So says the one that thought that ponderings from David Reich were the beesnees to shut up the ones that were against Charles Murray and their ilk, when it was just a bit of concern trolling from David Reich and in the end he unequivocally called guys like Murray racists.
What?
I suppose it depends on what degree of precision you require for your statistical assertions.
Personally, I don’t think “Are black people really just stupid?” is particularly inaccurate or misleading as a short paraphrase of “Are black people’s lower average scores on standardized IQ tests compared to members of other broadly-defined racial groups attributable in a statistically significant way to inherited average differences between those racial groups in genetic factors affecting cognitive function?” The latter phrasing is much more specific and precise but the basic idea conveyed is essentially the same.
I get the strong sense you have a very broad notion of who qualifies as “Nazi” and a very limited spectrum of “people who disagree with me about stuff, but aren’t so wrong they should be de-platformed”. I mean, didn’t you basically call Charles Murray a Nazi, or did I misunderstand you?
In any case, I’m still with Mill, no matter how “wrong” someone’s ideas are:
“Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.”
And:
I—and Mill—think you’ve got it exactly backward:
As noted upthread, Mill quite rightly points out that when dishonest arguments are used “for good”, they are vigorously applauded. We have seen plenty of evidence for that in this thread. Self-righteous do-gooders always seem to consider that the ends justify the means when it comes to rhetorical contests of ideas.
Nonsense. Bret Weinstein, for instance, has consistently called himself a “committed progressive”, and I see no reason to doubt him. You probably would have approved of his first brush with campus controversy, in 1987:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Professor-Who-Roiled/240267
And Sam Harris not only excoriates Trump in the strongest of terms, he lost a bunch of subscribers a few years back because they were shocked to learn that he considers income inequality a huge problem, and strongly endorsed “soak the rich” taxation as a remedy. He supports gay marriage, equal pay for women, etc. Your attempt to brand everyone in the IDW as “reactionary” is ludicrous on its face.
Weinstein and his wife got drummed out of Evergreen College because they objected to white people being told to stay home on a given day.
Sam Harris gets demonized because he correctly observes that conservative Islam is repressive to women, gays, and atheists. Those are the important ideas they are punished for expressing, and they are hardly reactionary.
The problem here is totally ignoring how the sources of information you rely on are twisting information to fit their narrative, and sadly guys like Harris fell for it.
https://psmag.com/education/the-real-free-speech-story-at-evergreen-college
As I said to other poster in another thread that also ranted about that, you are not really that smart do you?
Many liberal or human right groups are active critics of how Muslim nations do treat women, gays, and atheists:
https://www.hrw.org/lgbt-international-resources
The problem I see is that many times defending people that are indeed leaving the Muslim world because they are being persecuted is mixed with the idea that just because many liberals do defend the immigration of those Muslims that are being persecuted for that or other reasons is “the same” as defending the extremist Muslims.
Simple logic should tell anyone how dumb is that, but no matter, Harris and many others will use that failed logic as a way to criticize people that do know how asinine is to be so absolutist about preventing immigration from Muslim nations.
:rolleyes: Whoo, what a densely packed pellet of distortion and misinformation.
What actually happened is that the college’s annual “Day of Absence” demonstration/discussion, in which it’s suggested that people of color gather off-campus to raise awareness about their contributions, one year took the form of suggesting that white people consider meeting off-campus instead.
Weinstein, whose egalitarian conscience never seems to have given him any trouble about the previous “Day of Absence” observances, made a fuss in an open letter complaining that the proposed new event format was “a show of force, and an act of oppression” and that he would encourage other white people at Evergreen to join him in disregarding it. This rather snowflakey response met with criticism, but the subsequent protests that lazy media stories have linked to it were actually sparked by anger at a police action on campus (and not diminished by the trauma and anger of dealing with the following incident in nearby Portland where a white-supremacist bigot murdered two men who were interfering with his yelling threats at two Muslim women).
Weinstein’s and his wife’s then suing the college following the campus ruckus, and leaping at the publicity opportunities offered them by the so-called “dark web” types, puts a very different spin on your claims about their being “drummed out of Evergreen College”. They didn’t in any way get “drummed out”: they resigned as part of the half-million-dollar settlement of their lawsuit. And now they’re celebrities of the “freeze peach” anti-left who get paid for writing and speaking about the alleged assault on civil liberties by the “PC left”. Sure beats grading students’ lab reports, I guess!
