Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

[Heaven Swan]

^^^
Ok I see. You believe in social justice, as do I, but you may be being hoodwinked.

When you have time, check out this video, I’m watching it right now. It’s a talk by Brett Weinstein, the professor that was at the center of that fiasco at Evergreen University.



Just finished watching it. I lreally like this guy. He’s brilliant.

I hope everyone here at RI warches at least the last 5 minutes of this, where he sums up his ideas.

[American Dream]

I love the delicious irony of the term "SJW" as a pejorative being so closely associated with Gamergate bigots who can fairly be termed racists, haters and/or misogynists, as well as the association with various creepy 4chan presences. Confusionism at its finest.

[Elvis]

You believe in social justice, as do I, but you may be being hoodwinked.

When you have time, check out this video, I’m watching it right now. It’s a talk by Brett Weinstein, the professor that was at the center of that fiasco at Evergreen University.

I'm not sure what you mean by hoodwinked, but thanks for the video, I'll listen while I work (must get back to work). I have no idea what to expect (I didn't follow that affair), but the first thing out of the speaker's mouth is about "liberty" which has become a dog-whistle kind of word on some outer planes of the far right. Should be interesting.

[Heaven Swan]

^^^

Great. Would love to hear what you think.

Thel last 5 minutes where he challenges the left/right political axis and proposes a form of alliance between non-authoritarians on the left and right is brilliant, His ideas were forged in the fire of that insane conflict at Evergreen College. Very interesting.

[Elvis]

Finished, absorbed most of it. Bret Weinstein sounds reasonable. He appears to have been unfairly put in a very bad position. I can see why I might want to run away from anything with the name "social justice warrior" attached to it.

I wish Weinstein would use a different name for the "movement" he describes. It's a shame to hear the words "defeating the social justice movement" coming from a progressive sort like him. I suppose that actual justice in the social sphere—not the "SJW" brand—will never be the same.

Question: Do the "SJWs" call themselves SJWs? Or is it strictly a label applied by their critics?

[Elvis]

I wish Weinstein would use a different name for the "movement" he describes.

I see on YouTube he calls it "the regressive left" which is less of a mindfuck and may be a useful term. At first glance I like it.

I've said it before, I think the prevailing problem is stupidity, and its not just Republicans and Trumpers. Optimistic me says that kind of stupid can be fixed, but I have no great hopes for the near future.

[Jerky]

Amen, Jack. 100% spot on.

The so-called social justice environment on tumblr is the most hostile online environment I have EVER been in; even worse than arguing with white supremacists and nazis. They are far more insulting than MRAs and religious fundamentalists have ever been to me. (they also can't argue as well as any of these people, disturbingly enough)

This person needs to get the fuck off Internet and especially Tumblr and go outside and meet some of these people she imagines she knows and she imagines are representative of real-world groups or movements and start figuring out that whoever is harassing her on Tumblr probably does not correspond all that well to whomever she thinks she is describing in real world. She should meet some Nazis and compare the "hostility" firsthand. It is a ludicrous piece and despite a tad of the distancing from Peterson it's basically his whole schtick, including the bit about the imaginary "SJW" movement about to round up her poor fragile white ass and exterminate her in Maoist camps! But wait, here's a tweet by some entirely random ass person no one else knows (and who is probably being taken out of context) that can be misused to show the truth of everything she has to say about "SJWs" and by extension "the left," Democrats, Clinton voters, whatever: they're all terrible people, no exceptions, virtue-signaling elites, just like Trump and Peterson would say. Hooray!

And then there is the bit about the by-her imagined "SJWs" losing the 2016 election. This too is very far removed from the real world. 110 million people (who for some crazy reason went as a plurality into the Clinton column, and against Trump) know why they voted and whatever harassment she's gotten on Tumblr or whatever she thinks it represents in the real world, it was even less decisive a factor than the Russian FB ads! SJW is a meaningless term outside an Internet bubble of right-wingers who think the guillotines are running full-time at Yale and those who engage with them online. SJW had nothing to do with the 2016 election result, zero, it is a category applied after the fact by punditry to explain why a largely imaginary working class in Michigan voted for Trump. (The working class plurality in Michigan, to be clear, voted for NOBODY. It's time to admit this and stop spinning, spinning, spinning the bullshit!)

Basically this person is allowing herself to get worked up about her imaginary "SJWs" (or a group of Internet personae she imagines as "SJWs") as a means for excusing her superficial shift from left to reactionary, which is where I'm guessing she always was. And it's okay, she can be as wrong as she likes, it's the distortion that annoys. Taking use of this term "SJW" from the right-wing lexicon, as if it corresponds to a large real-world group who actually self-identify by it or fit the insane criteria by which basically right-wing people define it, as an instant discrediting factor. Whatever!!!

.

[Heaven Swan]

You believe in social justice, as do I, but you may be being hoodwinked.

When you have time, check out this video, I’m watching it right now. It’s a talk by Brett Weinstein, the professor that was at the center of that fiasco at Evergreen University.

I'm not sure what you mean by hoodwinked, but thanks for the video, I'll listen while I work (must get back to work). I have no idea what to expect (I didn't follow that affair), but the first thing out of the speaker's mouth is about "liberty" which has become a dog-whistle kind of word on some outer planes of the far right. Should be interesting.

I just read your post from yesterday with the SWJ photos (hah). Actually we cross-posted, the hoodwinked comment was in reference to what Jack wrote.

But yes, using SJW as a kind of slur is confusing. Who isn’t for social justice? The words indicate a worthy goal, the ‘regressive left’ is a much better term...i.e. a rigid, dogmatic mindset, my way or the highway, little or no real debate, a bunch of accepted positions in the place of thinking and reacting to life and formulating ideas based on the reality of one’s own experience.

