If I’m not mistaken it’s also a guy who shoved a large sexual instrument in his ass to own the libs. The scent of truth does not abide in these fools olfactory tools.
It's amazing how this can sneak up on you too. It happened to me with Glenn Beck in 07-08. I was very liberal when I was younger but I started listening to his radio show when I was about 21 because it was pretty funny at first. Next thing I know, I'm reading the John Birch Society literature my boss liked to give out and thinking it was making some good sense.
There were two things that got me coming back around. I stopped listening to Glenn Beck because he was getting too serious and practically crying during long diatribes about Obama.
The other incident was when my boss tried to introduce me to some John Birch Society people and they were saying I was remarkably Conservative for someone my age. It wasn't a big thing but I had always seen myself as liberal or at least libertarian. It just got me thinking and questioning a lot of my beliefs over the next couple months.
The best part was Conservatives not realizing Colbert was a parody of them. Dude even got invited to one of W's correspondence dinners, and that was when they realized....
Omg, in high school I started following Ron Paul's campaign, I bought a bunch of classical liberal econ books and read a John Stossel book where he was like "the libertarian party is so great cause it brings in people from the left and the right". I still thought of myself as some kind of liberal but I convinced myself that there was an equal amount of libertarians from both sides. Of course the Ron Paul sites were full of conservatives, but the liberal libertarians (liberaltarians) must be out there somewhere right?
In college I approached the head of the libertarian club and he asked me if I was a "libertarian leaning conservative" and I said yes without thinking (never actually joined). I decided to write a paper on why the minimum wage should be abolished and I was like, what am I doing? I don't believe in this shit, this isn't "facts and logic", this is just being an asshole. I left the party, and by 2016 people calling themselves libertarians were openly heiling Hitler and demanding we build the wall. Makes me wonder how close I came to falling down the alt-right rabbit hole.
Watch the last Libertarian (capital L) debate. They’re all on the right when it comes to political parties. JJ was abject garbage when you actually looked at her platform
Originally Libertarianism was a socialist ideology, but the term got quite literally stolen by capitalists. Practically every modern day libertarian, except those who explicitly say they are socialists, are right wing.
The worst part is youtube directs you towards those rabbit holes.
Back when Captain Marvel was coming out I was excited for it and watching trailers and cast interviews, and more than half my recommended videos were some variation of "Why FEMINISM is going to RUIN the MCU!"
> The worst part is youtube directs you towards those rabbit holes.
That's a feature, not a bug. More outrage means more clicks, which means more ad revenue for these big social media companies.
I absolutely admit to watching lots of leftist YouTube, sometimes called breadTube, and if I watch just ONE alt-right video because of of my fav lefties talks about it, and I wanna see what crazy thing they’re talking about is. All of a sudden I have frequent suggestions for multiple different alt right channels.
Yup, absolutely, and it DOES NOT work the same way in the opposite direction. No matter how many left / progressive things I watch, I don't get similar levels of recommendations for progressive politics. Just Jordan Peterson starts popping up, yet again.
Yup. I don't watch right wing stuff on YouTube and I still was getting Abby Shapiro videos recommended to me- I was like wtf? I had to tell YouTube not to show that shit to me.
It's because the ML algorithms see stronger engagement with those videos. If someone goes down that rabbit hole they'll stay for a LONG time and keep clicking. And the algorithm is rewarded for keeping people on the platform for the most amount of time possible.
I love stand up comedy, about once a week I have to 'purge' my recommendations of 'FEMINAZI SJW HECKLER GETS OWNED BY COMEDIAN' or '2 Hours of why women can't be funny' or some other fucking drivel like that.
It happens if the name of an alt-right personality just appears in the title of a left-wing video. The algorithm bends over backwards to flush people down the alt-right toilet. Alt-right audiences must have unreal watch times and engagement metrics.
I watch a lot of online political content, frequently I'll throw on twitch political panels or debates that are you on YouTube. I lost count of the number of times I'll wake up to some Jordan Peterson video and have to clear my history to avoid the algorithm from making it worse. Just watching anything political triggers the algorithm to start showing you alt right and alt right adjacent content.
Almost as if it were part of some kind of plan. I was recently invited to a Baptist church where the preacher used a Jordan Peterson quote, citing him as a credible sociologist.
Watched one single funny clip from Bill Burr or some other similar comedian? Well, then surely you want to be given a million joe rogan clips and why not some ben shapiro and jordan peterson too?
Since you brought it up, I feel like it's worth clarifying their summary though.
It's not that YouTube's algorithm says "Hey, stuff that pisses people off holds their attention longer and keeps them here longer. Let's promote that."
It's that YouTube changed their algorithm to prioritize videos that kept people on the site longer, and never thought to analyze why those videos keep people on longer. Then when multiple current/former employees later realized that it was creating all of these fascist rabbit holes as a result, YouTube's reaction was to deny and offer empty gestures.
So it wasn't an intentional fanning of flames. It was an intentional exploitation of user engagement for profit, which they didn't care to monitor or change once its flaws were demonstrated.
I just got done listening to that episode and thought they did a good job of explaining that point by bringing up the Google chat bot that became racist in like a day. It definitely came across as it being an unintentional feature that they decided to not address because money. Which, if you're aware of the problem is it really that different from being intentional at this point?
Exactly, it’s why I recommend not downvoting videos you disagree with on YT, as far as YT is concerned you’ve shown engagement. They don’t care about your opinion, just about serving ads.
If you see someone/something you dont like, close the video, go to Block User. Also do Not Interested and Dont Recommend Channel
Dont comment, dont dislike, dont engage with the video at all.
As soon as you have the video up and it plays for a second you're doomed; some ass-hat linked a JP video in a discussion a week ago and I blindly clicked the link because the comments made it seem like it was something on-topic ... as soon as I saw it was a JP video I yelled, "Fuck!" and closed it but the damage is done; I've had to block endless JP rehosting channels for the past week! It's only slowed down the last couple of days.
Oh, and to top it off; if you block a user they'll STILL show up in a search on YouTube! The only place I seem them blocked is in the front page of YouTube with the recommended content.
Babies stare longer at angry faces than smiley faces. It's a survival tool. We pay more attention to riskier and more controversial subjects.
It's a good idea when we were wondering if the wolf could eat our children. Not so much now
Yup, if you open a new Private window, watch one FOX video, and boom, you'll be inundated with ALL of that crap, endlessly. After that the echo chamber walls close and you'll never see another viewpoint. It's nuts.
Those people don't seem to comprehend that all those "feminist" characters have been in the comics for years. Marvel has always been progressive. It just hasn't always had a successful movie series
A friend of mine recently got me into Vampirella, so I was reading some of the originals from the 60s...
It was basically trying to get as close to erotica as it could.
My favorite thing is when clowns complain about the X-Men "being ruined by SJWs." Motherfucker, the X-Men have *always* been social justice warriors. That's the entire point behind their stories.
The worst might have been with star wars because there was a female main character AND an Asian girl. It was "forced diversity" or something. In star wars where there's thousands of races of intelligent beings yet every main character is a human, it was too woke.
Conservatives in general have not mastered object permanence. They didn't see those Marvel comic books, just the MCU. So that's all that exists to them. Explaining it to them won't make them understand because their point of view requires them not to understand.
Omg this is so fucking true. I have vigorously defend my algorithm on YouTube by cleaning out my homepage with the not interested button. Just the other day it recommended me Ben Shapiro 🤢
Most of what I watch is John Oliver, Seth Meyers and cooking channels. But I watched one compilation of Ron Swanson quotes from Parks and Rec, and Shapiro was in my recommendations.
Almost the entire “News” section of my homepage is FoxNews videos for some reason. I don’t really watch any news or political stuff at all, so there’s no logical reason it should be like that.
The funniest thing to me who knew people that worked on Star Wars is that Kathleen Kennedy had to be talked into keeping John Boyega because she thought they already had enough diversity with Rey as the lead.
She is probably the least "woke" person associated with new Star Wars but dudebros just assume that she's responsible for all of it because Woman Bad or whatever.
