Tag: Spooky Thinky Web

  • How much more attention do they want?

    Nathan Robinson on the silenced chatterers, the suppressed best-sellers, the censored columnists and podcasters so bravely championed by Bari Weiss in the Times.

    Weiss uses the nation’s paper of record to introduce audiences to a group of people whose voices are supposedly being kept out of mainstream institutions, but who for some reason I seem to hear about all the damn time.

    The “intellectual dark web” is neither on the dark web nor comprised of intellectuals. It is a phrase coined by one of Peter Thiel’s deputies to describe a group of people who share the following traits in common: (1) they are bitter about and feel persecuted by Leftist Social Justice Identity Politics, which they think is silencing important truths and (2) they inhabit the internet, disseminating their opinions through podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, etc. The group includes: Eric Weinstein, the aforementioned Thiel subordinate; vacuous charlatan Jordan Peterson; cool kids’ philosopher Ben Shapiro; deferential interview host Dave Rubin; ex-neuroscientist Sam Harris; former Man Show host Joe Rogan; American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers; and former Evergreen State University professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying.

    Nice choice of epithets; I particularly like “vacuous charlatan” for the so very not silenced Jordan P.

    In fact, all of the persecuted intellectuals appear constantly in major outlets with huge reach. Whether it’s Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson appearing on HBO’s Real Time, Christina Hoff Sommers writing for Slate, The Atlantic, and the New York Times, Milo going on CNN, Bret Weinstein being interviewed on FOX News, Andrew Sullivan being racistin New York magazine, Peterson getting invited on the NBC Nightly News, or Ben Shapiro being profiled in the New York Times, not one of these individuals ever seems to lack for a mainstream perch from which to squawk. It’s a strange kind of oppression in which silenced dissidents keep getting book deals, op-eds, sold-out speaking tours, lucrative Patreons, millions of YouTube views, and sympathetic profiles in the world’s leading newspapers. How much more attention do they want? How much freer can speech be? Weiss’ article itself pushes the absurdity to its limits. It features half a dozen staged photographs of its subjects moodily lurking amidst topiaries, and is the longest piece yet in Weiss’ ongoingseries on the illiberalism and repressiveness of the left. As one commenter put it, Weiss’ argument is “that unseen forces are preventing her and those like her from making the exact arguments that she’s making, right now, in the exact venue where she’s making them, right now.”

    The members of the Intellectual Dark Web are attacked, supposedly, for their “ideas,” which they are eager to discuss “civilly” but which the left will not debate because it hates rational discourse. It’s a strange definition of civility, though. Shapiro’s speeches contain such civil remarks as “you can all go to hell, you pathetic, lying, stupid jackasses,” and he has repeatedly made vile racist remarks about Arabs. Peterson, when criticized in the New York Review of Books, did not respond with an extended rebuttal, but by calling the writer a “son of a bitch” and a “sanctimonious prick” on Twitter, and threatening to slap him in the face. (Not the first time that criticism has caused genteel conservative “civility” to give way to threats of violence.) Sam Harris goes from cool reason to angry denunciation and accusations of bad faith when people dare to suggest to him that Charles Murray is a racist. For men who care about facts, they sure have a lot of feelings!

    See also: Michael Shermer. He wrote a multi-page article in response to my brief (however damning) mention of him (part of a single paragraph) in Free Inquiry. Then he wrote another even longer one at eSkeptic; both were full of angry denunciation and accusations of bad faith – because I mentioned something he said on camera.

    Here’s another reason why I’m skeptical that our national Martyrs for Free Speech and Rational Debate are interested in actually debating ideas: I’ve tried to get them to do it. I wrote a long explanation of why I thought Ben Shapiro’s logic was poor and his moral principles heinous. Shapiro mentioned me when we both gave speeches at the University of Connecticut. Did he rebut my case? No. He said he hadn’t heard of me and that my crowd was smaller than his. (I admit to being obscure and unpopular, but I’d ask what that says about which speech is mainstream and which is marginal.) When I wrote about Charles Murray, explaining in 7,000 words why I think his work is bigoted, Murray dismissed it with a tweet. When I wrote 10,000 words meticulously dissecting Jordan Peterson’s laughable body of work, Peterson responded with about three tweets, one misunderstanding a joke and anotherusing fallacious reasoning. (See if you can spot it!) The wonderful ContraPoints recorded a highly intelligent 30-minute explanation of why Peterson is wrong. Peterson’s only reply: “No comment.” So much for wanting a debate with the left.

