Wank Dad 2: Electric Wankaloo

[benjipwns]

Because I have both, I often get dragged welcomed into fights enlightening discussions between the two departments fighting over the same humanities resources.

I think Poli Sci needs historiography courses worse sometimes because at least history departments actually have them. That article I linked in the Lassiez Faire thread and told nobody to read gets into some of that. Also another thing that poli sci is starting to talk about similarly is how entire topics are just flat out ignored. From that book I mentioned in the book thread, I learned and confirmed that The American Political Science Review has only published one article on intelligence. Of any kind, policy, process or other. Ever. In 113 years. It's also never published an article about climate change and a whole bunch of other technology related fields that are similar to climate change policy direction/discussion.

edit: here's that article so anyone else who might be interested doesn't have to dig it up: https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Political-Science-Became/245777/

According to a Teaching, Research & International Policy Project survey, a regular poll of international-­relations scholars, very few believe they should not contribute to policy making in some way. Yet a majority also recognize that the state-of-the-art approaches of academic social science are precisely those approaches that policy makers find least helpful. A related poll of senior national-security decision-makers confirmed that, for the most part, academic social science is not giving them what they want.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that scholars increasingly privilege rigor over relevance. That has become strikingly apparent in the subfield of international security (the part of political science that once most successfully balanced those tensions), and has now fully permeated political science as a whole. This skewed set of intellectual priorities — and the field’s transition into a cult of the irrelevant — is the unintended result of disciplinary professionalization.

That increasing tendency to embrace methods and models for their own sake rather than because they can help us answer substantively important questions is, I believe, a misstep for the field. This trend is in part the result of the otherwise normal and productive workings of science, but it is also reinforced by less legitimate motives, particularly organizational self-interest and the particularities of our intellectual culture.

While the use of statistics and formal models is not by definition irrelevant, their edging out of qualitative approaches has over time made the discipline less relevant to policy makers. Many pressing policy questions are not readily amenable to the preferred methodological tools of political scientists. Qualitative case studies most often produce the research that policy makers need, and yet the field is moving away from them.

In addition to the growing dogma among many political scientists that scholars can achieve rigor only by using a narrow set of techniques, other factors compound today’s cult of the irrelevant. For instance, many social scientists eschew policy relevance on the grounds that it is incompatible with scientific objectivity. Objectivity, for them, means that social-science research has to be "value-free," concerning itself only with establishing and analyzing the facts about what "is" and avoiding any discussion of what "ought" to be. A social-scientific consensus has emerged: Objectivity precludes policy engagement because the latter is inextricably linked with questions of value.

I was surprised at how positive this article was received in the field, even with all the usual caveats

[VomKriege]

To be fair "Marxism" is super intimidating so I can see why most peons like me would just stay at the most basic level of the Manifesto and some famous other bits but then again I don't make a career denouncing "Cultural Marxism".

Wank Dad cancelled, now Aron is my new Clausewitzian Daddy.

[Joe Molotov]

Swamp witches stay cackling in their swamps.

[BisMarckie]

Teaching anything about Communism/Marxism in a way that seems not negative is how you expose the College Republicans. It's the one thing you're always taught in Graduate School Political Science.

oops, wasn't supposed to reveal that

I do cheat, for Communism, the recommended reading is something like The Communist Manifesto (they just ask why if you don't include it), Critique of the Gotha Program and The Conquest of Bread/Mutual Aid

Recommended reading is a great way to troll students who never attend. Like only listing the Latin untranslated edition of Cicero's De Legibus in the syllabus.

[Nintex]

Zizek and Daddy P liked eachother. They'll get their own Netflix show for sure.

[Crash Dummy]

Zizek and Daddy P liked eachother. They'll get their own Netflix show for sure.

i think daddy p was more enamored by zizek than the other way around; i listened/watched in the background and noticed some subtle (pointing out orthodoxy is also a very short book)/not so subtle jabs by zizek ("i'm not saying you're an idiot and don't know what you're talking about" and asking for names of any pomo neo marxists)

[Oblivion]

After reading about this debate, I'm now convinced Daddy P did not intentionally misrepresent the "compelled speech" law and make a new career out of it, but he actually likely didn't read the bill at all (and most assuredly still hasn't) and just assumed that's what it said because he heard it somewhere. He's truly exposed as a hack fraud who lucked into this life and has been winging it ever since.

Well, that wouldn't be surprising since the guy literally wasn't aware that the bill included anything other than pronoun tyranny (the main goal of the bill was to protect trans people from getting fired/not being able to get housing/including them in hate crimes if they get murdered/etc.).