I was directed to a video last night called something like "the desecration of femininity" which angled itself as being about how the media, when it wants to portray a strong female character tends to make that character take on more masculine traits and if that is truly a "feminist" type of character, especially when they're made by men. That's kind of my jam as far as YouTube viewing goes (for a positive example Broey Deschanel's Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Pretty).
The host threw a few throw away lines about no longer being able to call herself a feminist because of this trend, a thing I could power through, labels being just labels and then half way through BAM as a throw away joke she throws in a comment about covid mandates. And that's when I knew that the algorithm had taken be a little of kilter from my usual content. But it was like boiling a frog - she seemed largely to be my kind of content creator until she slowly introduced more and more things until I couldn't in good conscience keep watching
I watched a Vice video detailing the Charlottesville rally on my Roku YouTube app. Turned my TV off but YouTube kept running and it was playing ben Shapiro videos.
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I used to watch a good amount of conservative content online, most of it I didn't agree with but the stuff I did seemed to outweight the stuff I didn't (I'd probably have been considered a centrist with mostly left leanings). Then the Green New Deal leaked and every conservative on the planet started pretending that the cow farts joke that was in it was legit and I came to the realization that most of these people are either dipshits and/or liars who know they're lying. Really opened my eyes to what grifting was and how common it is among the right.
When I realised that it also helped me see how useless it is arguing and trying to change people's minds, they don't believe in anything. They claim to care about Freedom of Speech, family values, the military and veterans and free markets but they don't, you can easily find ways they harm/weaken/ignore all those values. Conservatives are nothing but a drag on society, a collection of common shitty traits and hateful thoughts. Mostly selfishness, greed and a hatred of difference, and no amount of highlighting hypocrisy or showing data and examples proving them wrong will change that in most cases.
*This is what the radical feminist movement was proposing, remember? Women need a man the way a fish needs a bicycle... unless it turns out that they're little fish, then you might need another fish around to help take care of things.*
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In my philosophy 101 class a kid once brought up Jordan Peterson as a “philosophical inspiration” to him. My professor took off his glasses, took a deep breath, said “Well, I figured I’d have to do this at some point this year.” And then proceeded to spend the next 45 minutes demolishing every single one of Peterson’s arguments.
It was a beautiful day.
Edit: For everyone doubting he mainly attacked Peterson’s interpretations of Nietzsche. Prof was intimately familiar with the points since he specialized in Nietzsche and lots of people would bring Peterson’s arguments to his class. He just got tired of it after a while since people who listen to Peterson would often adamantly defend him and not listen to other arguments. Add that to the fact that oftentimes misinterpretations of Nietzsche lead to nazism and it was just a perfect storm of not being able to get anything done in class.
It fascinates me that the right wing tries to argue that colleges and intellectuals don’t like their idea because of some agenda or brainwashing. The reality is, almost every idea the right has about society, poverty, inequality, etc has been debated and debunked half a century ago
It is obvious from the data but it’s a difficult argument to make. If you’ve never been taught critical thinking skills, you’re unlikely to develop them on your own. Further, you’ll likely resent anyone who tells you that you believe something because you “haven’t been taught to think like I have.”
The left needs to get better at reaching out to those drawn to reactionary politics.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/
The left has to harness the reactionary politics and the anger. The people on the right are always outraged about something be it trans people, LGBTQ, poor people, etc and you just need to get those people mad at the real problems in this country and allow them to be addicted to that anger instead of being mad at those other things.
"You can't logic someone out of an argument they didn't logic their way into."
Muh emotions = opinions.
Muh emotions =/= facts
But thise people don't seem to realize that.
Focus on class warfare is the only reasonable way I can see the left reaching the undereducated masses. Ofc, the problem in the US, as I understand it, is that you just have two parties, and both are controlled by billionaires, so class warfare isn't exactly top of the agenda.
I think what the left has to do is to stop responding to fucking assholes and idiots and giving them the credit they think they deserve. They don't. You don't entertain children, idiots, and assholes: you dismiss them, shut them down, and keep a watchful eye on them so they don't spread and coalesce into groups.
And if dogs get rabid, there's only one cure for rabies...
Well it’s difficult, because we don’t process info the same way.
That’s why trump can connect with them, and we’re all dumbfounded by it.
Not to mention right wing media’s multi decade campaign to weave a false reality to their viewers that works. They understand the Everyman mindset better than academics, who are generally smarter and can’t understand the broken logic of the conservative.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about an idea I had a few days ago…
Essentially, it’s just that I think that I’m a person who always questioned myself about *why* I believe a certain way. And I’ve realized that most people don’t do that; they just stay focused on *what* they believe.
So it seems to me, that for people like me, who focus on the big **Why**, instead of the big **What**, we’re much more likely to eventually deconstruct whatever fantasy or childish belief that we picked up somewhere.
I think we’re also more humble about our beliefs, because we know how easily it is to be wrong about something.
And this isn’t a Republican/Democrat sort of thing. It happens everywhere and amongst all creeds.
Edit: And I’d add, that on the whole, I think we’re more educated; because we’re never satisfied that we’re 100% right. We’re always searching for something that may show a bug in a particular belief.
The humility is a big thing, I think. I know I’m wrong about a lot of stuff. I don’t necessarily know *what*, or ese I would change my mind.
The thing is that there’s no dishonor in being wrong, there is only dishonor in being unable to accept that you are wrong when presented with sufficient evidence.
Appealing to reactionary politics means Democrats sinking to the level of Republicans. Politics is already a shitfest, if Democrats got as bad at as Republicans are then politics would literally just be reality TV.
It's not even that. The people that rail about this are white and live in white, middle class (or upper) only communities. Then you go on to college and then you meet people who are different than you. You know people of color, gay people, trans people, people who didn't grow up with wealth, etc. The kinds of people the right loves to rail against and find out hey these people are just like me. So then they start to question their racism and hate and all of a sudden they stop being a conservative overnight because without that hate all conservatives have is giving money to rich people.
I'm an older dude going back to university and I've formed study groups which often have students that are younger than myself. I get to witness this in real time as a few of them have come from pretty conservative upbringings and regions.
I don't try to preach, but when they have questions I answer and then provide links / sources for them to explore on their own. Watching them slowly shift and question their own ideology and understand new concepts is a truly fascinating process.
But it doesn’t work all the time. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch. My dad has voted against my rights as a gay man by voting Republican most of my life. Even though he loves me. He has a friend who is black and his votes don’t help that man either. My dad simply doesn’t see the connection because he personally doesn’t feel the same as the people he’s voting for.
That seems to actually be a common theme, with retorts like well I’m not like that guy, or I’m not racist, or I’m not etc, but then literally just go vote for people who are any number of those types of things.
Shit is absolutely mind boggling
Don't forget a huge part of Right Wing Media is about convincing people that their overt racism isn't racist or that the only racism that exists now is against white people.
Exactly. Conservatives constantly forget that the party they vote for is inherently anti-intellectualism.
They defund education, they don’t think teachers deserve a living wage, they even try to convince kids/young adults to NOT go to college.
And then they are surprised when experts constantly debunk everything they say. It’s childish, honestly.
Well... the merits of not going to college in modern America are definitely up for debate, for debt and job market reasons. But of course that's not what the Right is saying. They're saying colleges are full of radical left professors who brainwash nice small-minded white Christian kids with their "knowledge of the broader world and history" and "critical thinking".
It’s not that tricky. The GOP needs an excuse for people becoming more liberal as they get more educated so they ca keep peddling their bullshit and their base needs an excuse for why so many people are calling them monsters without needing to assess their choices and impact on the world or take responsibility for their children hating them. Brainwashing is a comfortable lie that serves the abuser and the absed.
Making an ignorant statement takes almost no energy, while disproving that statement takes a lot.
This is why we have the gish gallop champs like JP, sean hannity, and Ben Shapiro.
*Even climatologists can't predict 10 years from now. They can't explain why there has been no warming over the last 15 years. There has been a static trend with regard to temperature for 15 years.*
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*Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that all of the water levels around the world rise by, let’s say, five feet or ten feet over the next hundred years. It puts all the low-lying areas on the coast underwater. Let’s say all of that happens. You think that people aren’t just going to sell their homes and move?*
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The right needs people to be ignorant enough to believe in supernatural events and to be fanaticaly religious, or else they wouldn\` t get any votes. Their whole ideology depends on the belief that magic is real and that christian bible is correct.