Parroting what others are putting out as”left’ (or right) positions because you’ve lost touch with your sense of self and your rooting in the real world is an authoritarian framework.

I joined my first leftist organization as a teenager in another country. The older comrades taught us to think for ourselves. In order to become a cadre or ‘militant’—we called ourselves militants, not activists—they advised us to read several newspapers a day, from across the political specrtrum and to pay very close attention to “the people” we were wanting to organize, their real needs, wants, fears, hopes, etc. The idea was to take all these factors into account and use them to think critically and form an analysis.

If these leftist comrades had proposed or subtly suggested parroting their ideas or talking points I wouldn’t have been interested. I could have joined a cult if that’s what I wanted, no? The leftists spent a lot of time discussing and debating and those who most lucidly saw reality and we able to formulate their own ideas and proposals were the most respected.

Oh how far the left has fallen! This nonsense is not the left that I know, but if these shallow, dogmatic trendsetters are the new left, I agree with Brett Weinstein that we need to start over with a blank sheet of paper. They can keep their cult. They’re just going to retreat into suburbs, etc and their priviledged lives anyway (after wrecking the left).

[Heaven Swan]

[American Dream]

Context matters:

The Intellectual Dark Web goes to Washington

It seems that these days, the only thing Republicans love more than “free speech” is pretending to get mad when their fellow conservatives’ free speech is even remotely threatened. This has yielded a wave of phony conservative outrage at isolated incidents of overenthusiastic college students protesting stuff, which has in turn led to Bret Weinstein, self-proclaimed “professor in exile” at Evergreen State University and a member of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee about threats to free speech on college campuses.

Because Congress is controlled by Republicans, Weinstein appeared alongside Robert P. George, a far-right Princeton professor; Allison Stanger, the Middlebury College professor who was injured while escorting the racist intellectual Charles Murray through a protest; a representative of the Alliance Defending Freedom (identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBT hate group); and Shaun Harper, a member of the University of California’s Race and Equality Center who writes frequently about racial injustice and was the only smart person who’d been invited to speak.

...Weinstein’s testimony read like a Greatest Hits of the Intellectual Dark Web. He painted himself as a victim of runaway social justice culture. He omitted facts that, if accounted for, made him seem like kind of a dick. He spoke in hyperbolic language, offering nonsense like, “Am I alleging a conspiracy? No. What I have seen functions much more like a cult.” He used the word “logic,” and began a sentence by saying, “As a member of the Intellectual Dark Web...” Later on in the hearing, House Oversight Committee chairman Jim Jordan asserted that you can’t say, “Donald Trump is the President” on a college campus, and Weinstein did not challenge him. (Predictably, Jordan didn’t give USC’s Shaun Harper, the only person contesting the very premise of the hearing, the same treatment. At one point, Jordan tried to goad him into saying that there are cops who police people’s language on college campuses, and then acted really offended when Harper didn’t take the bait.)

From a certain vantage point, it feels like angry conservatives and members of the Intellectual Dark Web actually have an incentive to say and do things that provoke the ire of campus activists. After all, if college students hadn’t protested Bret Weinstein, then he wouldn’t get covered by the New York Times, be able to put up a well-funded Patreon page, or receive an invitation to speak before Congress about how he’s being oppressed by woke college kids. It’s almost like by claiming his free speech was violated, he’s only gotten more opportunities to be heard.

There was, however, one productive point made during the hearing. During his opening remarks, Shaun Harper offered a perspective that, given the histrionics whirling around him, may have unfortunately fallen upon deaf ears. Citing the fact that there are only a handful academics who, like Weinstein, have “experienced aggressive encounters with student activists,” it seems almost trivial to be devoting “so much national conversation [to] professors’ freedom of speech supposedly being under attack.” Instead, Harper offered, “Avoidance of deep learning about race and other dimensions of diversity, equity, and inclusion is the bigger, much more pervasive problem that ignites campus conflict.”

https://theoutline.com/post/4717/the-in ... i=sboeesez

[Elvis]

Yeah...

That Outline piece, another example of "if conservatives say it, we must oppose it!!"? That, exactly, seems to be part of the problem.

The piece is a bit hyperbolic itself, and instead of spending its words on trying to tie Weinstein—a liberal Jewish college professor—to the right, the Outline should have outlined Weinstein's alleged "ommitted facts" if it wanted to make a case. Too much "feels like...."

Quite long, first part pasted here... oh, and Weinstein has a brother... (bold emphasis is author's):

How to join the Intellectual Dark Web — a user’s guide

Recently a new meme started doing the rounds on the Internet — the “Intellectual Dark Web”. The phrase was coined by the mathematician Eric Weinstein. It seems to have caught on — showing that whatever it is, quite a few people are recognising it — even though there’s a lot of discussion about what exactly it means.


My theory in this post is that the phenomenon that’s being loosely described as the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ is an early, but significant evolutionary leap in public thought and discussion, that has been facilitated by the medium of the internet — and that the spread of the name is the coming to public consciousness (and self-consciousness) of a conversation that is existentially important.

Why existentially? Because one of the things that unifies many of the thinkers in the IDW is a belief that the evolutionary strategies that got us to where we are now are unlikely to get us any further — particularly our hard-wired tribalism. That the tools at our disposal are so powerful that the odds of our survival are not high unless we can find a way to move beyond our current level of thinking. As Eric’s brother and evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein says: “Evolution gets you here and it almost certainly will end in a self extinguishing event if you keep playing the evolutionary game. You can’t continue to dance with the one that brought you.”

[more]


https://medium.com/rebel-wisdom/how-to- ... 0ae0b12b86