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.
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!
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.)
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.
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 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 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'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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.)
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.
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.
---
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.
---
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.