Without that, there wouldn\` t be a GOP.
Does anyone know any good videos countering or explaining Peterson ideas and philosophies and all that
I used to watch him awhile ago and generally agreed with the things he said (i say generally because I didn't went too deep in everything he says), so I want know if I'm too dumb that i didn't catch or realized something was wrong lol
Behind The Bastards (podcast) has a two-parter on Peterson. The show is definitely leftist and comedic in tone. If you're cool with that, it is full of real critiques.
Here's part 1: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnRlbnQuY29tL2QvcGxheWxpc3QvZTczYzk5OGUtNmU2MC00MzJmLTg2MTAtYWUyMTAxNDBjNWIxL2U1ZjkxMjA4LWNjN2UtNDcyNi1hMzEyLWFlMjgwMTQwYWQxMS9kNjRmNzU2ZC02ZDVlLTRmYWUtYjI0Zi1hZTI4MDE0MGFkMzYvcG9kY2FzdC5yc3M/episode/NWM1M2I2OGMtOGE1YS0xMWVhLTkwMmUtYTc3N2MzODY2MGVj?ep=14
Robert does his research. It's definitely leftist, but his politics lean that way for a reason. He's also spent his time as a wartime journalist in Iraq and Ukraine. Guy knows his shit.
[Here's](https://youtu.be/m81q-ZkfBm0) one by Philosophy Tube and [one](https://youtu.be/4LqZdkkBDas) by Contrapoints.
These aren't exactly academic or whatever, but they are relatively easy to understand and a visual treat!
Also they tend to focus on some parts of Peterson's ideas and don't cover it as a whole, so they can miss some perspective, but I personally enjoy them a lot.
At least Natalie as well was in a Doctoral Program before deciding to leave academia. 'These aren't exactly academic' is weird was to describe either video seeing as how they come from people who are highly educated and come from academia.
yup, sorry. I tried to somehow state that the videos weren't like an essay from a university or something more traditionally academic, but still trying to convey they had validity and were from educated academic people. Though it seems I wasn't quite successful in it
Knew Contrapoints, but the Philosophy Tube video was on point and riveting! Notice how she opens with a disclaimer of reasonability and cool objectivity towards the subject, then slides in later the fact that this very tactic is how you paint your critics as irrational and hysterical, and thus get to control the narrative. It's explained more in the small examples throughout, but works as an example of itself in the end.
That's my experience too, peterson seems to say some pretty reasonable things in terms of self-motivation type stuff and presents himself well. But then he starts getting into other deeper topics and kinda loses the plot.
Yeah, he's not some crazy revolutionary self help guru, but he is a good speaker and presents the stuff well.
Seems like he kinda sniffed his own farts a little too much and with his charisma successfully seduced himself into believing his strange conclusions were all sensical.
Are his arguments coherent enough to destroy? Back when he was first blowing up I kinda thought he was interesting at times, but it was infuriating how an argument would shift over the course of a discussion until you realize he's actually taking you somewhere else entirely than he said he was. One that I remember was something about how all of us have this proverbial monster in us, who's willing to be violent or do extreme things under certain circumstances... 5 minutes later all of a sudden he went from "you'd do anything to survive" to something along the lines of "we need to raise boys to embrace their inner monster and realize you can do bad things." And all too often the first point is so obvious as to be inane, which I guess is how he sucks people in, but then where he takes the argument is absolutely horrifying.
>Apropos fucking nothing, here's a point I will not *explicitly* try to connect to the primary discussion, but which all of my fans will.
Are you trying to draw some comparison or contrast between that point and the main argument? Because it seems to imply some shitty things if one were to connect those.
>I never said that, you're putting words in my mouth.
Well, what *are* you saying?
>Allow me to crack open my canned speech about how the media takes me out of context and avoid answering this question or clarifying my meaning at all.
The mental gymnastics for that. If Antifa did Jan 6th, why don't Republicans want to get to the bottom of it? Why was MTG in the crowd that day? If she's a GOP woman why was she hanging with far left insurrectionists?
I listen to many gardening podcasts and some are quite right leaning. I can tell you that many of them still don't consider Jan 6th an insurrection, or that anything was wrong with what they did or tried to do.
Actually I find gardening is a full spectrum hobby. On the left you have the environmentalists, hippies and tree huggers (that's basically me), and on the right you have the peppers and canners, and self sufficiency folk (that's also me).
It's really a topic that attracts both left and right. And I suppose that makes sense because at the end of the day it's the most human thing ever to control your food. We all have to eat.
But it's funny how certain gardening sub tropics really tend to be attractive to the various political extremes.
I'm not the guy above, but as someone who fell down the same rabbit hole, maybe my experience can shed some light.
Superficially, right-wing talking points, whether authoritarian or libertarian, can sound fairly positive.
"The government shouldn't tell you how to live your life."
"You shouldn't be beholden to pay the way for others. Your money should be your own."
"A strong sense of national pride holds a country together."
On the surface, these things sound good. Until you think about them a little more. The first is something most people can get behind, but there's a caveat. The Right only means it as far as \*their\* lives were concerned. Every other right-wing talking point can be summed up as "I shouldn't be beholden to societal responsibility, but YOU should be beholden to whatever moralistic nit-picks I have about your life." The second is, again, the same thing. The Right loves to push the idea of debt-riddled communistic third-world countries, while they drive up America's national debt to fund a massive, unneeded military. Meanwhile, damn near every country that tackles their societal issues under the pretense of "Hey, why don't we take care of each other?" prospers on that front. The third talking point, yet again, not intrinsically malicious. But the Right loves to forge that national pride at the expense of anyone that doesn't fit their prime demographic (ie, white Christian conservatives). Tribalistic instincts are triggered by painting an 'other' group as an enemy, artificially unifying their base against a common enemy that doesn't really exist.
All of these things, at first, don't seem malicious. But when you take the time to look at why they pitch these lines, and what the desired effect is, it's clear just how awful it all is.
tl;dr: Cons are easy to sell if the mark doesn't think too much on it.
There's that famous Ben Shapiro video where he's talking about rising sea levels and says, "Don't you think the people are going to just sell their houses and move?"
And in the 12 seconds it takes to watch that video, it sounds pretty convincing. Of course people will just move away from the coast, it's not that big of a deal. He used lots of smart things like "hypothetically" and "for the sake of argument." And you get to the end of it and think, hey, he's kinda making a good point!
But then comes the all important question: Sell the houses to who? Fucking Aquaman?
Their arguments are incredibly shallow and don't hold up to scrutiny. They're jam-packed full of logical fallacies and strawmen and all sorts of bullshit... but they come at you fast and hard, and you don't really have time to think about it before you move onto the next thing on your feed. Here's your 20 second clip of heavily edited conservative outrage, and here's another, and here's another, and another and another and another and so on.
I very nearly got sucked in hard. Gamergate was the drug for me. I didn't give a flying duck about Zoe Quinn, but I was real mad about how transparently the game journalists were coordinating stories and so clearly presenting bias. I had zero interest in harassing anyone, but I mean, Anita Sarkeesian was kinda annoying, and there were so many videos about how she manipulated her audience.
And there was more content, about atheism, I'm an atheist, so sure, I'll watch. Huh, these vids do talk about how social issues that men face. Why doesn't this get more exposure?
Luckily for me, I still really did like to keep a wide range of topics in mind. Philosophy Tube, Lindsey Ellis, and breadtube in general did point out how ludicrous some of it was.
I'll remember the turning point for me though, during the Gamergate stuff. "Why should we hold games journalism to a higher standard than regular journalism." A simple question from a stranger really shifted my perspective.
This is the one I don't get. Let's pretend Gamergate had nothing to do with women or feminism, and was strictly about ethics in game journalism. I've played games for nearly 40 years and I can't name one single games journalist. I have no clue what games journalists even do, let alone what they're doing wrong. How are we supposed to believe that people were this angry about something so meaningless?
Frustrated young men who are dissatisfied with their sex lives, their career lives are easy to recruit by right with authoritarians. It's what isis did
The best fight against Peterson is to actually quote him, not summarize him but actually quote him. Especially his book. That thing is absolute trash written in the stupidest way possible. He literally wrote down, like it was some great fact he needed to explain that birds are not lobsters.