No, the Weinsteins and Heyer overall look very much more like opportunists than victims. They were adjacent to some campus turmoil and anger about Trump-era emboldening of racism, and they very astutely and promptly parlayed that into prominent positions on the libertarian pundit circuit. Their “persecution” is a carefully fostered illusion in the minds of their newfound fans.
Um, Sam Harris mostly gets criticized—not so much demonized—for being a thinskinned, egotistical, undiscriminating purveyor of various kinds of prejudiced twaddle who throws tantrums when other people point out his muddled thinking. E.g.:
In the history of forever, nobody claiming this as evidence of ‘winning at life’ have, in fact, been winning in life.
Also, if having a car and TV and time to post on SDMB is all you have as evidence of ‘winning at life’ I feel genuine pity for you.
Well to be fair, the “married, four kids” part did come first.
Not that I’m arguing that either marriage or parenthood automatically implies, or is necessary for, “winning at life” status. But a lot of people not unreasonably see them as pretty important sources of happiness.
(Do we even really care who’s “winning at life” in the context of messageboard contention, anyway? Personally I think that a miserable hopeless loner making a cogent argument is better worth reading than a blissfully fulfilled demigod with crap reasoning skills.)
The guy is probably in scary debt for that car, so he really should be working more than a few hours a week. He’s got a family of 6 and he’s said before they are just over $30k income yet he is so delusionally puffed up that he still needs to brag about a 70" tv.
File that little nugget with such pearls of wisdom as “Is our children learning?” and “They misunderestimated me”. 
Harris did air the Omer Aziz podcast in its entirety, precisely because Aziz was trying to spin the whole thing as his “winning” the argument. If you can listen to that and agree, or even argue that it is NOT “boring”, you are so deluded as to be completely beyond hope:
Funny how you left out the most important points—you know, the ones I listed first? :rolleyes: That’d be the wife and four kids. (Ah, now I see that Kimstu pointed out the same thing.)
But yeah, I wouldn’t work forty hours a week for any amount of money if I can get by without it. Literally, any amount. My leisure time is priceless and my wants are relatively modest (by First World standards). It’s a great time to be alive.
This must have been at least a couple years ago. We are well over $50K now, in a part of the country where that goes a pretty long way (our 3BR 2BA apartment in a brand new building with stainless steel appliances, two-car garage, balcony, and access to the clubhouse and fitness center, is $1200 a month with water and heat included).
Oh you are right, that was supposed to be :
You are not really that smart are you? The point I made stands.
And everyone can notice that I can learn, but you lack that capacity. Better to avoid evidence that shows how shallow you are huh?
What I see is just that you completely miss evidence that can make you an even better human being, otherwise I can see that you are only exuding complacency.
Aw, that one wasn’t as amusing. C’mon, GIGO: say something comically garbled again! When you get on a roll, you’re like one of those hilarious Peter Sellers or Mickey Rooney characters from the pre-PC cinematic era. 
Pausing again, as in the case of Ramira, to note that it’s rather assholish of native English speakers to make fun of minor grammatical blunders on the part of someone whose first language is not English.
I don’t know about “minor”, but yes: in a vacuum, it is definitely assholish. In response to two posters who literally never post anything (in threads I’m in) that isn’t a caustic attack on me personally, I’m going to give myself a pass. 
ETA: LOL at the Ambivalid link—thank you for posting that. Priceless.
Meh, like if we all don’t know already that you are an ignoramus when you avoid the fact that Murray was wrong about the Hispanics, and even David Reich pointed out how biased Murray and others like him are, so stop feeding the racists.
There was also the complete disregard from what the professors at the Alabama University said about Murray and Harris, They are not impressed at all, and neither many other experts. That already showed that your prior beliefs are not overridden as evidence accumulates, as someone that prides to be intelligent should react. But we can see that Bayes’ Theorem does not work for you.
BTW that turned into a reverse pitting, priceless indeed, so thanks for the good memories.
So you are an ignoramus also about how posters do see grammar nitpickers: attacking one because of errors in grammar and not the points the poster made just shows to all that anyone reaching for the bad grammar argument really does not have any proper reply to what was posted.
Indeed, it is just a demonstration to all about how big a coward you are are, better to protect your cherished ignorant talking points huh?
GIGO and many others like to cite the “takedown” of Harris and Murray in Vox (never mind that those authors explicitly acknowledge that they have colleagues whose views are closer to Murray’s than to theirs).
Completely serendipitously, I happened upon another Vox piece just now. It has a, shall we say, slightly different take:
:dubious:
Wow, a 70 inch TV! That’s like 70 whole inches of television! What will they think of next?