I used to follow Lindsay a few years ago, and I am way more socially conservative than either of you guys, but I agree with Katie, I think the man has literally lost his mind. The thing about the Dr Phil clip isn’t that any individual claim is incorrect; it’s that he thought he could get in front of a crowd of the normiest possible normies and talk at that pace, using that vocabulary, and strike them as anything but a crazy person. It suggests a total inability to see himself from the outside.
I bought How To Have Impossible Conversations when it first came out & I enjoyed it. Despite Lindsay going off the deep end, it's a book I'll likely read again. The mention of Bret Weinstein caused me to shiver. I was in his corner after Evergreen but I couldn't buy into his Covid/Vaccination rhetoric and it got to the point where I found him and Heather unlistenable. I find the trajectories of both Lindsay and Weinstein/Heying similar.
Was that the whole thing about the rats and how there was some sort of conspiracy to cover up the fact that the rat lines they were using in lab experiments were genetically faulty? I do remember Bret starting to push that one hard and I think that was one of the first moments when my very basic bullshit detector pricked up. I think his brother genuinely tried to argue Bret missed out on some sort of Nobel prize for pushing that argument.
I found Eric's seemingly slavish admiration of Peter Thiel a little off as well and that only grew the more I listened to him.
The Weinsteins were two people who I found interesting when I first began to break out of my own echo chamber a couple of years ago and admittedly, I was bedazzled by them at first. I was (desperate) trying to find voices that would challenge me and help me to think differently and I thought the Weinsteins - along with a few others - were it and a bit. Like I said earlier though, once Covid hit, Bret seemed to go off a cliff and Eric became increasingly incoherent.
I guess the one good thing for me is my bullshit detector is getting quite a lot better.
My only knowledge of JL not gleaned from the POD was from an interview he did with Boghossian on another podcast a while ago. He seemed like a totally different character to that one I kept hearing about.
I do wonder, and I say this as a recovering mathematician myself, if that might be part of the problem here. There is a ruthless logic to mathematical reasoning, if JL came to see wokism as a theorem he had proved and he then had to spend so much time demonstrating that proof to people who, in his eyes, didn’t get it then I can see why he got a bit obsessed and frustrated. Most mathematicians are not known for their ability to communicate with normal people either.
You might have something there about his personality and cognitive style. I wouldn't say "most" mathematicians are deficient in that way, but perhaps "many". (Speaking as another former mathematician.)
I'll note though that calling JL a mathematician or former mathematician is a stretch (IMO) since he apparently never actually worked in the field after getting his PhD. Nothing wrong with that, just makes the term dubious.
I like your analysis of what was wrong with the Dr. Phil clip. After I listened to this episode, it really bothered me that their only response to said clip was to brush it off as a “stream of shit” without explaining why they thought so. I actually had to listen to the clip twice because I was confused. I couldn’t find anything Lindsay said that was factually incorrect, but listening to it was still a bit irritating and it was really difficult for me to articulate why. I think you explained it really well.
I am not on Twitter but I do listen to his podcast. He really does his research but he gets super conspiracy minded very quickly. Sadly on the other hand he has sometimes been quite prescient. i also think the man does not know when to stop talking. I have rarely heard anyone who loves the sound of his voice as much as he did
So I listen to his podcast for the facts he presents -since he straight quotes from his sources. His editorializing leaves me uneasy.
That being said. I love love Katie and I like Jesse a lot and I have heard both on other podcasts. I would say that I have only heard them on podcasts with hosts who agree with them politically. They may have beeb on podcasts where there were disagreements and I never heard then. James Lindsay though. I have heard him on a few podcasts where there were genuine disagreements and he was great. Everyone respectfully disagreed and laid out their arguments quite well. I think that counts for a LOT.
FYI I’m a conservative-ish vegetarian (gasp) and there are a lot of us. This Cracker Barrel thing is a made up media nothing. I don’t buy it for a second.
Also, the impossible meat is SO meat-like now that it grosses me out and I don’t like it. So, if you’re a vegetarian who misses meat you should dig in!
Lastly, Cracker Barrel is awesome. Their take home Thanksgiving dinner is exactly like the dinner my mom would have made (sage and onion stuffing a la Texas style) and their desserts are amazing too. You can take home the whole dinner for 8 - with sides of your choice - and pop it in the oven thanksgiving morning or you can just get “plates” with side choices for each person. Mom used to cook for three days to get everything ready (mostly for my dad) but I put her out of her misery about 15 years ago by bringing the whole thing from Cracker Barrel.
We love you Cracker Barrel, putting down the Thanksgiving patriarchy one red-billy family at a time since 2005!
Aside from any other consideration, it’s my go-to restaurant for dinner when I’m traveling alone by car. I do notice that a number of the diners at CB are “old,” ie precisely the demographic being instructed by their doctors to lay off red meat. That wouldn’t make such a great ad though, for few elderly (including me) like being reminded of our advanced years ;)
Someone suggested in a Substack comment recently that vegetarians are doing more harm to the environment by eating highly processed meat substitutes than if they eat meat. I don't know if this pencils out (it definitely doesn't from the animals' point of view), but as a vegan I do tend to avoid the meat-like products. These seem aimed primarily at carnivores, sort of like vegan food with training wheels.
I think this has been pretty comprehensively debunked: meat production consistently outstrips all other forms of food production by a huge margin on one fundamental point alone, which is the fact that getting protein from an animal is in itself a more energy intensive process than getting it directly from the plant - because they eat plants. This is usually true even if there is little or no further processing of the end product, but we know that there very often is. Or to put it another way, you're comparing a 1-step process with a 2-step one. Which is going to requre more energy/water/carbon?
If you look at the charts that have been accepted by pretty much all governments that give a toss about climate change, there really isn't an argument for not at very least cutting down vastly on meat and dairy, because they are by far the biggest food-based culprits and among the biggest culprits in any category too. I'm not speaking purely from self-interest here either - I'm a vegetarian but not vegan, and I personally find it very hard to give up dairy. I don't, however, kid myself that this isn't a problem, and I try to cut down as much as I can.
Yes, what got me to stop eating red meat 47 years ago was learning that it took 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. I think that ratio has been revised down slightly, but the principle is the same.
Yep, and anything that does drive down the ratio further is almost certainly detrimental to any attempt at promoting animal welfare. More intensive farming methods are greener - and who would want to support that?
Oh that’s interesting. I’ve known a few people over the years who did it for “health reasons” who liked and missed meat so I guess they would like the substitutes. If you were doing it for environmental reasons this would be bad news. I’m one of those overly sentimental, made pets out of every creature on the farm or in the woods, and did the math on a pork chop on my plate pretty early kind of vegetarians. My mom swears I would refuse to eat meat when I was three and I did not grow up in a vegetarian familiar or friendly place - rural Texas ;) So to each their own of course but for me the more “meat-like” something is the more I want to barf!
The monkeypox trajectory is like that of AIDS in that AIDS started out primarily afflicting men who had sex with men, but as it turns out some men who have sex with men also have sex with women. Jeez, who knew?! So it's more accurate to say that the people most at risk for monkeypox are people who have sex with men. And given that the average gay man has more sex than the average human, it stands to reason that men who have sex with men are most at risk. In general, at this point, and other caveats. (Why do I employ the tedious "men who have sex with men" instead of the snappier "gay men"? Because like AIDS, monkeypox is about behavior, not identity.)
I think for most people "gay," "straight," and "bisexual" are behavioral descriptors. "Straight man who occasionally sleeps with men" has the same dissonance as "vegan that occasionally enjoys a steak."
Using those words as identities is relatively new, isn't it?
I would say that gay as an identity made sense when there were common external threats affecting us all, be it illegality, discrimination, targeting by law enforcement or the AIDS epidemic. Once those common external threats were subdued or eliminated, the common behaviour (at least in a broad sense) remained the only thing shared bye people who could otherwise just get on with their lives in peace. This is why the LGBT queue identity movement was always doomed to fail, whatever external threats remain R entirely different across the constituent parts and there aren’t even common behaviours two define a larger community identity.