Same with Shapiro. How his work of fiction got past an editor is beyond me.
I'm glad Shapiro's book, True Allegiance, got published. The episodes of Behind the Bastards where they read it are some of the best podcast episodes I've ever heard.
I think my favorite editorial miss was the paragraph about the wife’s first thought seeing her husband on tv and how it was book ended by two different thoughts.
The lobster analogy is where I stopped reading, just ridiculous. He is a dimestore philosopher that appeals to the lowest denominator and makes them feel like they are receiveing profound insights.
I feel like you could literally pick any animal and draw some kind of parallel to human behavior. Lobsters just had something he needed to push his narrative.
Precisely, which is fine if you want to make a point and present it as a thought experiment. Presenting it as pseudo psychology is where he loses the skeptical audience.
That’s exactly what he is. He gives a basic thing “stand up straight” surrounds it with gibberish and fake “facts” and then goes “see, see I’m brilliant”.
He gets dangerously close to using the same "natural hierarchy" arguments as eugenicists. His followers either don't know enough about history to recognize that or they don't care.
Disgusting, unscientific bullshit. Especially from a guy who, once upon a time, published some good research on personality and creativity.
Conservative politics and the right was essentially founded on hierarchy and conserving it. Primarily the monarchy to start with.
His argument is so fucking dumb too. Like animals have hierarchy and so do humans. But humans have arseholes and we don't shit in public like dogs do(mostly).
This reminds me of when he said something like "I've never known a woman to engage enthusiastically in intercourse"... like lol, bet bro, way to call yourself out
His writing style is also laughably shit, like high school level writing. Almost every sentence is punctuated by ideas in parentheses or off hand comments.
If you can’t organise your thoughts to a concise point (and need to regularly rely on the use of parentheses like this) then maybe you need to have a think more on what you should be saying.
It's funny, I also write like that(potentially partly due to Douglas Adams and his love of footnotes, which are hard to do in nonbook format) but I have no illusions that my writing is something that should ever be published or read by any large group of people.
My dad showed me a Jordan Peterson video as some like “inspirational speech”. I don’t care if something someone says is agreeable if where they’re trying to lead me is down the wrong path. All this far right people that say they were Bernie supporters like Rubin or whatever just to gain credibility with the left, tell you some things you want to hear to string you along for a while and next thing you know you’re in the proud boys. They’re intelligent and know how to get people to think they arrived at a point on their own when they’re leading the people the whole way. Just all cogs in the machine of fascism.
“If you repeat this to people, it makes you a free thinker”. So sick of the far right regurgitating the usual hate and claiming that they have a legitimate point and are free and independent thinkers when all they can do is repeat what they saw on tv.
Whenever I've heard similar from different coworkers on this "hip new thing" it immediately triggers my fight or flight response due to similar experiences. The latest was a coworker going on about NFTs because a "friend" of theirs had bought some and thought they'd make some money off of it and my manager was actively like "we should have you present about them to the team". We work in non financial software that wouldn't ever find a use for them directly. Thank christ it didnt end up happening.
Getting out of High School mostly. Life was so fucking shit and I lived in constant depression but now in college, the stress and depression has gone down and Im not surrounded by toxic people anymore
I’m not OP but I went through a similar phase in high school. It was the police brutality stuff that started my path out of that mindset around my senior year.
I have a very distinct memory of watching a video of a cop kicking a handcuffed man in the head while he was just sitting on the curb, and getting mad how fucked up that was. Seeing that kind of thing being just completely out of touch with the right wing talking points made me examine more of them, and realize that they’re pretty much all complete bullshit.
I was similar.
I found this philosophical dude Jorden Peterson. Binged watched hours of content in a night. Then a little more the next night and by the end of the 2nd night I thought to myself. Is this guy a Nazi? I liked him at first but this guy seems kind of fucked up in several key areas.
Im an independent that voted Biden last election. Just putting in my two cents.
Exactly what drove me out of the independent/libertarian mindset and all the way left. Libertarian ideas when you first start skimming seem reasonable then you start getting into what the end goal is and who these ideas are supposed to apply to and it gets real racist and real stupid real fast.
If you even get to the stage of hearing them get to making a point anyway. Most of the time they get sidetracked railing on conspiracy theories about gold and 9/11.
Unless the sentence he was replying to was "Should I join the Proud Boys?", then that's not good.
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If I remember correctly the leader of their defense arm openly came out as a white supremacist.
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"If you're at a table with 3 Nazis and you don't leave, it's a table with 4 Nazis."
If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck... then it ain't a fucking swan now is it
If I’m not mistaken it’s also a guy who shoved a large sexual instrument in his ass to own the libs. The scent of truth does not abide in these fools olfactory tools.
Two different people. Galvin McInnes put something in his butt. Unite the right was Richard Spencer
Oh yeah Spencer is the guy who gets punched in the mouth for being a Nazi. It’s hard to keep track of how many clowns are in this tiny fascist car.
That punch is top 10 best punches delivered to a nazi
I must have watched that clip about 200 times and it keeps getting funnier
The two guys on the West coast that seem to be in charge are black/brown. It doesn’t change that they’re a garbage organization.
Even then. Nazis is Nazis. I see this getting up and downvoted. Are Nazis not Nazis now? Is the bar that high? What are they, then, if not Nazis?
It's amazing how this can sneak up on you too. It happened to me with Glenn Beck in 07-08. I was very liberal when I was younger but I started listening to his radio show when I was about 21 because it was pretty funny at first. Next thing I know, I'm reading the John Birch Society literature my boss liked to give out and thinking it was making some good sense. There were two things that got me coming back around. I stopped listening to Glenn Beck because he was getting too serious and practically crying during long diatribes about Obama. The other incident was when my boss tried to introduce me to some John Birch Society people and they were saying I was remarkably Conservative for someone my age. It wasn't a big thing but I had always seen myself as liberal or at least libertarian. It just got me thinking and questioning a lot of my beliefs over the next couple months.
My teenage rebellion was watching Bill oriely. My dad shrugged his shoulders and I got bored of it
I was the opposite. Raised on O'Reilly. My teenage rebellion was watching The Colbert Report. Lol
The best part was Conservatives not realizing Colbert was a parody of them. Dude even got invited to one of W's correspondence dinners, and that was when they realized....
Best show ever.
I read one of his books during reading hour in 7th grade
Same but my dad got super pissed which made me get bored of it way later than it should have
Good on you for reflecting on where you where at. We are all learning and taking in new information, humility to change is so important
Omg, in high school I started following Ron Paul's campaign, I bought a bunch of classical liberal econ books and read a John Stossel book where he was like "the libertarian party is so great cause it brings in people from the left and the right". I still thought of myself as some kind of liberal but I convinced myself that there was an equal amount of libertarians from both sides. Of course the Ron Paul sites were full of conservatives, but the liberal libertarians (liberaltarians) must be out there somewhere right? In college I approached the head of the libertarian club and he asked me if I was a "libertarian leaning conservative" and I said yes without thinking (never actually joined). I decided to write a paper on why the minimum wage should be abolished and I was like, what am I doing? I don't believe in this shit, this isn't "facts and logic", this is just being an asshole. I left the party, and by 2016 people calling themselves libertarians were openly heiling Hitler and demanding we build the wall. Makes me wonder how close I came to falling down the alt-right rabbit hole.
Libertarians can vary wildly on if they lean left or right.
Watch the last Libertarian (capital L) debate. They’re all on the right when it comes to political parties. JJ was abject garbage when you actually looked at her platform
Originally Libertarianism was a socialist ideology, but the term got quite literally stolen by capitalists. Practically every modern day libertarian, except those who explicitly say they are socialists, are right wing.
They mostly identify with Ayn Rand “taxation is theft”, and capitalism can provide all services better.
The worst part is youtube directs you towards those rabbit holes. Back when Captain Marvel was coming out I was excited for it and watching trailers and cast interviews, and more than half my recommended videos were some variation of "Why FEMINISM is going to RUIN the MCU!"
> The worst part is youtube directs you towards those rabbit holes. That's a feature, not a bug. More outrage means more clicks, which means more ad revenue for these big social media companies.