    Not that left. The other left. The one that’s on the third bench from the corner every other Wednesday at 4 a.m., unless it misses the bus.

    We can also tell how little they care about serious debate from their total refusal to rationally engage with advocates of the social justice/ identity politics position that so horrifies them. In his debate with Sam Harris, Ezra Klein made an important observation: in 120 episodes, Harris had only ever had two African American guests. Harris then replied that he had had former Reagan administration official Glenn Loury on specifically to discuss racism, but suggested that he chose Loury specifically because he wanted someone who didn’t hold the views Harris disdains. That’s so often the case with critics of social justice: I pointed out recently that when David Brooks attempted to “engage” with the campus activist position, he didn’t do so by reading a book or speaking to an actual human being, but by inventing an imaginary caricature in his head and then arguing with it.

    That’s why they pay him the big bucks.

    H/t Screechy Monkey

  • Dinner with the vanguard

    Well this one sure has all the kids talking: Bari Weiss at the Times explaining the “intellectual dark web” and how courageously iconoclastic and awesome it is.

    Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”

    I was meeting with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin; and their spouses in a Los Angeles restaurant to talk about how they were turned into heretics. A decade ago, they argued, when Donald Trump was still hosting “The Apprentice,” none of these observations would have been considered taboo.

    But would they have been considered simplistic, meaningless, a disguise for something less anodyne, pointless, in need of further explanation? Of course they would. No shit there are “fundamental biological differences between men and women,” but what’s your point? That women are more stupid or more suited to the helping professions than to tech? When you say identity politics is a toxic ideology, what the fuck are you talking about? Free speech is under siege how and where and in what sense and how much more than it ever has been?

    Or to put it another way, how about fewer clichés and more precision?

    What is the I.D.W. and who is a member of it? It’s hard to explain, which is both its beauty and its danger.

    Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.

    Sam Harris? I doubt that he’s “locked out of legacy outlets.” On the other hand Dave Rubin? Why should he feel welcomed to “legacy outlets” – they’re not public schools or libraries, open to all, they’re publications (I assume that’s what she means by that unattractive descriptor) that want good writers and thinkers as opposed to random people who just turn up brandishing an opinion.

    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.

    Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist just as Maajid Nawaz is, and she’s more known for that than she is as a feminist. Sommers of course is not known as a feminist at all, but as a contemptuous critic of feminism.

    The core members have little in common politically. Bret and Eric Weinstein and Ms. Heying were Bernie Sanders supporters. Mr. Harris was an outspoken Hillary voter. Ben Shapiro is an anti-Trump conservative.

    But they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.

    Oops. She started by saying they all share three distinct qualities, then she says that one of those three is that some have paid for this commitment by being purged – if only some have been purged then they don’t all share that one, do they. Sharpen up. This is why the “legacy outlets” are so shut-outy.

    “People are starved for controversial opinions,” said Joe Rogan, an MMA color commentator and comedian who hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the country. “And they are starved for an actual conversation.”

    This is the “intellectual dark web”? Intellectual?

    Offline and in the real world, members of the I.D.W. are often found speaking to one another in packed venues around the globe. In July, for example, Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray and Mr. Harris will appear together at the O2 Arena in London.

    Of course they will.

    “I’ve been at this for 25 years now, having done all the MSM shows, including Oprah, Charlie Rose, ‘The Colbert Report,’ Larry King — you name it,” Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, told me. “The last couple of years I’ve shifted to doing shows hosted by Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris and others. The I.D.W. is as powerful a media as any I’ve encountered.”

    Mr. Shermer, a middle-aged science writer, now gets recognized on the street. On a recent bike ride in Santa Barbara, Calif., he passed a work crew and “the flag man stopped me and says: ‘Hey, you’re that skeptic guy, Shermer! I saw you on Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan!’” When he can’t watch the shows on YouTube, he listens to them as podcasts on the job. On breaks, he told Mr. Shermer, he takes notes.

    Exciting!!!

    And safer than getting women drunk and then “having sex” with them.

    Editing to add: H/t Sackbut