I think it can be ambiguous even if you assume they're behavioral descriptors. It can be hard to draw the line between gay/straight and bisexual. Sure, people who are equal opportunity for both sexes are bi, but what about people who prefer one sex over the other 9 out of 10 times? They're technically engaging in bisexual behavior over time, but I get why they wouldn't call themselves that since their general behavior is skewed in one direction.
As I type, I'm also realizing I've seen this more in the gay community. I have gay and lesbian friends who will occasionally find a woman/man that strikes their fancy and go for it, without calling themselves bisexual. I feel people who are mostly straight will call themselves bi if they occasionally sleep with the same sex. Or heteroflexible, if people still say that ever.
Yup. When I worked in sexual health, it was about men who have sex with men. MSMs. MSWs. And WSWs.
But now there are trans men who.are of course men. Now. If they are having sex with gay men, Inam guessing they are at the same risk as gay males. And then of course what percentage of trans men have sex with men, versus with women
Same for trans women. I am betting the trans women, who are woman, who have sex with men are at the same risk as gay men
In 2019, 69% of new HIV infections were in MSM. If monkeypox becomes endemic and follows the same trajectory as AIDS, it will never stop being a disease that primarily affects gay dudes.
It seems like the crucial empirical question is, what is the reproduction number R for monkeypox outside of the MSM community? If it's lower than 1, we would expect some cases on the fringe of the community (those who have sex or other close contact with an MSM) and a few beyond that, but not a wider epidemic. In that case it seems reasonable to focus the public health messaging primarily on the MSM population and actively avoid spooking people outside that population (but not claiming there's zero risk, of course).
If instead the R value outside the MSM population is greater than one, we would expect a wider epidemic of some sort, and the messaging should be different.
I haven't seen anyone addressing this empirical question yet in the general media. It might well be too early to tell. Any thoughts from PH experts?
As I understand, its spread by close contact. So sex among adults but children have closer physical contact with both family adults and other children for completely innocent and developmentally necessary reasons.
Yes - exactly this. They are vulnerable to catching it because kids are more inclined to get physically close to their caregivers, teachers, parents, peers etc in a way adults do not. Nothing more sinister than that.
I'm not aware of any children catching it - this is hypothetical. Where they have caught it, in other countries mainly, they are likely to spread it purely for the reason that kids generally have lots of close contact with other kids.
I keep reading that those of us who were vaccinated for smallpox (which US govt routinely did until 1972 and US military did until 1991) are protected. I am not in a high-risk category anyway, but shouldn't this get more press? I hear people worrying about this who were probably vaccinated.
I didn't know this. I bet it would be getting a lot more press if it weren't just we geezers who are affected. Maybe the assumption is that if you're old enough to have gotten the smallpox vaccine, you probably aren't having a lot of sex. ;)
The masturbatory-paper author’s pedo background is why it makes me grind my teeth whenever anyone talks about “studies show” and non-offending pedophiles.
People lie. People find justifications for their behavior. Any research based on what pedophiles say is inherently biases that way, but the “science says” people want us to shut up and listen to their proclamations, some pf which might be bases on research done by literal pedophiles to justify themselves.
I don’t think most of the professors who have gotten in trouble for supporting “non-offending MAPs” are pedophiles--most are just open-minded enough that their brains have fallen out--but most of them have acted self-righteous about things that are not by any stretch proven.
“Studies show” or “Research says” always begs the question to me: what studies, who’s research? I hear these phrases often in secondary education usually to justify some change to education that seems overly complex and not that effective
I am sure that there are paedophiles who really are aware how damaging acting on their desires would be, and manage to refrain. But it’s got to be really tough. And they do it by staying well away from anything that could tempt them.
In cases like this I find it very hard to conclude that this guy is not a paedophile (or maybe technically a hebephile) who has found ways to justify and indulge himsef via academia. And people who indulge and justify their paedophilic desires are far more likely to abuse. Spend any time reading research with abusers and you will see their self-justifications. They really do convince themselves that the young boys they abuse ‘wanted’ it, that they were ‘helping’ them ‘explore their sexuality’. It’s stomach-churning.
I agree there probably are people who are sexually attracted to children who don’t offend. I just don’t take anyone at their word that they belong to this category and don’t believe we have any evidence of what would help them continue to not offend.
There’s been at least one treatment for sex offenders that made them more likely to reoffend after they got out of prison.
In general, I believe reducing stigma and increasing community increases behavior. That is why I don’t want to reduce the stigma against sexual attraction to children.
There should be a stigma attached to sexual attraction to children.
I think the problem arises when you have people who are attracted to kids but for not want to be. Abd as it is, the stigma is so great that they cannot access treatment. I also think if calling someone a MAP makes it easier to access treatment, or to be willing to ask for it, great
However. Attraction to kids is not equivalent to being gay and acting on that attrq Yukon is inherently harmful
I briefly followed James Lindsay on Twitter and unfollowed both because he just tweeted way too much and because it quickly became clear he was going off the conspiratorial deep end.
That said, I don't think the Dr. Phil clip is that off base. CRT in schools is one of those examples of "it's not happening but it's good if it is." When Rufo started his anti-CRT campaign the response was mostly dismissal, that CRT was an obscure field of study that you'd only encounter in law schools.
Not long after, the NEA voted to support critical race theory in schools, and to fund research opposing the anti-CRT organizations:
One such measure, introduced by the NEA’s board of directors, said the nation’s largest teachers’ union will support and lead campaigns that “result in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, critical race theory, and ethnic … studies curriculum in pre-K-12 and higher education.” The measure is part of a larger $675,000 effort to “eradicate institutional racism” in public schools.
...
NEA delegates also adopted a $56,500 measure to “research the organizations attacking educators doing anti-racist work” so that members are prepared to respond.
I agree with this. In the Dr. Phil clip Lindsay gives a great example of how not to follow any good advice on rhetoric, careful and respectful argumentation, etc., and of course he looks like a fool. But if you actually look at the substance of what he's saying in the clip, it's not at all ridiculous.
Not trying to defend anything else he's said recently or his Twitter behavior, but just pointing out that this particular clip isn't as damning as some people think it is.
People think it's "damning" not because he's 100% wrong, but because he sounds completely insane to any normal person listening. He's not giving any context and assuming the entire audience spends as much time on Twitter as he does.
I read White Fragility because of him, this was prior to the pandemic, and he was posting snippets from the book and calling out the ridiculousness. Hardly anyone was doing this at the time.
Teachers will often say CRT isn't in schools but basically this is a gaslight. There are concepts related to it at work, and there are books we read for professional development that are within that field. It would be akin to saying "we are not doing Reaganomics" and yet we had to read a book by Dinesh D'Souza.
That said, I don't necessarily disagree with the things we do either. For reference, this isn't "separate kids into groups based on their race" type stuff, but more working with students to help them express themselves in a more clear way which may be based on their cultural background, or not (many of my students who are non white tend not to think in race based terms)
If you are helping kids express themselves in clearer ways based on cultural background, then wouldn't it ebd up with kids being separated by race? Like the child of Chinese immigrants comes from a very different culture from a kid who came to the US from the Dominican Republic at 2.
Also.i thought you had said POC kids were more likely to view thenselvez in race based terms. Then I reread and realized you had said the opposite
Because I had thought maybe it depends ob the region, and maybe perceptions have changed since I was a kid. But when I was in high school, it was "I'm Haitian" or "Im Chinese" or whatever.
I do thing the ciltural versus raxe view might be in part that a white kod is dear more likely to come from a family that has been in the US for hundreds of years than an Asian kid. And if your family has been here a long time, are you German, Irish, what?
Like. My high school was virtually all immigrants or children of immigrants. So rarely was someone Asian or White or Hispanic. It was Kprean or Palistani or Russian or Dominican .