[Brehvolution]

After reading about this debate, I'm now convinced Daddy P did not intentionally misrepresent the "compelled speech" law and make a new career out of it, but he actually likely didn't read the bill at all (and most assuredly still hasn't) and just assumed that's what it said because he heard it somewhere. He's truly exposed as a hack fraud who lucked into this life and has been winging it ever since.

The only credentials needed to be a hero of the alt right.

[BisMarckie]

Tbf that is true for all culture warriors. Be it contrapoints raking in the patreon money for intellectually lazy videos or Ben Shapiro doing Ben Shapiro things.

[Great Rumbler]

Complain about the intelligentsia while stanning for a college professor who prepped for a debate by cramming the night before.

[Rufus]

JP's fans love to bring up his credentials, as though a PhD in psychology makes him the sole arbiter on the human condition. That's what makes him at best skimming the material he claims to have valuable insights on especially delicious.

[BisMarckie]

[agrajag]

what skeptic community? Sam Harris and.... ?

[agrajag]

come on breh, Sargon ain't no "skeptic"

[Nintex]

LMAO this guy

https://twitter.com/MarkDiStef/status/1121440688263053313

[agrajag]

"I hate identity politics"

"White people are supposed to act like this"

 

[Himu]

One thing I never understood was how the "skeptic community" became a part of the new right. I don't understand the link.

Usually islam.

"We should not tolerate religion" -> "Islam is a threat to us and breeds intolerance" -> "Island is a threat to western values" -> "Christianity isn't that bad after all and is a part of our western values unlike Islam" -> "hey mom, I'm alt right"

One thing I never understood was how the "skeptic community" became a part of the new right. I don't understand the link.

You've never met a "race realist" quoting bell curves and black crime stats in your life? I envy you for it.

That's low-key Sam Harris entire grift.

There's that too.

"Blacks have a low IQ" -> "Blacks represent a sizable portion of crime statistics" -> "I support black people having access to abortion as it will make them less poor over all" (usually a cover for eugenics support)

[Joe Molotov]

Sometimes it's hard to tell if someone is alt-right or just dumb.

[agrajag]

I think it's also a matter a matter of looking at things in a binary way without allowing for much nuance and a mixture of views. Like Nintex can be considered alt-right here, a Nazi on Re, but a a bleeding heart college intellectual on Voat. People do exist in gray areas, guys.

[BisMarckie]

I think it's also a matter a matter of looking at things in a binary way without allowing for much nuance and a mixture of views. Like Nintex can be considered alt-right here, a Nazi on Re, but a a bleeding heart college intellectual on Voat. People do exist in gray areas, guys.

Nintex isn‘t alt-right or whatever at all. He just thinks Trump is hilarious, which he kinda is. He also enjoys writing shitty fanfiction and being a low quality troll.

[BisMarckie]

I never understood the skeptic community‘s raison d‘etre. It always struck me as something inherently American, since you couldn‘t score edgelord points here for atheism since Feuerbach.

[BisMarckie]

The Anglosphere.

[agrajag]

I never understood the skeptic community‘s raison d‘etre. It always struck me as something inherently American, since you couldn‘t score edgelord points here for atheism since Feuerbach.

breh you think that's bad? I've been bombarded with Youtube recommendations of rational skeptics debunking "flat earth theories" lately.

 

[BisMarckie]

I think flat earthers are cute.

Like nobody ever believed that the Earth was flat, but they adopted this popular culture myth. 

[BisMarckie]

If the Earth was flat, how come there are still monkeys?

[jakefromstatefarm]

If we’re keeping score at home, and I’m pretty sure this has been mentioned before, the New Atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, et al. were/are an important predecessor for the IDW both because their demos/content have significant overlap and because the former paved a lot of the infrastructure that the latter then capitalized on. I think Cardgage is mostly right here. They sold hard on a secular bourgeois liberalism that was latently gaining momentum in America for years while religious language still, ostensibly, held hegemony in public/political discourse. Then, and this is really within the past 10 years or so, the demos start to shift in their favor, esp. among the under-30 crowd, and, exactly because they’ve won, they start to promote more obviously reactionary horseshit because they’ve built their brand around being ultratransgressive.*

Part of the Quillette** crowd are those Charles Murray HBD types who think we can read racial essentialism directly off of the natural world; the upshot always being a vindication of purse-clutching caucasoid common sense. And those guys should probably be contrasted with the deus vult guys or the Petersons of the world who think they’ve found ancient scrawlings in dingo poop that justify women being housewives, or whatever.

