Tuesday, May 08, 2018

Sanity Strikes Back?: The "Intellectual Dark Web"

This is real cause for hope, I think!: the individual intellectual celebrities that have been fighting the illiberal left seem to be morphing into a kind of alliance.
   It's a dopey name ("intellectual dark web")...but it could be a whole lot worse (e.g. "brights." Egad. Better to let totalitarianism win). It's not great to see personalities rather than ideas being emphasized. And it's the NYT, so there's the standard bias (e.g. the argumentum ad Murryam).
   But it's something!

9 Comments:

Blogger Dark Avenger said...

Williamson, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson are intellectuals?

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.”

8:42 AM  
Blogger Pete Mack said...

It's also a terribly constructed article. (Widely respected professor at Evergreen State? As if! That is an oxymoron.)

9:57 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Well, what *I* said was "intellectual celebrities," FWIW. Who's Williamson?

Also: look, basically all these people are pretty damn smart--even Harris. Many or most are former academicians. Unless I'm mad, I don't sneer at people for not being academicians, or not being at good schools, or having Ivy League pedigrees, or any of that stuff. (Hell, I'm in no *position* to sneer...)

Anyway, none of that's relevant. (1) Their *arguments* are good, and, (2), they're forming a core of an organized response to PC crazy.

10:30 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Oh, also: 'Intellectual' in this context clearly means something more like "a dark web of an intellectual kind," rather than "a dark web of intellectuals."

10:31 AM  
Blogger Dark Avenger said...

The guy who lost his position at the Atlantic for his opinion that women should be hanged for having had an abortion. Of course Ben Shapiro, having started opining at an early age, was against the Parkland students daring to have an opinion on gun control.

You know how to pick ‘em, Winston. A budding Edmund Burke or Russel Kirk is sure to come from this movement one of these days.

9:53 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Your pulling stuff out of your ass again, DA. There's no mention of Kevin Williamson in any of this. I barely even know who that guy is.

And *that's* what you've got on Shapiro?

This is pretty thin gruel even by your standards, DA.

6:15 AM  
Blogger Dark Avenger said...

Conservative columnist Ben Shapiro appeared to defend Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Thursday, saying that while he disagreed with her tweet going after Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg it wasn't "remotely close" to criticism that Hogg himself has issued.

Shapiro argued in a series of tweets that Parkland students such as Hogg who engage in political discourse should not be immune from criticism, pointing to the student's past
comments regarding gun rights advocates.

"You may not like what Ingraham said. You may disagree with it. I did. But it isn't remotely CLOSE to the level of viciousness with which Hogg has attacked people who disagree with him," Shapiro writes.

https://www.google.com/amp/thehill.com/homenews/media/380926-ben-shapiro-parkland-student-should-not-be-free-of-pushback%3famp

A great example of conservatives fighting on the level of ideas and not making it personal.

8:09 AM  
Blogger Dark Avenger said...

Why, just look at what happened to Kevin Williamson: he was hired by The Atlantic, but the moment they found out he held a Dangerous opinion (in this case, the opinion that women who get abortions should be hanged and that little black boys can be appropriately described as “primates”), he was fired. Why are mainstream institutions punishing heterodox thinking?

First, even from the evidence in Weiss’ article, we can see that freely speaking about the “siege on free speech” is impressively lucrative. Dave Rubin’s show “makes at least $30,000 a month on Patreon” while Jordan Peterson “pulls in some $80,000 in fan donations each month” and recently released a bestseller. Ben Shapiro gets 15 million downloads a month and has published five books, Sam Harris gets a million listeners per episode and has published seven books. Though Joe Rogan insists “he’s not an interviewer or a journalist” (I wouldn’t disagree) his three-hour podcast conversations are among the most downloaded in the world. These dissident “intellectuals” each seem to make about as much money in a month, with far larger audiences, than is made annually by the critical race theorists and gender studies professors they think are keeping them from being heard.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/05/pretty-loud-for-being-so-silenced

As with the Holy Roman Empire.......

9:10 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

DA, you're just not making any sense, dude. None of this is at all relevant in any way I can see.

These just all seem like weird ad hominems to me...except for the Williamson bit, which is irrelevant on other grounds.

What am I missing?

9:25 AM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home