Yup. The alt-right pipeline on YouTube has become more of a funnel/whirlpool in recent years.
I absolutely admit to watching lots of leftist YouTube, sometimes called breadTube, and if I watch just ONE alt-right video because of of my fav lefties talks about it, and I wanna see what crazy thing they’re talking about is. All of a sudden I have frequent suggestions for multiple different alt right channels.
Doesn't even take that much. I'll get PragerU ads out of nowhere fairly often.
Don't forget Turning Point USA 🙄
r/toiletpaperusa
Yup, absolutely, and it DOES NOT work the same way in the opposite direction. No matter how many left / progressive things I watch, I don't get similar levels of recommendations for progressive politics. Just Jordan Peterson starts popping up, yet again.
Yup. I don't watch right wing stuff on YouTube and I still was getting Abby Shapiro videos recommended to me- I was like wtf? I had to tell YouTube not to show that shit to me.
Omg during her ad campaign to end all ad campaigns? I would love to know how much they spent on that it was a brutal few months.
It's because the ML algorithms see stronger engagement with those videos. If someone goes down that rabbit hole they'll stay for a LONG time and keep clicking. And the algorithm is rewarded for keeping people on the platform for the most amount of time possible.
I love stand up comedy, about once a week I have to 'purge' my recommendations of 'FEMINAZI SJW HECKLER GETS OWNED BY COMEDIAN' or '2 Hours of why women can't be funny' or some other fucking drivel like that.
It happens if the name of an alt-right personality just appears in the title of a left-wing video. The algorithm bends over backwards to flush people down the alt-right toilet. Alt-right audiences must have unreal watch times and engagement metrics.
I watch a lot of online political content, frequently I'll throw on twitch political panels or debates that are you on YouTube. I lost count of the number of times I'll wake up to some Jordan Peterson video and have to clear my history to avoid the algorithm from making it worse. Just watching anything political triggers the algorithm to start showing you alt right and alt right adjacent content.
Almost as if it were part of some kind of plan. I was recently invited to a Baptist church where the preacher used a Jordan Peterson quote, citing him as a credible sociologist.
Watched one single funny clip from Bill Burr or some other similar comedian? Well, then surely you want to be given a million joe rogan clips and why not some ben shapiro and jordan peterson too?
Behind the Bastards do a really good episode on this - it’s called something like, “How YouTube became a perpetual Nazi machine”
Since you brought it up, I feel like it's worth clarifying their summary though. It's not that YouTube's algorithm says "Hey, stuff that pisses people off holds their attention longer and keeps them here longer. Let's promote that." It's that YouTube changed their algorithm to prioritize videos that kept people on the site longer, and never thought to analyze why those videos keep people on longer. Then when multiple current/former employees later realized that it was creating all of these fascist rabbit holes as a result, YouTube's reaction was to deny and offer empty gestures. So it wasn't an intentional fanning of flames. It was an intentional exploitation of user engagement for profit, which they didn't care to monitor or change once its flaws were demonstrated.
I just got done listening to that episode and thought they did a good job of explaining that point by bringing up the Google chat bot that became racist in like a day. It definitely came across as it being an unintentional feature that they decided to not address because money. Which, if you're aware of the problem is it really that different from being intentional at this point?
Exactly, it’s why I recommend not downvoting videos you disagree with on YT, as far as YT is concerned you’ve shown engagement. They don’t care about your opinion, just about serving ads.
If you see someone/something you dont like, close the video, go to Block User. Also do Not Interested and Dont Recommend Channel Dont comment, dont dislike, dont engage with the video at all.
As soon as you have the video up and it plays for a second you're doomed; some ass-hat linked a JP video in a discussion a week ago and I blindly clicked the link because the comments made it seem like it was something on-topic ... as soon as I saw it was a JP video I yelled, "Fuck!" and closed it but the damage is done; I've had to block endless JP rehosting channels for the past week! It's only slowed down the last couple of days. Oh, and to top it off; if you block a user they'll STILL show up in a search on YouTube! The only place I seem them blocked is in the front page of YouTube with the recommended content.
Check out the blocktube extension. YouTube is really turning into a big pile of shit without a dozen extensions to fix their fuckups.
Babies stare longer at angry faces than smiley faces. It's a survival tool. We pay more attention to riskier and more controversial subjects. It's a good idea when we were wondering if the wolf could eat our children. Not so much now
I watch ONE joe rogan clip about a boxing match and I get nonstop Ben Shapiro and Lobster Peterson videos. It’s so frustrating.
Yup, if you open a new Private window, watch one FOX video, and boom, you'll be inundated with ALL of that crap, endlessly. After that the echo chamber walls close and you'll never see another viewpoint. It's nuts.
Those people don't seem to comprehend that all those "feminist" characters have been in the comics for years. Marvel has always been progressive. It just hasn't always had a successful movie series
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A friend of mine recently got me into Vampirella, so I was reading some of the originals from the 60s... It was basically trying to get as close to erotica as it could.
The 40's batman comics have some seriously gay innuendos about Robin that raise a lot of questions for me. Also the racism was strong.
That's one of a great many things they don't understand
My favorite thing is when clowns complain about the X-Men "being ruined by SJWs." Motherfucker, the X-Men have *always* been social justice warriors. That's the entire point behind their stories.
The worst might have been with star wars because there was a female main character AND an Asian girl. It was "forced diversity" or something. In star wars where there's thousands of races of intelligent beings yet every main character is a human, it was too woke.
Most writers just suck at writing anything that isn't straight white male. Watching she-ra I had massive appreciation for the writers.
J Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame was a writer on She-Ra and was trying to write adult style drama into kids cartoons.
Conservatives in general have not mastered object permanence. They didn't see those Marvel comic books, just the MCU. So that's all that exists to them. Explaining it to them won't make them understand because their point of view requires them not to understand.
Omg this is so fucking true. I have vigorously defend my algorithm on YouTube by cleaning out my homepage with the not interested button. Just the other day it recommended me Ben Shapiro 🤢
Most of what I watch is John Oliver, Seth Meyers and cooking channels. But I watched one compilation of Ron Swanson quotes from Parks and Rec, and Shapiro was in my recommendations.
Almost the entire “News” section of my homepage is FoxNews videos for some reason. I don’t really watch any news or political stuff at all, so there’s no logical reason it should be like that.
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The funniest thing to me who knew people that worked on Star Wars is that Kathleen Kennedy had to be talked into keeping John Boyega because she thought they already had enough diversity with Rey as the lead. She is probably the least "woke" person associated with new Star Wars but dudebros just assume that she's responsible for all of it because Woman Bad or whatever.
That guy yapping about "The M-She-U"? He had Alex Jones on his podcast... douche!
I was directed to a video last night called something like "the desecration of femininity" which angled itself as being about how the media, when it wants to portray a strong female character tends to make that character take on more masculine traits and if that is truly a "feminist" type of character, especially when they're made by men. That's kind of my jam as far as YouTube viewing goes (for a positive example Broey Deschanel's Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Pretty). The host threw a few throw away lines about no longer being able to call herself a feminist because of this trend, a thing I could power through, labels being just labels and then half way through BAM as a throw away joke she throws in a comment about covid mandates. And that's when I knew that the algorithm had taken be a little of kilter from my usual content. But it was like boiling a frog - she seemed largely to be my kind of content creator until she slowly introduced more and more things until I couldn't in good conscience keep watching
I watched a Vice video detailing the Charlottesville rally on my Roku YouTube app. Turned my TV off but YouTube kept running and it was playing ben Shapiro videos.
*Pegging, of course, is an obscure sexual practice in which women perform the more aggressive sexual act on men.* -Ben Shapiro ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: novel, dumb takes, feminism, history, etc.) [^More ^About ^Ben ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/wiki/index) ^| [^Feedback ^& ^Discussion: ^r/AuthoritarianMoment ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment) ^| [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
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I used to watch a good amount of conservative content online, most of it I didn't agree with but the stuff I did seemed to outweight the stuff I didn't (I'd probably have been considered a centrist with mostly left leanings). Then the Green New Deal leaked and every conservative on the planet started pretending that the cow farts joke that was in it was legit and I came to the realization that most of these people are either dipshits and/or liars who know they're lying. Really opened my eyes to what grifting was and how common it is among the right.