No, it wouldn't. Because this isn't so much "oh the white kids are oppressors" type thinking. But rather it's more about helping students to understand how they see themselves which isn't really cut and dried. Like, I don't know how they see themselves, that is for them to decide. You may ask students what they are and they might say black or they may say Nigerian. Some others will say "I am just me." Also the majority of my students are non white like there are not many white students going to an urban NYC high school.
I kinda posit to them to say "Am I white? If so, what makes me white?" Because I often think about this, I don't really consider myself "white" even if I am just assumed to be. I have Irish/Italian heritage from my parents, but I more view myself as American. Maybe that is white "privilege" or maybe I am thinking that this is a different way of viewing things.
Oh. I wasn't thinking oppressors. I thought you meant the students were split into groups based on ethnicity. But it sounds like this is a class discussion.
Yeah. I went to Bronx Science, which I suppose is not "urban," but the locale is such that the neighborhood was totally Dominican and a little Puerto Rican (now there are some Bangladeshi families as well, but the vast majority are Dominican). While the school at the time was literally the most diverse public high school, but still mostly.Korean, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, and Russian Jews. Some Dominican kids. Some Haitian kids. Nigerian. But like no African American kids. And so our school population looked nothing g like the neighborhood, which was awkward.
But I DO truly believe that so much of this is about immigration rather than race. Also I think it is what happens if you grow up in NYC as a child of immigrants.
And I 100% believe that now that we equate immigrants with POC, certain beliefs that pretty much relate to all immigrants - this is now believed to be a POC thing.
Like. Not saying I am black but I am Nigerian. Or I am Korean, not saying Asian..
There were a few white American kids and they considered themselves American but of like Irish heritage or whatever. The bast majority of white kids, who were an absolute minority, were Russian Jews. And they too were like I am.Russian.
But think about it. I was technically a white American kid, but I didn't grow up feeling American so I never called myself that.
But identifying by where ypur parents came from? That seemed to be common to all of us whose parents were not American.
And this was HUGE for me because previously I had gone to schools where pretty much everyone's parents was American. And it was so great to finally go to a place where there were other people like me, even if we didnt look alike
I think white privilege comes into it in this way: if you are white and consider yourself American, no one questions your Anericanness. This is nit true if you are POC. If you speak without an accent, no one is surprised. I also think if you are white and grew up speaking another language, it is not viewed as disloyal in a way it is for Chinese immigrants
The white privilege comes in how others perceive us. So plenty of children of Chinese immigrants view themselves as Americans. They sadly may mot be viewed that way. Versus tje child of Russian immigrants faces mo such obstacle. But for both kids there is that sense of not being American. And for the Russian kid it us visible. For the Chinese kid, it is either visible or it might be imposed on them. If that makes sense
I agree that yes, those of us who are white are assumed to be American whereas those of us who are not, are less so much. That has to change. So yeah, it's about finding commonalities.
Completely agree about the commonalities. I would also add that, though this is far less damaging, the reverse (perhaps inverse?)is also true. If you are white, you are assumed not to be an immigrant. It is part of the construct that white people are American. But when I would tall about my mom's experience when she first came here, I would hear, "but you're white." Yes. And?
This is not damaging, not in the way that being assumed you're not American is. It is infuriating. This happens to other children of European immigrants.
But then for black people. I think sadly as a society we do not see black people as American in the same way we do white people. At the same time most black people's families have been here a lot longer than most white people's. And because of that, the child of Nigerian immigrants may be assumed to be American in a way her or she is not
I agree with this. I think I even listened to his podcast after that & he commented that he was speaking too fast -- maybe he was nervous? I guess we’re not supposed to give people the benefit of the doubt anymore?
The CRT proponents play a game of weasel words, and it’s really clear when it comes to talk about it in schools... “CRT is not being taught in K-12 schools” may be accurate in that the THEORY isn’t be taught, but it is plainly a priority of many school districts to APPLY CRT in education. (Getting rid of AP classes bc it doesn’t “look” equal if classes are not exactly lining up w/the population, talk about getting rid of standardized tests, etc., etc.).
I once made fun of Jimmy Concepts and then he changed his name to what I made fun of him for. Why didn’t I take screen shots? All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
The Cracker Barrel "controversy" as Jesse described it sounds like what Kat Rosenfield wrote about journalists creating news and marketing opportunities out of trolls' tweets: https://unherd.com/2022/06/the-media-is-run-by-trolls/.
The same thing happened not too long ago with the "controversy" over Kevin Feige saying that there were no plans to recast T'Challa after Chadwick Boseman's death. Some journalists found tweets where some people were angry that because racism, Disney is denying Black children a superhero while making 5,000 Spiderman movies. As if Disney/Marvel wasn't spending the past couple of years establishing the concept of the multiverse and had a whole TV series (Loki) where they established "variants" i.e. the idea that a core character could be played by multiple actors and that Tom Hiddleston wasn't being "recast" by a woman, child, or CGI alligator.
I guess when you have deadlines and quotas, the temptation to magnify local idiots' missed punches into all out culture war battles is overwhelming.
I hate when journalists pull random quotes from Twitter to illustrate a “trend” that isn’t really significant. The Toronto Star exemplified this when they put a bunch of inflammatory quotes from Twitter about the unvaccinated for a story about how Covid is dividing us all. “LET THEM DIE etc.” As if anybody outside of Twitter actually wants the unvaccinated to die. It also raises questions, like: how did the Toronto Star verify these are real people behind those Twitter accounts who aren’t intentionally trolling or trying to stoke division?
There is a whole ecosystem of Canadian journalists as well who spend their lives “reporting” on extremely minor internet characters with 13 000 followers on Telegram who say racist things, and have subsequently come to believe that this reflects a massive white supremacy problem in the country that’s out to murder all the journos. Whereas if they just used the block feature and touched grass a little more often they would find the country isn’t as awful as they believe.
I didn't realise Helen Pluckrose has withdrawn from public life. That's a real shame, I always found her thoughtful and interesting even when I didn't agree with her. Her letter exchange with Kathleen Stock was very good.
I followed her for a bit, more closely than James Lindsay. I don't know if her stepping back is because of James at all, but I got the impression Twitter was wearing her down. Some of us thrive on the dopamine, but it's not for everyone. I think she's still involved with Counterweight, her project to defend liberal ideas. https://counterweightsupport.com
I followed Helen on Twitter, and she did say the site was affecting her health adversely. She was so patient, with clear cogent arguments, and she still received constant hammerheaded abuse. I miss her intelligence on the site, but I’m glad she withdrew so her health could improve.
I was sad to hear this. I could not find a statement or announcement. I did find this which is "invite only" which I did not realize was a setting on substack
I'm a bit surprised that you didn't mention that James Lindsay apparently sustained a major head injury in the past (he said it in one of his Rogan interviews). This could have contributed to his strange turn.
Summer 2020 because he mentioned the injury caused him to lose his senses of taste and smell for a year, which is common with brain damage, and he was offering descriptions of at home therapies that he thinks helped him recover most of it, in the hopes that it would help people who have covid. Now it seems that he laughs at people with covid and blocks them when they attempt to describe, in detail, the heartbreaking reality of the brain damage involved. I should know. I stupidly attempted to describe my sister's struggle with long covid and how it affects the brain and how she lost her taste for a year. He blocked, but not before his supporters piled on and accused me of being a "Fauci Shill", a liar, a member of a "fat family who should have told my sister to cut down on the carbs and this wouldn't have happened " and oh, of course, an anti-human denizen of clown world.
OMG that is awful! I'm so sorry for all that you went through.
I think that head injuries are a big reason for a lot of antisocial behavior. I read a book years ago that discussed how many inmates have a history of TBI or extreme trauma.
Maybe, except the head injury was in 2011, and until a couple of years ago he was still pretty level-headed (so to speak). I don't know enough about brain damage to know if it can have that kind of delayed effect.
Aug 13, 2022·edited Aug 13, 2022Liked by Jesse Singal
By the way I would not be surprised if the editors of qualitative research got yelled at by the head of Sage publishing and that’s why they had to take it down and get investigated.