One interesting way I think you can divy it up is by (perceived) intellectual lineage. They both see The West^TM as sacrosanct/under crisis/whatever, but the scientism crowd thinks the parts of The West^TM that are worth preserving only extend to about John Locke, or so. Where the other crowd really buys into the Judaeo-Christian civilization myth and thinks that the battle of Tours and the sieges of Vienna are singularly defining world-historical events. You see a lot of people in either camp claiming to be ‘classically liberal’ despite not evincing any of the radical spirit that animated 19th century British utilitarianism. Because they haven’t read Bentham or Mill or Sidgwick. Or really anyone else, for that matter.

*although the imperial apologia is always there, cf. hitchens supporting the war in Iraq

**who are now publishing content by legit marxists? Wtf? I just saw this yesterday, they’ve been shifting over the past couple weeks or so; can’t tell if their cynically diversifying their bonds or what

[BisMarckie]

Never underestimate the Gopnik‘s squatting ability!

[BisMarckie]

Tfw your dumb shitpost follows a genuinely insightful post.

[jakefromstatefarm]

...the scientism crowd thinks the parts of The West^TM that are worth preserving only extend to about John Locke, or so. Where the other crowd really buys into the Judaeo-Christian civilization myth...

so, e.g., Pinker and Dawkins, while not being alt-right and not clearly even normal-right, dovetail really nicely with the first group, but have no common stock with the second.

Also a lot (although i couldn't tell you who) of people just have incoherent worldviews / ideology. I have a friend who is as radlib + idpol centric as it gets but loves Sam Harris and keeps a library's worth of anti-muslim factoids in her brain.

dont know your friend, obv, but I’m willing to bet this is because that Harrisite secular liberal shtick itself is high-key idpol

[Himu]

This is why I pointed out Islam. The new atheists were very, very big proponents on the war on terror. And a lot of the altright fall into the new atheist demographic.

[Great Rumbler]

For some reason I thought Sargon was black...

[BisMarckie]

For some reason I thought Sargon was black...

You‘re thinking of famous youtuber videogamedunkey.

[agrajag]

you're thinking of

 

[jakefromstatefarm]

I'm listening go on

So full disclosure, I’m on record saying that I don’t think a politics that doesn’t mobilize ‘identity’ is really possible given i) what the modern self is and ii) what modern politics are/have always been. So there’s a strong, tendentious claim I’d make that any stance claiming neutrality wrt idpol -like in the case of the detached objective outside observer that utilitarians are so fond of- is just gonna recapitulate the received common sense of a certain milieu. Anti-idpol is the idpol of hegemony, or something like this. In Harris’ case, it’s secular, liberal, white, wealthy, cosmopolitan reason repackaged as what everyone would arrive at if they were being sufficiently rational.

But there’s a weaker claim without all the tendentious horseshit. He’s openly considered bomb-striking third world brown people for their thought-crimes. There’s also his Californiafied yoga as health and wellness shit that fits snugly with (wait for it) neoliberal technologies of self-improvement.

[toku]

[Oblivion]

https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/status/1121351751020445697



Rubin continues to be a fucking loser

[agrajag]

Can't knock his hustle. The man managed to combine his verbal humiliation kink with making big conservative bucks.

[Oblivion]

What's great about the above clip is that it was the second attempt Rubin tried to get Ben to accept his existence.

[Oblivion]

Rubin is apparently even dumber than your friend though. Rubin legitimately thinks the cons he hangs out with actually like him as "one of the good ones", as opposed to just simply taking advantage of him as a useful idiot/co-conspirator.

[Crash Dummy]

I had a gay conservative for a roommate once. I talked to him at length about it, which was kind of rude in retrospect, but he was definitely cognizant that "his side" didn't always have his back and that the tradeoff was hard at times. Luckily, he was white!

the unbearable whiteness of being  :'(

[VomKriege]

I don't have my pulse on skeptic circles but I have some passing familiarity with it on the Internet and I'm not sure there's really any special commonality with the Far (Alt / New / Etc) Right. You'll find skeptics in all flavours and I'd say your vanilla skeptic is probably not going to respond well to any form of conspiracy theories, Holocaust negationism or the tired tropes of racial pseudo-science just by virtue of being a skeptic.  Some skeptics went "woke" (to sum up things quickly) probably a lot earlier than the bunch we're discussing, right around the time of "ElevatorGate" in 2011 (a controversy where a female skeptic went very vocal about unwanted advances in an elevator while she was at a Con), off the top of my head I could name PZ Myers and Atheism+. There's long been debates on the sort of "old school militant atheism", its obsolescence and possible perversions (esp. wrt to Islam).

I think self designated skeptics feature prominently right now with the "Alt Right" because that movement (insofar as it "exists" as an entity), fancies itself as revolutionary, speaking truth to power and are trying to get accepted as legitimate and rational. And in a Western world where everything seems to be more and more framed into a binary of "Responsible Adults" Vs "The Populists", any intellectual discourse challenging the statu quo can rapidly spin you into the latter, whatever the intent.