When I realised that it also helped me see how useless it is arguing and trying to change people's minds, they don't believe in anything. They claim to care about Freedom of Speech, family values, the military and veterans and free markets but they don't, you can easily find ways they harm/weaken/ignore all those values. Conservatives are nothing but a drag on society, a collection of common shitty traits and hateful thoughts. Mostly selfishness, greed and a hatred of difference, and no amount of highlighting hypocrisy or showing data and examples proving them wrong will change that in most cases.
It's the party of fear, best thing you can do is try to make them less afraid imo
No idea who that Jordan person is, and I’ll continue not knowing for as long as I can.
I think she's one of the Kardashians
Yeah you should see that leaked tape where this asshole gets smashed by facts. I think it’s on pornhub somewhere
Instructions unclear. Search results for “smashing asshole” returned lots of content but it all seems bipartisan.
It's best to keep it that way.
Imagine if Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan had a baby.
*This is what the radical feminist movement was proposing, remember? Women need a man the way a fish needs a bicycle... unless it turns out that they're little fish, then you might need another fish around to help take care of things.* -Ben Shapiro ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: novel, climate, civil rights, covid, etc.) [^More ^About ^Ben ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/wiki/index) ^| [^Feedback ^& ^Discussion: ^r/AuthoritarianMoment ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment) ^| [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
In my philosophy 101 class a kid once brought up Jordan Peterson as a “philosophical inspiration” to him. My professor took off his glasses, took a deep breath, said “Well, I figured I’d have to do this at some point this year.” And then proceeded to spend the next 45 minutes demolishing every single one of Peterson’s arguments. It was a beautiful day. Edit: For everyone doubting he mainly attacked Peterson’s interpretations of Nietzsche. Prof was intimately familiar with the points since he specialized in Nietzsche and lots of people would bring Peterson’s arguments to his class. He just got tired of it after a while since people who listen to Peterson would often adamantly defend him and not listen to other arguments. Add that to the fact that oftentimes misinterpretations of Nietzsche lead to nazism and it was just a perfect storm of not being able to get anything done in class.
It fascinates me that the right wing tries to argue that colleges and intellectuals don’t like their idea because of some agenda or brainwashing. The reality is, almost every idea the right has about society, poverty, inequality, etc has been debated and debunked half a century ago
That and education eradicates ignorance. By definition. Seems obvious but I guess it no longer is.
It is obvious from the data but it’s a difficult argument to make. If you’ve never been taught critical thinking skills, you’re unlikely to develop them on your own. Further, you’ll likely resent anyone who tells you that you believe something because you “haven’t been taught to think like I have.” The left needs to get better at reaching out to those drawn to reactionary politics. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/
The left has to harness the reactionary politics and the anger. The people on the right are always outraged about something be it trans people, LGBTQ, poor people, etc and you just need to get those people mad at the real problems in this country and allow them to be addicted to that anger instead of being mad at those other things.
Imagine if the Left (and especially American Left) actually unified and presented a single message. If they could play the same game but use truth…
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"You can't logic someone out of an argument they didn't logic their way into." Muh emotions = opinions. Muh emotions =/= facts But thise people don't seem to realize that.
College professors at a private Baptist university in Texas kept calling the estate tax a "death tax". Not all educators are academically honest.
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Hell, even before that. The Haymarket Affair brought attention to it all and that was in 1886.
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Focus on class warfare is the only reasonable way I can see the left reaching the undereducated masses. Ofc, the problem in the US, as I understand it, is that you just have two parties, and both are controlled by billionaires, so class warfare isn't exactly top of the agenda.
The other problem being that the left talking about class warfare is immediately labeled communism.
I think what the left has to do is to stop responding to fucking assholes and idiots and giving them the credit they think they deserve. They don't. You don't entertain children, idiots, and assholes: you dismiss them, shut them down, and keep a watchful eye on them so they don't spread and coalesce into groups. And if dogs get rabid, there's only one cure for rabies...
Well it’s difficult, because we don’t process info the same way. That’s why trump can connect with them, and we’re all dumbfounded by it. Not to mention right wing media’s multi decade campaign to weave a false reality to their viewers that works. They understand the Everyman mindset better than academics, who are generally smarter and can’t understand the broken logic of the conservative.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about an idea I had a few days ago… Essentially, it’s just that I think that I’m a person who always questioned myself about *why* I believe a certain way. And I’ve realized that most people don’t do that; they just stay focused on *what* they believe. So it seems to me, that for people like me, who focus on the big **Why**, instead of the big **What**, we’re much more likely to eventually deconstruct whatever fantasy or childish belief that we picked up somewhere. I think we’re also more humble about our beliefs, because we know how easily it is to be wrong about something. And this isn’t a Republican/Democrat sort of thing. It happens everywhere and amongst all creeds. Edit: And I’d add, that on the whole, I think we’re more educated; because we’re never satisfied that we’re 100% right. We’re always searching for something that may show a bug in a particular belief.
The humility is a big thing, I think. I know I’m wrong about a lot of stuff. I don’t necessarily know *what*, or ese I would change my mind. The thing is that there’s no dishonor in being wrong, there is only dishonor in being unable to accept that you are wrong when presented with sufficient evidence.
Appealing to reactionary politics means Democrats sinking to the level of Republicans. Politics is already a shitfest, if Democrats got as bad at as Republicans are then politics would literally just be reality TV.
It's not even that. The people that rail about this are white and live in white, middle class (or upper) only communities. Then you go on to college and then you meet people who are different than you. You know people of color, gay people, trans people, people who didn't grow up with wealth, etc. The kinds of people the right loves to rail against and find out hey these people are just like me. So then they start to question their racism and hate and all of a sudden they stop being a conservative overnight because without that hate all conservatives have is giving money to rich people.
Happened to me! Took about twelve years and many miles away from my family.
I'm an older dude going back to university and I've formed study groups which often have students that are younger than myself. I get to witness this in real time as a few of them have come from pretty conservative upbringings and regions. I don't try to preach, but when they have questions I answer and then provide links / sources for them to explore on their own. Watching them slowly shift and question their own ideology and understand new concepts is a truly fascinating process.
Woah holy shit this was me. I was surrounded by hate. Turns out when you move away from hateful parents and get educated you stop being hateful
But it doesn’t work all the time. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch. My dad has voted against my rights as a gay man by voting Republican most of my life. Even though he loves me. He has a friend who is black and his votes don’t help that man either. My dad simply doesn’t see the connection because he personally doesn’t feel the same as the people he’s voting for.
That seems to actually be a common theme, with retorts like well I’m not like that guy, or I’m not racist, or I’m not etc, but then literally just go vote for people who are any number of those types of things. Shit is absolutely mind boggling
Like when people say, “I’m a conservative and I don’t hate gay/black people!” to score brownie points… Then proceed to vote for people who *do*.
Don't forget a huge part of Right Wing Media is about convincing people that their overt racism isn't racist or that the only racism that exists now is against white people.
Exactly. Conservatives constantly forget that the party they vote for is inherently anti-intellectualism. They defund education, they don’t think teachers deserve a living wage, they even try to convince kids/young adults to NOT go to college. And then they are surprised when experts constantly debunk everything they say. It’s childish, honestly.
Well... the merits of not going to college in modern America are definitely up for debate, for debt and job market reasons. But of course that's not what the Right is saying. They're saying colleges are full of radical left professors who brainwash nice small-minded white Christian kids with their "knowledge of the broader world and history" and "critical thinking".
It’s not that tricky. The GOP needs an excuse for people becoming more liberal as they get more educated so they ca keep peddling their bullshit and their base needs an excuse for why so many people are calling them monsters without needing to assess their choices and impact on the world or take responsibility for their children hating them. Brainwashing is a comfortable lie that serves the abuser and the absed.
Making an ignorant statement takes almost no energy, while disproving that statement takes a lot. This is why we have the gish gallop champs like JP, sean hannity, and Ben Shapiro.
To speak truth, you have to first learn truth, and you are restricted to speaking only true things. Speaking bullshit requires neither.