Also, I am a conservative who doesn't think James is crazy. But let me explain. He's not crazy, he is one of a million grifters since 2015 to become "icons of the right". I think he knows what gets him paid now, like Candice Owens, and just says what he needs to get my stupid peers to give him money. There has long been online leftist celebrity that allows people to make money, but the rise of the same thing on the right specifically online is a more recent event. Because there are fewer options for the right in this regard, a lot of people get caught up by opportunistic grifters.
I think The Daily Wire is a good example of this. 7 years ago, Ben Shapiro talked a lot more policy and principles, but now the entire outlet has become nothing but an outrage factory that feeds itself. Right wing outrage is an extremely lucrative venture right now. DW is playing the same game as Jimmy Concepts. I don't think he believes a word of what he says based on his history, I think he's milking the rubes.
Trump's store taught everyone how much money can be sucked out of rightwing anger. No way Jimmy Concepts went from a lib atheist to a Christian nationalist. He's a grifter.
I think there’s a place for JL in “the discourse” but I think you make some good points here. That said, conservative “grifting” isn’t new. Limbaugh is Ur example. My father listened and he was my earliest awareness that media wasn’t just different outlets spitting facts. But he became more grifty over time as well. I remember when Trump was primarying Limbaugh was a Cruz supporter and all but called Trump a clown. When Trumo won, Limbaugh fell in line and was MAGA as if he always was.
I think trump winning is KINDA where a Limbaugh went awry, but I grew up listening to him as well, with and without my dad in the 90s and 00s especially. I think his switch to Trump wasn't the biggest betrayal because Rush would say, and I would mostly agree, the actual enemy are the left. Have your internal conflict, but don't let it become an internecine conflict. It's still important to come home in the end and train your fire against the real enemy. I'm not saying that is flawless logic, I think it's rooted in the Buckley "vote for the best choice of the available options" rationale and I am sympathetic to it. I have lived as a closeted conservative in western washington my adult life because not only would I lose most of my friendships, but it would make my professional life hell. So I'm afraid the left will have to forgive me for thinking they are worse than the guy who got Roe overturned.
I saw that story as well, seems like pretty silly doctors who were afraid of legal recourse. Bit of hysteria there OR being deliberately difficult to make exactly this story.
Well, number one, I don't live in Louisiana, they aren't MY careless actions. Secondly, a doctor poorly interpreting a law isn't my fault. A lot of these "poorly written laws" have all the exceptions for instances like this and in cases where the mother's life is in danger, and the doctors are either being willfully ignorant or are just trying to make a point. There are very few instances of actually poorly written laws in the states that don't have exceptions written into the law and those have been pretty widely discussed and are being addressed. But also, the woman in Louisiana was sent to Florida to have the procedure done. The beauty of our system is that each state is it's own laboratory of freedom. It's not perfect, but it's the best the world has ever seen, so maybe pump the brakes a bit.
As an academic, it's worth pointing out that pay-to-publish is completely, 100% normal in academic publishing. Every journal, from Nature downwards, will bill authors 'page charges' to publish their papers. It's a completely different world to journalism and book publishing, in which anything that has even a whiff of pay-to-publish is considered suspect.
I know that Katie somewhat relented, but she only arrived at paying-to-publish being 'not as much of a red flag as it used to be'.
There's no hint of a red flag in paying a journal to publish a paper. World-leading academics at Ivy Leagues/R1's will regularly pay to publish in even the top journals. It's just how academic publishing works, unfortunately.
I have heard that every time James Lindsay sees a cute fluffy dog he cuts the dog’s leash with his samurai sword and yells: “Run free! Now they can never take you to the GROOOOOMER!”
The last segment in this episode made me feel oddly better about my own academic field. We may publish articles laden with jargon, the same old paint-by-numbers sentences that we fill in with the latest buzzwords, and arguments that are masturbatory in the figurative sense. But at least we don't publish autoethnography.
Same, though it’s annoying that he published in a journal with a pretty good impact factor and I have another rewrite of a paper that doesn’t involve sitting in my apartment and masturbating.
I was asked by a highly technical materials science run by Elsevier my gender and race and it was not optional. I chose prefer not to answer because you don't get to use my private info to feel better about women in science
Great, more pointless, stupid, bad faith, and false criticism of another stupid, pointless, bad faith moron. Again, the bar is SO low for criticizing James Lindsay well. He is one of the most psychotic people on the internet, and his brain has turned to mush in the last several years. The dude is worthless. But the only thing worse than a stupid pointless person is listening to stupid and pointless criticism of that person. Like Katie suggesting that maybe James is against gay people serving in the military now? He's a dipshit culture warrior, not a neocon. Or Jesse saying that James "couldn't understand why Trump would cause a backlash" after Katie literally just quoted him saying exactly that! Jesse, he changed his mind. He understands you, he just disagrees with you. Sure he changed his mind to a stupider position, but to then say "he can't understand what I'm saying" just shows that you can't understand what he's saying.
It's sad because I used to give you guys a fair bit of benefit of the doubt, but now I can't trust any of your reporting on dumb woke internet dramas. If you have no desire to fact check and get things right just because it's cool and fashionable to hate James Lindsay (as it should be, to be clear), why should I assume you have any desire to be fair or accurate when you're summarizing some Monkey decoration scandal in Portland? Thanks for confirming that you are not a worthwhile source.
I also loved Katie quoting a reasonable paragraph from a Lindsay, Pluckrose, & Boghossian piece, and then declaring, with no evidence whatsoever, that she suspects Pluckrose must have written it. Of course she is completely ignorant of the fact that Lindsay himself has made the exact point of that paragraph on his own numerous times. "A reasonable point appearing in a James Lindsay article? Surely he must have had a ghost writer! Don't worry everyone, Detective Katie is on the case!"
I didn’t enjoy the Lindsay part of this show. It seemed just unnecessary to give such energy to someone who clearly became psychotic bc of their Twitter behavior. Which Jesse is not far from! He tweets and deletes too much! Katie obviously gets twitter and just tweets pointed humor when necessary.
I was also disappointed in their willingness to even engage with their subject. Jesse actually said he won't listen to James Lindsay's podcast when it really gives a different perspective. I'm not steeped in post-modern thought but if I hadn't listened to JL I don't think I'd know about Herbert Marcuse & Repressive Tolerance, which is helpful background info in seeing what's going on in the culture right now. It just reminds me of my woke college friends going into fits if they see the name Bari Weiss or Andrew Sullivan, or saying JKR is a transphobe without daring to read her essay about her thoughts on gender on her website. It's intellectual laziness justified with tribalism.
I used to follow Lindsay a few years ago, and I am way more socially conservative than either of you guys, but I agree with Katie, I think the man has literally lost his mind. The thing about the Dr Phil clip isn’t that any individual claim is incorrect; it’s that he thought he could get in front of a crowd of the normiest possible normies and talk at that pace, using that vocabulary, and strike them as anything but a crazy person. It suggests a total inability to see himself from the outside.
I bought How To Have Impossible Conversations when it first came out & I enjoyed it. Despite Lindsay going off the deep end, it's a book I'll likely read again. The mention of Bret Weinstein caused me to shiver. I was in his corner after Evergreen but I couldn't buy into his Covid/Vaccination rhetoric and it got to the point where I found him and Heather unlistenable. I find the trajectories of both Lindsay and Weinstein/Heying similar.
Was that the whole thing about the rats and how there was some sort of conspiracy to cover up the fact that the rat lines they were using in lab experiments were genetically faulty? I do remember Bret starting to push that one hard and I think that was one of the first moments when my very basic bullshit detector pricked up. I think his brother genuinely tried to argue Bret missed out on some sort of Nobel prize for pushing that argument.
I found Eric's seemingly slavish admiration of Peter Thiel a little off as well and that only grew the more I listened to him.
