Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web

[hueymahl]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”

I was meeting with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin; and their spouses in a Los Angeles restaurant to talk about how they were turned into heretics. A decade ago, they argued, when Donald Trump was still hosting “The Apprentice,” none of these observations would have been considered taboo.

. . . .

What is the I.D.W. and who is a member of it? It’s hard to explain, which is both its beauty and its danger.

Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.

. . . .

But they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.

Long form article, interesting read. Reminds me a lot of DU!

[sharedvalues]

1. Author: right wing propagandist Bari Weiss!!

Better headline:

“Meet the renegades of the Simpleminded Rightwing Dark Web”


None of these alleged thinkers are very intelligent.

Look for example at how Ezra Klein (a real intellectual) recently completely intellectually eviscerated Sam Harris for his views on race genetics.

The right has no brainpower. Almost all the smart young thinkers today are liberals. Because smart people realize that the right’s “ideas” are really lies and propaganda.

[JustAnotherGen]

4. We were framing our responses at the same time

I quoted the Vox article by Ezra Klein before. He did an excellent job of pointing out - so what if a bunch of white conservatives who are predisposed to thinking poorly about minorities are whining in behind a locked door together.

[sharedvalues]

18. Nice

Bari Weiss is in a class with Kim Strassel as Republican op ed writers who do nothing but parrot right wing talking points. I’ve never seen her write anything that is at all insightful. It’s almost like all smart people these days are liberals, because anyone with half a brain can see conservatives stand only for lies and propaganda.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. Twitter is tearing this up.

From @gin_and_tacos:

Hey have u guys heard about the Intellectual Dark Web? It’s a place to find suppressed voices like (*checks notes*} Joe Rogan who hosts the second most downloaded podcast on the planet.

And from @jbouie:

What was even the pitch for this piece? “I want to do two thousand words on how my friends are rebels.”

[JustAnotherGen]

3. Read it this am

These folks can say whatever they want - and folks have the right to disregard it.

They are in a dark web of their own making. In particular - Mr. Harris.


Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science

This is not “forbidden knowledge.” It is America’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality.

By Ezra Klein@ezraklein Mar 27, 2018, 1:00pm EDT

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/15695060/sam-harris-charles-murray-race-iq-forbidden-knowledge-podcast-bell-curve

Klein

What bothered me most about Harris’s conversation with Murray was the framing. There is nothing more seductive than “forbidden knowledge.” But for two white men to spend a few hours discussing why black Americans are, as a group, less intelligent than whites isn’t a courageous stand in the context of American history; it’s a common one.


In his book Stamped From the Beginning, which won the 2016 National Book Award for nonfiction, Ibram X. Kendi traces the history of arguments about black inferiority to before the founding of the republic. “Even before Thomas Jefferson and the other founders declared independence, Americans were engaging in a polarizing debate over racial disparities, over why they exist and persist, and over why White Americans as a group were prospering more than Black Americans as a group,” he writes. Those explanations typically revolved around ever more baroque claims of biological difference.

Here Klein quotes this:

This pattern has played out across American history, and these ideas have persisted well into the modern age. William F. Buckley, the venerated founder of National Review, wrote this in a 1957 in a column titled “Why the South Must Prevail”:

The central question that emerges … is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over negro, but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.

That was just 60 years ago. It was within my mother’s lifetime. Are we so sure our generation’s version of this argument will look so much better 60 years from now?

Not you OP - but to Mr. Harris. WHY should I listen to someone whose entire body of work proves he is inherently inferior to me? Why can't he just be happy I refer to him as a 'he' or a 'him' i.e. assigning humanity to him . . .

When I refer to 45/140 as an it?

He (Mr. Harris) has an 'It' problem. All of this nonsense about labels and wypipo and everything else at DU doesn't dismiss the fact that there are other minorities like me in America, we do LITERALLY belong dark web groups - and we have completely dehumanized It and it's It's that voted for him and WE are the ones blocked/locked out of the American conversation?

Are we frightening?

[sharedvalues]

19. Ha nice. And today, liberals are the advanced group

The irony of that passage just hit me: it’s not race today that sorts groups, it’s choice of media and views.

We actually do have an advanced group today, because all the gullible and fools have been sorted into the conservative group, by their own choice. Liberals are today what Buckley proposed- the intellectually superior group. It’s simple selection: conservative media appeals mostly to the simpleminded so all the simpleminded end up conservatives.

[DetlefK]

5. To understand the article above:

https://upload.democraticunderground.com/12315978

Psychologists have found two motivators for believing in conspiracy-theories:
* If you are powerless, imagining an evil conspiracy gives you the illusion that you could do something about it.
* Various psychological trials have revealed that people more readily believe a statement if believing it paints them as unique freethinkers.

iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades

That's just people declaring themselves edgy.

[Yavin4]

6. More White men fearing that their dominance in the world is slipping

That's all this really is. The world is rapidly changing around them. Their power is being directly challenged, and they cannot stand it.

[Solly Mack]

7. Lipsters.

Lipster: your mouth moves so you must be saying something new, original, and profound.

[enough]

8. Anything getting written up in the New York Times can not possibly be the dark web. NT

[Tarc]

9. So...they're alt-right

For a group of white males who decry "identity politics" and such, they seem to trot out a new label per month or so.

[tenderfoot]

10. Right wing hooey

eom

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

11. Dave "Fucking" Rubin a comedian??... That's a stretch. nt

[Orsino]

12. tldr; racists and incels. n/t

[blogslut]

13. That article is bullshit

[SharonClark]

14. Bari Weiss was on JoeScar this morning

The anti-intellectual Joe ranted about the liberal media and liberal campuses and then posed a question "if a guy catholic guy from texas opposes gay marriage does that make him a homophobe?".

Eddie Glaude's (chair of the Center for African-American Studies and the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Princeton University) response was a perfect "not neccesarily". Perfect because he didn't fall into Joe's anti-liberal trap.

[kcr]

15. For those who don't know who Bari Weiss is, this article serves as a good introduction

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2018/03/10/a-new-york-times-columnist-blamed-a-far-left-mob-for-her-woes-but-maybe-she-deserves-them/?utm_term=.1d90d5c2bc57

[Blue_Tires]

16. I never heard of them

Last edited Tue May 8, 2018, 04:57 PM - Edit history (1)

so all this hype about how much they're supposedly influencing things is just that...

I did like the "wealthy white folks can't get their fringe viewpoints in the media" -angle... Very original.

Link to tweet

[bullwinkle428]

17. Isn't this just the old "Know-Nothing" movement, dressed up in new

cyber-packaging?