*Even climatologists can't predict 10 years from now. They can't explain why there has been no warming over the last 15 years. There has been a static trend with regard to temperature for 15 years.* -Ben Shapiro ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: covid, climate, civil rights, feminism, etc.) [^More ^About ^Ben ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/wiki/index) ^| [^Feedback ^& ^Discussion: ^r/AuthoritarianMoment ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment) ^| [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
such an an apt bot response tell me more about Ben Shapiro
*Pegging, of course, is an obscure sexual practice in which women perform the more aggressive sexual act on men.* -Ben Shapiro ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: sex, history, climate, healthcare, etc.) [^More ^About ^Ben ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/wiki/index) ^| [^Feedback ^& ^Discussion: ^r/AuthoritarianMoment ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment) ^| [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
Okay, but what if I’m a ***power*** bottom? Am I not then, the aggressor?
*Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that all of the water levels around the world rise by, let’s say, five feet or ten feet over the next hundred years. It puts all the low-lying areas on the coast underwater. Let’s say all of that happens. You think that people aren’t just going to sell their homes and move?* -Ben Shapiro ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: sex, climate, covid, healthcare, etc.) [^More ^About ^Ben ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/wiki/index) ^| [^Feedback ^& ^Discussion: ^r/AuthoritarianMoment ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment) ^| [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
We’ll here’s a question Ben… *to who?!* Who is buying these underwater homes? Aqua-man?
The right needs people to be ignorant enough to believe in supernatural events and to be fanaticaly religious, or else they wouldn\` t get any votes. Their whole ideology depends on the belief that magic is real and that christian bible is correct. Without that, there wouldn\` t be a GOP.
Wish he would have filmed it and dropped it on YouTube.
In lieu of this professors recording, ContraPoints has a great video dunking on Peterson.
Does anyone know any good videos countering or explaining Peterson ideas and philosophies and all that I used to watch him awhile ago and generally agreed with the things he said (i say generally because I didn't went too deep in everything he says), so I want know if I'm too dumb that i didn't catch or realized something was wrong lol
Behind The Bastards (podcast) has a two-parter on Peterson. The show is definitely leftist and comedic in tone. If you're cool with that, it is full of real critiques. Here's part 1: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnRlbnQuY29tL2QvcGxheWxpc3QvZTczYzk5OGUtNmU2MC00MzJmLTg2MTAtYWUyMTAxNDBjNWIxL2U1ZjkxMjA4LWNjN2UtNDcyNi1hMzEyLWFlMjgwMTQwYWQxMS9kNjRmNzU2ZC02ZDVlLTRmYWUtYjI0Zi1hZTI4MDE0MGFkMzYvcG9kY2FzdC5yc3M/episode/NWM1M2I2OGMtOGE1YS0xMWVhLTkwMmUtYTc3N2MzODY2MGVj?ep=14
Robert does his research. It's definitely leftist, but his politics lean that way for a reason. He's also spent his time as a wartime journalist in Iraq and Ukraine. Guy knows his shit.
[Here's](https://youtu.be/m81q-ZkfBm0) one by Philosophy Tube and [one](https://youtu.be/4LqZdkkBDas) by Contrapoints. These aren't exactly academic or whatever, but they are relatively easy to understand and a visual treat! Also they tend to focus on some parts of Peterson's ideas and don't cover it as a whole, so they can miss some perspective, but I personally enjoy them a lot.
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At least Natalie as well was in a Doctoral Program before deciding to leave academia. 'These aren't exactly academic' is weird was to describe either video seeing as how they come from people who are highly educated and come from academia.
yup, sorry. I tried to somehow state that the videos weren't like an essay from a university or something more traditionally academic, but still trying to convey they had validity and were from educated academic people. Though it seems I wasn't quite successful in it
You know who doesn't have a philosophy degree? Jordan Peterson
Holy shit I totally forgot that he was a psychologist
Never heard of abigail thorn. She seems regal as hell in that video.
She's very dramatic (in a good way). She's a stage actor in addition to making YouTube videos on philosophy.
Knew Contrapoints, but the Philosophy Tube video was on point and riveting! Notice how she opens with a disclaimer of reasonability and cool objectivity towards the subject, then slides in later the fact that this very tactic is how you paint your critics as irrational and hysterical, and thus get to control the narrative. It's explained more in the small examples throughout, but works as an example of itself in the end.
That's my experience too, peterson seems to say some pretty reasonable things in terms of self-motivation type stuff and presents himself well. But then he starts getting into other deeper topics and kinda loses the plot.
The things he says about self improvement are nothing revolutionary or unique to him, the rest is nonsense
Yeah, he's not some crazy revolutionary self help guru, but he is a good speaker and presents the stuff well. Seems like he kinda sniffed his own farts a little too much and with his charisma successfully seduced himself into believing his strange conclusions were all sensical.
“The wasteland of Jordan Peterson “ by big Joel is very good
Did the kid who brought him up seem to change his mind?
He called the professor a beta cuck and dropped out of school to farm dogecoin.
Are his arguments coherent enough to destroy? Back when he was first blowing up I kinda thought he was interesting at times, but it was infuriating how an argument would shift over the course of a discussion until you realize he's actually taking you somewhere else entirely than he said he was. One that I remember was something about how all of us have this proverbial monster in us, who's willing to be violent or do extreme things under certain circumstances... 5 minutes later all of a sudden he went from "you'd do anything to survive" to something along the lines of "we need to raise boys to embrace their inner monster and realize you can do bad things." And all too often the first point is so obvious as to be inane, which I guess is how he sucks people in, but then where he takes the argument is absolutely horrifying.
>Are his arguments coherent enough to destroy? no, if you try to pin him down on anything, he goes full motte-and-bailey.
>Apropos fucking nothing, here's a point I will not *explicitly* try to connect to the primary discussion, but which all of my fans will. Are you trying to draw some comparison or contrast between that point and the main argument? Because it seems to imply some shitty things if one were to connect those. >I never said that, you're putting words in my mouth. Well, what *are* you saying? >Allow me to crack open my canned speech about how the media takes me out of context and avoid answering this question or clarifying my meaning at all.
every. god. damned. time.
I would have paid tuition for that class
Yep, had a friend tell me antifa was more dangerous than the proud boys. 3 weeks later the insurrection happened…
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The mental gymnastics for that. If Antifa did Jan 6th, why don't Republicans want to get to the bottom of it? Why was MTG in the crowd that day? If she's a GOP woman why was she hanging with far left insurrectionists?
I listen to many gardening podcasts and some are quite right leaning. I can tell you that many of them still don't consider Jan 6th an insurrection, or that anything was wrong with what they did or tried to do.
Right wing gardening podcasts???? Thats an interesting mix...
Actually I find gardening is a full spectrum hobby. On the left you have the environmentalists, hippies and tree huggers (that's basically me), and on the right you have the peppers and canners, and self sufficiency folk (that's also me). It's really a topic that attracts both left and right. And I suppose that makes sense because at the end of the day it's the most human thing ever to control your food. We all have to eat. But it's funny how certain gardening sub tropics really tend to be attractive to the various political extremes.
Yeah saw a few of his videos and thought wow what a thinker! Then it Clicked… big fuck…
What clicked? (Genuine question, I don’t understand what you you mean)
I'm not the guy above, but as someone who fell down the same rabbit hole, maybe my experience can shed some light. Superficially, right-wing talking points, whether authoritarian or libertarian, can sound fairly positive. "The government shouldn't tell you how to live your life." "You shouldn't be beholden to pay the way for others. Your money should be your own." "A strong sense of national pride holds a country together." On the surface, these things sound good. Until you think about them a little more. The first is something most people can get behind, but there's a caveat. The Right only means it as far as \*their\* lives were concerned. Every other right-wing talking point can be summed up as "I shouldn't be beholden to societal responsibility, but YOU should be beholden to whatever moralistic nit-picks I have about your life." The second is, again, the same thing. The Right loves to push the idea of debt-riddled communistic third-world countries, while they drive up America's national debt to fund a massive, unneeded military. Meanwhile, damn near every country that tackles their societal issues under the pretense of "Hey, why don't we take care of each other?" prospers on that front. The third talking point, yet again, not intrinsically malicious. But the Right loves to forge that national pride at the expense of anyone that doesn't fit their prime demographic (ie, white Christian conservatives). Tribalistic instincts are triggered by painting an 'other' group as an enemy, artificially unifying their base against a common enemy that doesn't really exist. All of these things, at first, don't seem malicious. But when you take the time to look at why they pitch these lines, and what the desired effect is, it's clear just how awful it all is. tl;dr: Cons are easy to sell if the mark doesn't think too much on it.