The Weinsteins were two people who I found interesting when I first began to break out of my own echo chamber a couple of years ago and admittedly, I was bedazzled by them at first. I was (desperate) trying to find voices that would challenge me and help me to think differently and I thought the Weinsteins - along with a few others - were it and a bit. Like I said earlier though, once Covid hit, Bret seemed to go off a cliff and Eric became increasingly incoherent.
I guess the one good thing for me is my bullshit detector is getting quite a lot better.
And he wasn’t like that when Sokal Squared came out, there was a very visible deterioration into something I can only call a kind of monomania.
My only knowledge of JL not gleaned from the POD was from an interview he did with Boghossian on another podcast a while ago. He seemed like a totally different character to that one I kept hearing about.
I do wonder, and I say this as a recovering mathematician myself, if that might be part of the problem here. There is a ruthless logic to mathematical reasoning, if JL came to see wokism as a theorem he had proved and he then had to spend so much time demonstrating that proof to people who, in his eyes, didn’t get it then I can see why he got a bit obsessed and frustrated. Most mathematicians are not known for their ability to communicate with normal people either.
You might have something there about his personality and cognitive style. I wouldn't say "most" mathematicians are deficient in that way, but perhaps "many". (Speaking as another former mathematician.)
I'll note though that calling JL a mathematician or former mathematician is a stretch (IMO) since he apparently never actually worked in the field after getting his PhD. Nothing wrong with that, just makes the term dubious.
Now that I didn’t know, I assumed he was a university academic.
I like your analysis of what was wrong with the Dr. Phil clip. After I listened to this episode, it really bothered me that their only response to said clip was to brush it off as a “stream of shit” without explaining why they thought so. I actually had to listen to the clip twice because I was confused. I couldn’t find anything Lindsay said that was factually incorrect, but listening to it was still a bit irritating and it was really difficult for me to articulate why. I think you explained it really well.
I am not on Twitter but I do listen to his podcast. He really does his research but he gets super conspiracy minded very quickly. Sadly on the other hand he has sometimes been quite prescient. i also think the man does not know when to stop talking. I have rarely heard anyone who loves the sound of his voice as much as he did
So I listen to his podcast for the facts he presents -since he straight quotes from his sources. His editorializing leaves me uneasy.
That being said. I love love Katie and I like Jesse a lot and I have heard both on other podcasts. I would say that I have only heard them on podcasts with hosts who agree with them politically. They may have beeb on podcasts where there were disagreements and I never heard then. James Lindsay though. I have heard him on a few podcasts where there were genuine disagreements and he was great. Everyone respectfully disagreed and laid out their arguments quite well. I think that counts for a LOT.
He went crazy because all he did was hang out on Twitter and read absurd post modern nonsense to take a break from Twitter.
FYI I’m a conservative-ish vegetarian (gasp) and there are a lot of us. This Cracker Barrel thing is a made up media nothing. I don’t buy it for a second.
Also, the impossible meat is SO meat-like now that it grosses me out and I don’t like it. So, if you’re a vegetarian who misses meat you should dig in!
Lastly, Cracker Barrel is awesome. Their take home Thanksgiving dinner is exactly like the dinner my mom would have made (sage and onion stuffing a la Texas style) and their desserts are amazing too. You can take home the whole dinner for 8 - with sides of your choice - and pop it in the oven thanksgiving morning or you can just get “plates” with side choices for each person. Mom used to cook for three days to get everything ready (mostly for my dad) but I put her out of her misery about 15 years ago by bringing the whole thing from Cracker Barrel.
We love you Cracker Barrel, putting down the Thanksgiving patriarchy one red-billy family at a time since 2005!
❤️❤️❤️ Cracker Barrel
Aside from any other consideration, it’s my go-to restaurant for dinner when I’m traveling alone by car. I do notice that a number of the diners at CB are “old,” ie precisely the demographic being instructed by their doctors to lay off red meat. That wouldn’t make such a great ad though, for few elderly (including me) like being reminded of our advanced years ;)
It’s a great travel stop with friendly people, good comfort food, and a well lit clean exterior. Mmm…biscuits!
Good point! They may be getting healthier option requests from their more seasoned customer base ;)
Someone suggested in a Substack comment recently that vegetarians are doing more harm to the environment by eating highly processed meat substitutes than if they eat meat. I don't know if this pencils out (it definitely doesn't from the animals' point of view), but as a vegan I do tend to avoid the meat-like products. These seem aimed primarily at carnivores, sort of like vegan food with training wheels.
I think this has been pretty comprehensively debunked: meat production consistently outstrips all other forms of food production by a huge margin on one fundamental point alone, which is the fact that getting protein from an animal is in itself a more energy intensive process than getting it directly from the plant - because they eat plants. This is usually true even if there is little or no further processing of the end product, but we know that there very often is. Or to put it another way, you're comparing a 1-step process with a 2-step one. Which is going to requre more energy/water/carbon?
If you look at the charts that have been accepted by pretty much all governments that give a toss about climate change, there really isn't an argument for not at very least cutting down vastly on meat and dairy, because they are by far the biggest food-based culprits and among the biggest culprits in any category too. I'm not speaking purely from self-interest here either - I'm a vegetarian but not vegan, and I personally find it very hard to give up dairy. I don't, however, kid myself that this isn't a problem, and I try to cut down as much as I can.
Yes, what got me to stop eating red meat 47 years ago was learning that it took 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. I think that ratio has been revised down slightly, but the principle is the same.
Yep, and anything that does drive down the ratio further is almost certainly detrimental to any attempt at promoting animal welfare. More intensive farming methods are greener - and who would want to support that?
Oh that’s interesting. I’ve known a few people over the years who did it for “health reasons” who liked and missed meat so I guess they would like the substitutes. If you were doing it for environmental reasons this would be bad news. I’m one of those overly sentimental, made pets out of every creature on the farm or in the woods, and did the math on a pork chop on my plate pretty early kind of vegetarians. My mom swears I would refuse to eat meat when I was three and I did not grow up in a vegetarian familiar or friendly place - rural Texas ;) So to each their own of course but for me the more “meat-like” something is the more I want to barf!
It's not bad news - see above.
The monkeypox trajectory is like that of AIDS in that AIDS started out primarily afflicting men who had sex with men, but as it turns out some men who have sex with men also have sex with women. Jeez, who knew?! So it's more accurate to say that the people most at risk for monkeypox are people who have sex with men. And given that the average gay man has more sex than the average human, it stands to reason that men who have sex with men are most at risk. In general, at this point, and other caveats. (Why do I employ the tedious "men who have sex with men" instead of the snappier "gay men"? Because like AIDS, monkeypox is about behavior, not identity.)
And vaccine doses should probably be reserved for gay men until there are more doses. And gay men should be encouraged to get the vaccine.
I think for most people "gay," "straight," and "bisexual" are behavioral descriptors. "Straight man who occasionally sleeps with men" has the same dissonance as "vegan that occasionally enjoys a steak."
Using those words as identities is relatively new, isn't it?
I would say that gay as an identity made sense when there were common external threats affecting us all, be it illegality, discrimination, targeting by law enforcement or the AIDS epidemic. Once those common external threats were subdued or eliminated, the common behaviour (at least in a broad sense) remained the only thing shared bye people who could otherwise just get on with their lives in peace. This is why the LGBT queue identity movement was always doomed to fail, whatever external threats remain R entirely different across the constituent parts and there aren’t even common behaviours two define a larger community identity.
I think it can be ambiguous even if you assume they're behavioral descriptors. It can be hard to draw the line between gay/straight and bisexual. Sure, people who are equal opportunity for both sexes are bi, but what about people who prefer one sex over the other 9 out of 10 times? They're technically engaging in bisexual behavior over time, but I get why they wouldn't call themselves that since their general behavior is skewed in one direction.
As I type, I'm also realizing I've seen this more in the gay community. I have gay and lesbian friends who will occasionally find a woman/man that strikes their fancy and go for it, without calling themselves bisexual. I feel people who are mostly straight will call themselves bi if they occasionally sleep with the same sex. Or heteroflexible, if people still say that ever.