I guess the TLDR is "Do political correctness exist, is its enforcement more strict and is it counterproductive."

[benjipwns]

I still think this is more humiliating for him. I feel awful just watching it.



https://twitter.com/hanton_jeff/status/1118549529047887872

this clip makes it sound like Dave Rubin actually tried to spring a "gay-ish" orgy on Ben Shaprio in the past

this is now canon

[benjipwns]

I saw this in comments under stuff about the Zizek debate elsewhere and hadn't even thought about it until now...but it's something I recognized as picking at me when I've engaged with Peterson as a concept in this thread for a while.

Peterson didn't just blow off reading Marx, he doesn't seem to have even bothered to get into any critiques of Marx specifically. He seems to more have read a critique of "socialism" generally and extrapolated from there after hearing about "cultural marxism" from somewhere. I can't say that I get the impression he's really ever said "I should find out what everyone before me has said Marx got wrong." In other words, he skipped the Lit Review. (And methods. Unless "do not bother children when they are skateboarding" and "do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them" is a unique form of methodology I am unfamiliar with.)

I get YouTubers and Sean Hannity thinking they're the first to ever really break apart Marxism, socialism and their related ideas, but dude's a tenured PhD. Now I really want someone to figure out how to present a description of Peterson's whole "crusade" to himself asking his take as a clinical psychologist.

[benjipwns]

[HardcoreRetro]

I think he's read Gulag Archipelago and The Black Book of Communism.

I think he put Gulag Archipelago and The Road to Wigan Pier as his must read books on his blog/website.

Edit: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/books/book-list/?id=1045002

[jakefromstatefarm]

There’s that Stephen Hicks book too

[agrajag]

aww so cute, can we adopt it?

[BisMarckie]

aww so cute, can we adopt it?

We already have Kara.

Wait a minute, has anyone seen Kara and Zizek in the same place?

[Rufus]

Kara is an outside cat. He only comes in to eat and get his boo-boos treated.

[Himu]

https://www.theringer.com/2019/4/19/18485861/wrongthink-ben-shapiro-quillette-joe-rogan-intellectual-dark-web

[curly]

This interview is amazing:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/bret-easton-ellis-thinks-youre-overreacting-to-donald-trump

[Himu]

I'm actually interested in this interview:

https://www.wordonfire.org/peterson/

[Rufus]

You came to the defense of Roseanne Barr, saying that she denied, after tweeting racist stuff about Valerie Jarrett, knowing Valerie Jarrett was black.

Did she say that? That she didn’t know she was black?

You say it in the book.

Yeah, right, I quoted her.

wat

"I'm not that political" :wankmoji

[curly]

How do you write an entire book on a subject you don't care about and apparently haven't thought about at all?

You are a novelist. You write about the human condition. Do you worry about the self-harm of people who see things like child separation and have no emotional response?

I think I am an absurdist. I think politics are ridiculous.

Maybe don’t write a book about it. Would that be the solution?

I think the problem is that I don’t necessarily see this as interesting as fiction.

Yeah, I could tell.

It was much more interesting to me to write this as a nonfiction book, in terms of pulling this stuff from my podcast.

Thanks so much for talking.

It’s interesting to have that back-and-forth pull in an interview. The only problem, however, is that I am not that political, and so, when we have this conversation, and you confront me with certain things like this, I really am, I have to say, at a loss.

 

[Himu]

How do you write an entire book on a subject you don't care about and apparently haven't thought about at all?

Quick $$$

Bill O'Reilly has a ton of books.

[Rufus]

I get the impression he doesn't care so long as it doesn't affect him directly. It's his boyfriend (and everyone like him) being upset that bothers him. 'Calm down and wait for the election' makes sense from that perspective.

[benjipwns]

How do you write an entire book on a subject you don't care about and apparently haven't thought about at all?

Was that wrong? Should I have not done that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing was frowned upon, you know, ‘cause I've worked in a lot of offices and I tell you people do that all the time.

[Oblivion]

This interview is amazing:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/bret-easton-ellis-thinks-youre-overreacting-to-donald-trump

That interviewer rocks. I love how he doesn't even bother hiding his contempt for BEE.

It's really amazing how accurate the "I'm not really into politics = I'm secretly either solidly or comfortably conservative" meme is. I don't think I've met anyone who says they don't really care about politics who was secretly  really liberal.

[El Babua]

I say it to hide my Juche/Third Worldist power level

[curly]

If you want more debate pwnage and have an hour and a half to spare, here's a post-modern neomarxist DESTROYING a Jacobin universalist nitwit with Marx and Hegel