admires”? Fucking fluid group, that, but I will say that it’s really weird how chummy all these “center-left” people are with alt-right morons like Shapiro and hack religious conservatives like Jordan Peterson. EDIT: and neo-nazis like Stefan Molyneux.
Personally, I think the most reasonable way to define them is to go off that Bari Weiss article and look for the common threads. Almost everyone involved is a rich white man. Almost everyone involved has a massive platform. Almost everyone involved will unironically talk about “SJWs” and “PC” as though the terms had any meaning beyong right-wing grievance politics. Almost everyone involves is considerably more willing to sit down at the table and break bread with dishonest alt-right shills like Ben Shapiro or Sargon of Akkad than a leftist. Almost everyone involved claims to be a “liberal”, but spends a lot more time furthering right-wing talking points about how “the SJWs are stifling debate” than actually discussing their “liberal” views*.
Depending on which reactionary moron is deciding to put on airs and pretend to be something other than an alt-right fuckstick, this list may, obviously, vary. But the fundamental core here is that while they claim to be liberals, the main thing they actually do with their platform and their clout is punch left and feed into the dominant far-right narrative. And, out of fear of “silencing” people (not SJWs, those aren’t people), they extend that platform further and further rightwards.
*There’s this famous chart about the views of the “Intellectual Dark Web”. But, just to take an easy example, Eric Weinstein has written two tweets with the word “vaccine” in them, and both of them are looking for “rational” antivaxxers. Meanwhile, here’s him talking about SJWs.
And, for shits and giggles, here he is defending Kyle Kashuv. The funny part is later in the thread, where Mike Cernovich (you know, the guy who invented Pizzagate) chides him on not coming to the defense of the Covington Cath kids, and he has a nice, polite conversation with… Mike Cernovich. See, SJWs are beyond the pale, but an alt-right conspiracy theorist who constantly makes up lies that ruin people’s lives, that’s just fine. Actually, holy shit, that sums up the movement as a whole better than anything I could have imagined!
Isn’t it weird how easy it is to find these guys praising or calmly discussing with neo-nazis?
I will be happy to defend Harris, Haider, Hughes, or Pinker if and when you turn your righteous jihad towards them. Until then, knock yourself out.
The Intellectual Dark Web is their name, not ours. They coined it, and they choose to be a part of it. Anyone on the website has chosen to consider themselves part of it.
The views they tout are not centrist Democrat. That wouldn’t make sense. The whole point of the “dark” is the idea that they are saying things that can’t be said in more mainstream outlets. But centrist Democrats are part of the mainstream.
No, what IDW does is pretend to be some sort of centrists, while only ever promoting or bringing on right wing viewpoints. They are the scientific racists, the anti-feminists. They rail about how the people who fight bigotry (which they label SJWs) are the real bad guys. They will argue that Islam is inherently evil, despite the fact there are millions of peaceful Muslims. They have that anti-trans guy who thinks it’s tyranny to have to give them the basic courtesy of referring to them by what they say they are.
Where are the progressives? Where are the feminists? Where are the people like Huey Freedman and his black liberation ideology? Where is anyone who is actually on the left?
No, they’ve created their own little echo chambers where they can keep those ideas out, only presenting them in straw form to debunk. It’s just Fox’s “Fair and Balanced,” but for a crowd that realizes Fox is also part of the mainstream media.
And, well, it’s an attempt at using identity politics to appeal to straight white cisgender people, primarily male. All the while saying identity politics is evil.
https://www.google.com/search?q=dave+rubin+debate+sam+seder+billboard&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS751US751&oq=dave+rubin+debate+sam+seder&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i57j0.5486j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Why won’t Dave Rubin debate Sam Seder?
Dave Rubin does not have a hard time getting liberals. He is frightened out of his wits at the prospect.
Why won’t Dave debate Sam Seder?
Relevant/related: “Don’t Believe What They Tell You About The Left”.
Bret Weinstein, a prominent member of the Intellectual Dark Web and critic of “identity politics,” recently released a video arguing that “demonizing ‘whiteness’ spreads white nationalism.” He contends that “intersectionalists,” by telling straight white men they are bad, have made the return of genocidal white supremacy more likely. He says:
They are going to back straight white males against the wall [and] white nationalism will emerge from that cohort… [These straight white males] have been accused, by bigots, of oppressing others, and been told that they are not entitled to well-being no matter how they individually have behaved. So what do they have to lose by cooperating together against the intersectionalists, essentially creating the world that the intersectionalists claim already exists.
Weinstein later cited a comment left on his video as an example of the tendency. The commenter wrote:
I have never been interested in white ethnonationalism until I started being told I was somehow unworthy of being a part of society by the media/the left. I do not feel superior to anyone based off of my race, but I also will not be told I am inferior. I don’t want to be involved in hateful subcultures, but when the message I’m overwhelmingly receiving from the common culture in general is ‘fuck you for being a straight white man,’ white nationalism starts looking much more appealing. If the rest of society has formed race-based gangs as in a prison, I’m going to start sitting with the other whites for group protection.
I am not naturally sympathetic to the “Black Studies made me become a Nazi” position. Partly this is because, as a straight white male myself (and a college Black Studies major), I have no idea what these guys are even talking about. I’ve never been told “fuck you for being a straight white man.” Nothing of the kind. The closest thing I’ve ever gotten is “perhaps as a straight white male you should exercise a bit of caution and restraint before loudly giving your opinion on matters that other people may have somewhat more personal experience with.” But when people insist they “won’t apologize for being white,” I still wonder who has been asking them, because nobody has ever asked me to do anything but show respect for marginalized people’s perspective and critically examine my own assumptions and advantages. Which seems a fairly modest ask.
The article cites this thread by Sam Adler-Bell, a journalist who actually works for media that’s remotely left-aligned, which is also worth reading in full:
These people are not getting the message “everyone hates white straight males” from left wing media. They’re not watching left wing media!! It’s absurd.
They’re getting that message from right wing media interpreting left wing media for them.
The grift is so transparent. Weinstein sells his ideas as a salve for the disease he and his friends consistently exacerbate.
If the “overwhelming message” of the “common culture” was “fuck you for being a white straight man,” I would definitely know! I am very immersed in culture, and I’m white and straight and male!
The point is “white men are irredeemably bad” is not the message of pop culture; it’s the message right wing ideologues’ want their followers to hear from pop culture. And the elision between these things is the basis for Weinstein’s entire grift.
Hmm. A member of the intellectual dark web, drastically overstating “cancel culture” and “TEH SJEWS”? Must be a day ending in -day.