Yup. When I worked in sexual health, it was about men who have sex with men. MSMs. MSWs. And WSWs.
But now there are trans men who.are of course men. Now. If they are having sex with gay men, Inam guessing they are at the same risk as gay males. And then of course what percentage of trans men have sex with men, versus with women
Same for trans women. I am betting the trans women, who are woman, who have sex with men are at the same risk as gay men
In 2019, 69% of new HIV infections were in MSM. If monkeypox becomes endemic and follows the same trajectory as AIDS, it will never stop being a disease that primarily affects gay dudes.
It seems like the crucial empirical question is, what is the reproduction number R for monkeypox outside of the MSM community? If it's lower than 1, we would expect some cases on the fringe of the community (those who have sex or other close contact with an MSM) and a few beyond that, but not a wider epidemic. In that case it seems reasonable to focus the public health messaging primarily on the MSM population and actively avoid spooking people outside that population (but not claiming there's zero risk, of course).
If instead the R value outside the MSM population is greater than one, we would expect a wider epidemic of some sort, and the messaging should be different.
I haven't seen anyone addressing this empirical question yet in the general media. It might well be too early to tell. Any thoughts from PH experts?
This is a really great assessment by demographic and one I’m almost embarrassed to say I had never thought of.
Are the children catching it through means other than the very depressing ones I assume?
As I understand, its spread by close contact. So sex among adults but children have closer physical contact with both family adults and other children for completely innocent and developmentally necessary reasons.
Yes - exactly this. They are vulnerable to catching it because kids are more inclined to get physically close to their caregivers, teachers, parents, peers etc in a way adults do not. Nothing more sinister than that.
I'm not aware of any children catching it - this is hypothetical. Where they have caught it, in other countries mainly, they are likely to spread it purely for the reason that kids generally have lots of close contact with other kids.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/7th-child-us-tests-positive-monkeypox/story?id=88417787
The Economist has a brief take on a paper that predicts little chance of general spread:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/08/18/monkeypox-has-spread-rapidly-in-male-sex-networks-will-it-spread-further
I keep reading that those of us who were vaccinated for smallpox (which US govt routinely did until 1972 and US military did until 1991) are protected. I am not in a high-risk category anyway, but shouldn't this get more press? I hear people worrying about this who were probably vaccinated.
I'm afraid not as the smallpox vaccine only gives protection for 3-5 years so this would only apply if you had them regularly, and recently.
I didn't know this. I bet it would be getting a lot more press if it weren't just we geezers who are affected. Maybe the assumption is that if you're old enough to have gotten the smallpox vaccine, you probably aren't having a lot of sex. ;)
The masturbatory-paper author’s pedo background is why it makes me grind my teeth whenever anyone talks about “studies show” and non-offending pedophiles.
People lie. People find justifications for their behavior. Any research based on what pedophiles say is inherently biases that way, but the “science says” people want us to shut up and listen to their proclamations, some pf which might be bases on research done by literal pedophiles to justify themselves.
I don’t think most of the professors who have gotten in trouble for supporting “non-offending MAPs” are pedophiles--most are just open-minded enough that their brains have fallen out--but most of them have acted self-righteous about things that are not by any stretch proven.
“Studies show” or “Research says” always begs the question to me: what studies, who’s research? I hear these phrases often in secondary education usually to justify some change to education that seems overly complex and not that effective
I am sure that there are paedophiles who really are aware how damaging acting on their desires would be, and manage to refrain. But it’s got to be really tough. And they do it by staying well away from anything that could tempt them.
In cases like this I find it very hard to conclude that this guy is not a paedophile (or maybe technically a hebephile) who has found ways to justify and indulge himsef via academia. And people who indulge and justify their paedophilic desires are far more likely to abuse. Spend any time reading research with abusers and you will see their self-justifications. They really do convince themselves that the young boys they abuse ‘wanted’ it, that they were ‘helping’ them ‘explore their sexuality’. It’s stomach-churning.
This guy needs his hard-drive checked.
I agree there probably are people who are sexually attracted to children who don’t offend. I just don’t take anyone at their word that they belong to this category and don’t believe we have any evidence of what would help them continue to not offend.
There’s been at least one treatment for sex offenders that made them more likely to reoffend after they got out of prison.
In general, I believe reducing stigma and increasing community increases behavior. That is why I don’t want to reduce the stigma against sexual attraction to children.
There should be a stigma attached to sexual attraction to children.
I think the problem arises when you have people who are attracted to kids but for not want to be. Abd as it is, the stigma is so great that they cannot access treatment. I also think if calling someone a MAP makes it easier to access treatment, or to be willing to ask for it, great
However. Attraction to kids is not equivalent to being gay and acting on that attrq Yukon is inherently harmful
YES! Yes! Yes!
Agree completely. I am confounded by how multiple people approved this "study."
I briefly followed James Lindsay on Twitter and unfollowed both because he just tweeted way too much and because it quickly became clear he was going off the conspiratorial deep end.
That said, I don't think the Dr. Phil clip is that off base. CRT in schools is one of those examples of "it's not happening but it's good if it is." When Rufo started his anti-CRT campaign the response was mostly dismissal, that CRT was an obscure field of study that you'd only encounter in law schools.
Not long after, the NEA voted to support critical race theory in schools, and to fund research opposing the anti-CRT organizations:
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teachers-unions-vow-to-defend-members-in-critical-race-theory-fight/2021/07.
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One such measure, introduced by the NEA’s board of directors, said the nation’s largest teachers’ union will support and lead campaigns that “result in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, critical race theory, and ethnic … studies curriculum in pre-K-12 and higher education.” The measure is part of a larger $675,000 effort to “eradicate institutional racism” in public schools.
...
NEA delegates also adopted a $56,500 measure to “research the organizations attacking educators doing anti-racist work” so that members are prepared to respond.
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I agree with this. In the Dr. Phil clip Lindsay gives a great example of how not to follow any good advice on rhetoric, careful and respectful argumentation, etc., and of course he looks like a fool. But if you actually look at the substance of what he's saying in the clip, it's not at all ridiculous.
Not trying to defend anything else he's said recently or his Twitter behavior, but just pointing out that this particular clip isn't as damning as some people think it is.
I agree, it’s not what he’s saying but his affect. The words are a perfectly reasonable opinion but the delivery is weird. He almost seems manic.
People think it's "damning" not because he's 100% wrong, but because he sounds completely insane to any normal person listening. He's not giving any context and assuming the entire audience spends as much time on Twitter as he does.
I read White Fragility because of him, this was prior to the pandemic, and he was posting snippets from the book and calling out the ridiculousness. Hardly anyone was doing this at the time.
Teachers will often say CRT isn't in schools but basically this is a gaslight. There are concepts related to it at work, and there are books we read for professional development that are within that field. It would be akin to saying "we are not doing Reaganomics" and yet we had to read a book by Dinesh D'Souza.
That said, I don't necessarily disagree with the things we do either. For reference, this isn't "separate kids into groups based on their race" type stuff, but more working with students to help them express themselves in a more clear way which may be based on their cultural background, or not (many of my students who are non white tend not to think in race based terms)
If you are helping kids express themselves in clearer ways based on cultural background, then wouldn't it ebd up with kids being separated by race? Like the child of Chinese immigrants comes from a very different culture from a kid who came to the US from the Dominican Republic at 2.
Also.i thought you had said POC kids were more likely to view thenselvez in race based terms. Then I reread and realized you had said the opposite
Because I had thought maybe it depends ob the region, and maybe perceptions have changed since I was a kid. But when I was in high school, it was "I'm Haitian" or "Im Chinese" or whatever.
I do thing the ciltural versus raxe view might be in part that a white kod is dear more likely to come from a family that has been in the US for hundreds of years than an Asian kid. And if your family has been here a long time, are you German, Irish, what?