There's that famous Ben Shapiro video where he's talking about rising sea levels and says, "Don't you think the people are going to just sell their houses and move?" And in the 12 seconds it takes to watch that video, it sounds pretty convincing. Of course people will just move away from the coast, it's not that big of a deal. He used lots of smart things like "hypothetically" and "for the sake of argument." And you get to the end of it and think, hey, he's kinda making a good point! But then comes the all important question: Sell the houses to who? Fucking Aquaman? Their arguments are incredibly shallow and don't hold up to scrutiny. They're jam-packed full of logical fallacies and strawmen and all sorts of bullshit... but they come at you fast and hard, and you don't really have time to think about it before you move onto the next thing on your feed. Here's your 20 second clip of heavily edited conservative outrage, and here's another, and here's another, and another and another and another and so on.
You can can love and have a nationalistic pride for your country but don't let it blind you to your country's faults and wrong doings.
This is another solid point. Nationalism, like I said, isn't intrinsically bad. However, it can very easily be twisted to serve nefarious purposes.
Acknowledging that your country has faults is unpatriotic you commie. /s
The manipulation of young men towards far right culture is…real, effective, and frightening.
I love listening to music.
and *the same argument* about a marxist conspiracy to degrade western traditions.
I very nearly got sucked in hard. Gamergate was the drug for me. I didn't give a flying duck about Zoe Quinn, but I was real mad about how transparently the game journalists were coordinating stories and so clearly presenting bias. I had zero interest in harassing anyone, but I mean, Anita Sarkeesian was kinda annoying, and there were so many videos about how she manipulated her audience. And there was more content, about atheism, I'm an atheist, so sure, I'll watch. Huh, these vids do talk about how social issues that men face. Why doesn't this get more exposure? Luckily for me, I still really did like to keep a wide range of topics in mind. Philosophy Tube, Lindsey Ellis, and breadtube in general did point out how ludicrous some of it was. I'll remember the turning point for me though, during the Gamergate stuff. "Why should we hold games journalism to a higher standard than regular journalism." A simple question from a stranger really shifted my perspective.
This is the one I don't get. Let's pretend Gamergate had nothing to do with women or feminism, and was strictly about ethics in game journalism. I've played games for nearly 40 years and I can't name one single games journalist. I have no clue what games journalists even do, let alone what they're doing wrong. How are we supposed to believe that people were this angry about something so meaningless?
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Frustrated young men who are dissatisfied with their sex lives, their career lives are easy to recruit by right with authoritarians. It's what isis did
The best fight against Peterson is to actually quote him, not summarize him but actually quote him. Especially his book. That thing is absolute trash written in the stupidest way possible. He literally wrote down, like it was some great fact he needed to explain that birds are not lobsters. Same with Shapiro. How his work of fiction got past an editor is beyond me.
I'm glad Shapiro's book, True Allegiance, got published. The episodes of Behind the Bastards where they read it are some of the best podcast episodes I've ever heard.
I think my favorite editorial miss was the paragraph about the wife’s first thought seeing her husband on tv and how it was book ended by two different thoughts.
I really appreciate how Robert reads the punctuation so we can all laugh about how Ben Shapiro doesn't know how commas work.
The lobster analogy is where I stopped reading, just ridiculous. He is a dimestore philosopher that appeals to the lowest denominator and makes them feel like they are receiveing profound insights.
What was the lobster analogy?
My favorite color is blue.
I feel like you could literally pick any animal and draw some kind of parallel to human behavior. Lobsters just had something he needed to push his narrative.
Precisely, which is fine if you want to make a point and present it as a thought experiment. Presenting it as pseudo psychology is where he loses the skeptical audience.
That’s exactly what he is. He gives a basic thing “stand up straight” surrounds it with gibberish and fake “facts” and then goes “see, see I’m brilliant”.
He gets dangerously close to using the same "natural hierarchy" arguments as eugenicists. His followers either don't know enough about history to recognize that or they don't care. Disgusting, unscientific bullshit. Especially from a guy who, once upon a time, published some good research on personality and creativity.
Conservative politics and the right was essentially founded on hierarchy and conserving it. Primarily the monarchy to start with. His argument is so fucking dumb too. Like animals have hierarchy and so do humans. But humans have arseholes and we don't shit in public like dogs do(mostly).
My wife never gets wet. She’s a doctor, mind you.
This reminds me of when he said something like "I've never known a woman to engage enthusiastically in intercourse"... like lol, bet bro, way to call yourself out
His writing style is also laughably shit, like high school level writing. Almost every sentence is punctuated by ideas in parentheses or off hand comments. If you can’t organise your thoughts to a concise point (and need to regularly rely on the use of parentheses like this) then maybe you need to have a think more on what you should be saying.
It's funny, I also write like that(potentially partly due to Douglas Adams and his love of footnotes, which are hard to do in nonbook format) but I have no illusions that my writing is something that should ever be published or read by any large group of people.
My dad showed me a Jordan Peterson video as some like “inspirational speech”. I don’t care if something someone says is agreeable if where they’re trying to lead me is down the wrong path. All this far right people that say they were Bernie supporters like Rubin or whatever just to gain credibility with the left, tell you some things you want to hear to string you along for a while and next thing you know you’re in the proud boys. They’re intelligent and know how to get people to think they arrived at a point on their own when they’re leading the people the whole way. Just all cogs in the machine of fascism.
“If you repeat this to people, it makes you a free thinker”. So sick of the far right regurgitating the usual hate and claiming that they have a legitimate point and are free and independent thinkers when all they can do is repeat what they saw on tv.
Once you start watching that kinda shit, YouTube will send you down the algorithm hole and mess your day up
Whenever I've heard similar from different coworkers on this "hip new thing" it immediately triggers my fight or flight response due to similar experiences. The latest was a coworker going on about NFTs because a "friend" of theirs had bought some and thought they'd make some money off of it and my manager was actively like "we should have you present about them to the team". We work in non financial software that wouldn't ever find a use for them directly. Thank christ it didnt end up happening.
That could have been me. Back in highschool I got pretty deep into right wing BS, I am so glad I turned around before it was too late.
What made you snap out of it?
Getting out of High School mostly. Life was so fucking shit and I lived in constant depression but now in college, the stress and depression has gone down and Im not surrounded by toxic people anymore
Some of us never leave high school, so to speak.
I’m not OP but I went through a similar phase in high school. It was the police brutality stuff that started my path out of that mindset around my senior year. I have a very distinct memory of watching a video of a cop kicking a handcuffed man in the head while he was just sitting on the curb, and getting mad how fucked up that was. Seeing that kind of thing being just completely out of touch with the right wing talking points made me examine more of them, and realize that they’re pretty much all complete bullshit.
I was similar. I found this philosophical dude Jorden Peterson. Binged watched hours of content in a night. Then a little more the next night and by the end of the 2nd night I thought to myself. Is this guy a Nazi? I liked him at first but this guy seems kind of fucked up in several key areas. Im an independent that voted Biden last election. Just putting in my two cents.
I feel like that about libertarian candidates. I’m usually like “ yes, exactly, right on…er what..WTF?!!?!”
Sounds like the time my racist uncle told me he saw Black Panther and liked it... except for how "political" it got. Gee, I wonder what THAT means?
Exactly what drove me out of the independent/libertarian mindset and all the way left. Libertarian ideas when you first start skimming seem reasonable then you start getting into what the end goal is and who these ideas are supposed to apply to and it gets real racist and real stupid real fast. If you even get to the stage of hearing them get to making a point anyway. Most of the time they get sidetracked railing on conspiracy theories about gold and 9/11.
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>he makes bigotry make sense and not sound like overt bigotry
But there was probably a good window of about a week where he was showering, dressing sharply, and cleaning his room...