Like. My high school was virtually all immigrants or children of immigrants. So rarely was someone Asian or White or Hispanic. It was Kprean or Palistani or Russian or Dominican .
No, it wouldn't. Because this isn't so much "oh the white kids are oppressors" type thinking. But rather it's more about helping students to understand how they see themselves which isn't really cut and dried. Like, I don't know how they see themselves, that is for them to decide. You may ask students what they are and they might say black or they may say Nigerian. Some others will say "I am just me." Also the majority of my students are non white like there are not many white students going to an urban NYC high school.
I kinda posit to them to say "Am I white? If so, what makes me white?" Because I often think about this, I don't really consider myself "white" even if I am just assumed to be. I have Irish/Italian heritage from my parents, but I more view myself as American. Maybe that is white "privilege" or maybe I am thinking that this is a different way of viewing things.
Oh. I wasn't thinking oppressors. I thought you meant the students were split into groups based on ethnicity. But it sounds like this is a class discussion.
Yeah. I went to Bronx Science, which I suppose is not "urban," but the locale is such that the neighborhood was totally Dominican and a little Puerto Rican (now there are some Bangladeshi families as well, but the vast majority are Dominican). While the school at the time was literally the most diverse public high school, but still mostly.Korean, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, and Russian Jews. Some Dominican kids. Some Haitian kids. Nigerian. But like no African American kids. And so our school population looked nothing g like the neighborhood, which was awkward.
But I DO truly believe that so much of this is about immigration rather than race. Also I think it is what happens if you grow up in NYC as a child of immigrants.
And I 100% believe that now that we equate immigrants with POC, certain beliefs that pretty much relate to all immigrants - this is now believed to be a POC thing.
Like. Not saying I am black but I am Nigerian. Or I am Korean, not saying Asian..
There were a few white American kids and they considered themselves American but of like Irish heritage or whatever. The bast majority of white kids, who were an absolute minority, were Russian Jews. And they too were like I am.Russian.
But think about it. I was technically a white American kid, but I didn't grow up feeling American so I never called myself that.
But identifying by where ypur parents came from? That seemed to be common to all of us whose parents were not American.
And this was HUGE for me because previously I had gone to schools where pretty much everyone's parents was American. And it was so great to finally go to a place where there were other people like me, even if we didnt look alike
I think white privilege comes into it in this way: if you are white and consider yourself American, no one questions your Anericanness. This is nit true if you are POC. If you speak without an accent, no one is surprised. I also think if you are white and grew up speaking another language, it is not viewed as disloyal in a way it is for Chinese immigrants
The white privilege comes in how others perceive us. So plenty of children of Chinese immigrants view themselves as Americans. They sadly may mot be viewed that way. Versus tje child of Russian immigrants faces mo such obstacle. But for both kids there is that sense of not being American. And for the Russian kid it us visible. For the Chinese kid, it is either visible or it might be imposed on them. If that makes sense
.
I agree that yes, those of us who are white are assumed to be American whereas those of us who are not, are less so much. That has to change. So yeah, it's about finding commonalities.
Completely agree about the commonalities. I would also add that, though this is far less damaging, the reverse (perhaps inverse?)is also true. If you are white, you are assumed not to be an immigrant. It is part of the construct that white people are American. But when I would tall about my mom's experience when she first came here, I would hear, "but you're white." Yes. And?
This is not damaging, not in the way that being assumed you're not American is. It is infuriating. This happens to other children of European immigrants.
But then for black people. I think sadly as a society we do not see black people as American in the same way we do white people. At the same time most black people's families have been here a lot longer than most white people's. And because of that, the child of Nigerian immigrants may be assumed to be American in a way her or she is not
I agree with this. I think I even listened to his podcast after that & he commented that he was speaking too fast -- maybe he was nervous? I guess we’re not supposed to give people the benefit of the doubt anymore?
The CRT proponents play a game of weasel words, and it’s really clear when it comes to talk about it in schools... “CRT is not being taught in K-12 schools” may be accurate in that the THEORY isn’t be taught, but it is plainly a priority of many school districts to APPLY CRT in education. (Getting rid of AP classes bc it doesn’t “look” equal if classes are not exactly lining up w/the population, talk about getting rid of standardized tests, etc., etc.).
WOAH! You just quoted Sarah McLachlan’s I Will Remember You… (Doobie Dum Dum Dum)
I play guitar in her band and co-write some of her songs (not that one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).
Heh.
I once made fun of Jimmy Concepts and then he changed his name to what I made fun of him for. Why didn’t I take screen shots? All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
The Cracker Barrel "controversy" as Jesse described it sounds like what Kat Rosenfield wrote about journalists creating news and marketing opportunities out of trolls' tweets: https://unherd.com/2022/06/the-media-is-run-by-trolls/.
The same thing happened not too long ago with the "controversy" over Kevin Feige saying that there were no plans to recast T'Challa after Chadwick Boseman's death. Some journalists found tweets where some people were angry that because racism, Disney is denying Black children a superhero while making 5,000 Spiderman movies. As if Disney/Marvel wasn't spending the past couple of years establishing the concept of the multiverse and had a whole TV series (Loki) where they established "variants" i.e. the idea that a core character could be played by multiple actors and that Tom Hiddleston wasn't being "recast" by a woman, child, or CGI alligator.
I guess when you have deadlines and quotas, the temptation to magnify local idiots' missed punches into all out culture war battles is overwhelming.
There's a lot recently about "This CONTROVERSIAL opinion" and it ends up being like one person disliked a tweet.
I hate when journalists pull random quotes from Twitter to illustrate a “trend” that isn’t really significant. The Toronto Star exemplified this when they put a bunch of inflammatory quotes from Twitter about the unvaccinated for a story about how Covid is dividing us all. “LET THEM DIE etc.” As if anybody outside of Twitter actually wants the unvaccinated to die. It also raises questions, like: how did the Toronto Star verify these are real people behind those Twitter accounts who aren’t intentionally trolling or trying to stoke division?
There is a whole ecosystem of Canadian journalists as well who spend their lives “reporting” on extremely minor internet characters with 13 000 followers on Telegram who say racist things, and have subsequently come to believe that this reflects a massive white supremacy problem in the country that’s out to murder all the journos. Whereas if they just used the block feature and touched grass a little more often they would find the country isn’t as awful as they believe.
I didn't realise Helen Pluckrose has withdrawn from public life. That's a real shame, I always found her thoughtful and interesting even when I didn't agree with her. Her letter exchange with Kathleen Stock was very good.
I followed her for a bit, more closely than James Lindsay. I don't know if her stepping back is because of James at all, but I got the impression Twitter was wearing her down. Some of us thrive on the dopamine, but it's not for everyone. I think she's still involved with Counterweight, her project to defend liberal ideas. https://counterweightsupport.com
My impression as well is that she is still leading Counterweight. If she has gone silent on Twitter, more power to her!
It should be legitimate to be a public intellectual and only contribute to the discourse when you have something cogent and well thought out to say.
I followed Helen on Twitter, and she did say the site was affecting her health adversely. She was so patient, with clear cogent arguments, and she still received constant hammerheaded abuse. I miss her intelligence on the site, but I’m glad she withdrew so her health could improve.
I was sad to hear this. I could not find a statement or announcement. I did find this which is "invite only" which I did not realize was a setting on substack
I'm a bit surprised that you didn't mention that James Lindsay apparently sustained a major head injury in the past (he said it in one of his Rogan interviews). This could have contributed to his strange turn.
It's sad because I watched his videos in
Summer 2020 because he mentioned the injury caused him to lose his senses of taste and smell for a year, which is common with brain damage, and he was offering descriptions of at home therapies that he thinks helped him recover most of it, in the hopes that it would help people who have covid. Now it seems that he laughs at people with covid and blocks them when they attempt to describe, in detail, the heartbreaking reality of the brain damage involved. I should know. I stupidly attempted to describe my sister's struggle with long covid and how it affects the brain and how she lost her taste for a year. He blocked, but not before his supporters piled on and accused me of being a "Fauci Shill", a liar, a member of a "fat family who should have told my sister to cut down on the carbs and this wouldn't have happened " and oh, of course, an anti-human denizen of clown world.
OMG that is awful! I'm so sorry for all that you went through.
I think that head injuries are a big reason for a lot of antisocial behavior. I read a book years ago that discussed how many inmates have a history of TBI or extreme trauma.
Maybe, except the head injury was in 2011, and until a couple of years ago he was still pretty level-headed (so to speak). I don't know enough about brain damage to know if it can have that kind of delayed effect.
I didn’t know that, how sad. I have a childhood friend who had a head injury at 16 and was never the same. She’s like a completely different person.
By the way I would not be surprised if the editors of qualitative research got yelled at by the head of Sage publishing and that’s why they had to take it down and get investigated.
I can’t imagine being a person who is trying to run a business talking to someone who thought this was a good idea.
Also, I am a conservative who doesn't think James is crazy. But let me explain. He's not crazy, he is one of a million grifters since 2015 to become "icons of the right". I think he knows what gets him paid now, like Candice Owens, and just says what he needs to get my stupid peers to give him money. There has long been online leftist celebrity that allows people to make money, but the rise of the same thing on the right specifically online is a more recent event. Because there are fewer options for the right in this regard, a lot of people get caught up by opportunistic grifters.
I think The Daily Wire is a good example of this. 7 years ago, Ben Shapiro talked a lot more policy and principles, but now the entire outlet has become nothing but an outrage factory that feeds itself. Right wing outrage is an extremely lucrative venture right now. DW is playing the same game as Jimmy Concepts. I don't think he believes a word of what he says based on his history, I think he's milking the rubes.
Trump's store taught everyone how much money can be sucked out of rightwing anger. No way Jimmy Concepts went from a lib atheist to a Christian nationalist. He's a grifter.
I think there’s a place for JL in “the discourse” but I think you make some good points here. That said, conservative “grifting” isn’t new. Limbaugh is Ur example. My father listened and he was my earliest awareness that media wasn’t just different outlets spitting facts. But he became more grifty over time as well. I remember when Trump was primarying Limbaugh was a Cruz supporter and all but called Trump a clown. When Trumo won, Limbaugh fell in line and was MAGA as if he always was.
I think trump winning is KINDA where a Limbaugh went awry, but I grew up listening to him as well, with and without my dad in the 90s and 00s especially. I think his switch to Trump wasn't the biggest betrayal because Rush would say, and I would mostly agree, the actual enemy are the left. Have your internal conflict, but don't let it become an internecine conflict. It's still important to come home in the end and train your fire against the real enemy. I'm not saying that is flawless logic, I think it's rooted in the Buckley "vote for the best choice of the available options" rationale and I am sympathetic to it. I have lived as a closeted conservative in western washington my adult life because not only would I lose most of my friendships, but it would make my professional life hell. So I'm afraid the left will have to forgive me for thinking they are worse than the guy who got Roe overturned.
I saw that story as well, seems like pretty silly doctors who were afraid of legal recourse. Bit of hysteria there OR being deliberately difficult to make exactly this story.
Well, number one, I don't live in Louisiana, they aren't MY careless actions. Secondly, a doctor poorly interpreting a law isn't my fault. A lot of these "poorly written laws" have all the exceptions for instances like this and in cases where the mother's life is in danger, and the doctors are either being willfully ignorant or are just trying to make a point. There are very few instances of actually poorly written laws in the states that don't have exceptions written into the law and those have been pretty widely discussed and are being addressed. But also, the woman in Louisiana was sent to Florida to have the procedure done. The beauty of our system is that each state is it's own laboratory of freedom. It's not perfect, but it's the best the world has ever seen, so maybe pump the brakes a bit.
Greg Gutfeld did the same thing. I don’t expect much of any of these people but that one hurt.
As an academic, it's worth pointing out that pay-to-publish is completely, 100% normal in academic publishing. Every journal, from Nature downwards, will bill authors 'page charges' to publish their papers. It's a completely different world to journalism and book publishing, in which anything that has even a whiff of pay-to-publish is considered suspect.
I know that Katie somewhat relented, but she only arrived at paying-to-publish being 'not as much of a red flag as it used to be'.
There's no hint of a red flag in paying a journal to publish a paper. World-leading academics at Ivy Leagues/R1's will regularly pay to publish in even the top journals. It's just how academic publishing works, unfortunately.
I have heard that every time James Lindsay sees a cute fluffy dog he cuts the dog’s leash with his samurai sword and yells: “Run free! Now they can never take you to the GROOOOOMER!”
The last segment in this episode made me feel oddly better about my own academic field. We may publish articles laden with jargon, the same old paint-by-numbers sentences that we fill in with the latest buzzwords, and arguments that are masturbatory in the figurative sense. But at least we don't publish autoethnography.
Same, though it’s annoying that he published in a journal with a pretty good impact factor and I have another rewrite of a paper that doesn’t involve sitting in my apartment and masturbating.
I was asked by a highly technical materials science run by Elsevier my gender and race and it was not optional. I chose prefer not to answer because you don't get to use my private info to feel better about women in science
Great, more pointless, stupid, bad faith, and false criticism of another stupid, pointless, bad faith moron. Again, the bar is SO low for criticizing James Lindsay well. He is one of the most psychotic people on the internet, and his brain has turned to mush in the last several years. The dude is worthless. But the only thing worse than a stupid pointless person is listening to stupid and pointless criticism of that person. Like Katie suggesting that maybe James is against gay people serving in the military now? He's a dipshit culture warrior, not a neocon. Or Jesse saying that James "couldn't understand why Trump would cause a backlash" after Katie literally just quoted him saying exactly that! Jesse, he changed his mind. He understands you, he just disagrees with you. Sure he changed his mind to a stupider position, but to then say "he can't understand what I'm saying" just shows that you can't understand what he's saying.
It's sad because I used to give you guys a fair bit of benefit of the doubt, but now I can't trust any of your reporting on dumb woke internet dramas. If you have no desire to fact check and get things right just because it's cool and fashionable to hate James Lindsay (as it should be, to be clear), why should I assume you have any desire to be fair or accurate when you're summarizing some Monkey decoration scandal in Portland? Thanks for confirming that you are not a worthwhile source.
I also loved Katie quoting a reasonable paragraph from a Lindsay, Pluckrose, & Boghossian piece, and then declaring, with no evidence whatsoever, that she suspects Pluckrose must have written it. Of course she is completely ignorant of the fact that Lindsay himself has made the exact point of that paragraph on his own numerous times. "A reasonable point appearing in a James Lindsay article? Surely he must have had a ghost writer! Don't worry everyone, Detective Katie is on the case!"
I didn’t enjoy the Lindsay part of this show. It seemed just unnecessary to give such energy to someone who clearly became psychotic bc of their Twitter behavior. Which Jesse is not far from! He tweets and deletes too much! Katie obviously gets twitter and just tweets pointed humor when necessary.
I rolled my eyes so hard they almost spasmed when Katie suggested that Lindsay might be an anti-Semite. Give me a fucking break.
I was also disappointed in their willingness to even engage with their subject. Jesse actually said he won't listen to James Lindsay's podcast when it really gives a different perspective. I'm not steeped in post-modern thought but if I hadn't listened to JL I don't think I'd know about Herbert Marcuse & Repressive Tolerance, which is helpful background info in seeing what's going on in the culture right now. It just reminds me of my woke college friends going into fits if they see the name Bari Weiss or Andrew Sullivan, or saying JKR is a transphobe without daring to read her essay about her thoughts on gender on her website. It's intellectual laziness justified with tribalism.
I thought they didn't put any effort into their thoughts on Peter Boghossian either. He was just on Bari Weiss' Honestly podcast last September, I wonder if they even listened to it? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/honestly-with-bari-weiss/id1570872415?i=1000534979481
Seriously. His podcast, even if he is unnervingly verbose,,is very very well researched.