What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?
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Catching up on The Glenn Show recently, a podcast hosted by Glenn Loury and frequently co-hosted by John McWhorter. They are both Black academics of notable achievement and insight, who reject the prevailing race narrative as destructive to the communities it purports to sympathize with.
McWhorter told a story on a recent episode about a time, as a young academic with ideas about the Black experience not entirely in line with the narrative, he gave a talk at a small book store. A 50 year old white progressive woman, an employee at the store, came up to him afterwards with a look of pity and gave him a book to read which she hoped would teach him about the hardships of those who look like he does. He was so offended by this well meaning woman, that he intentionally didn't read anything from that author for decades after. Finally he did, and found him to be a great writer, but of course he learned nothing he did not already know about looking like he does. What he learned of on the day that woman took pity on him for being so wrong about his own experiences and thoughts, was the pervasive mindset of the indoctrinated white progressive female. Sadly, it is founded on a profound sense of superiority over people who look like he does.
This anecdote is 55 minutes into the May 23 episode of The Glenn Show, for anybody who'd like to listen. The writer the woman recommended was Walter Mosley.
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I listened to that just today too.
McWhorter wrote about that in one of his recent NYT pieces, too.
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I heard Bret Weinstein on a podcast recently. He is aware that some people expect him to do a mea culpa over Ivermectin, but he doesn't think he's wrong. It's just that nobody has interpreted that data correctly, other than him. Ivermectin is effective. The podcast host asked him why no country in the world has adopted it as a widespread treatment, and he handwaved a particularly weak narrative about how scientists' jobs are at risk if they demonstrate the effectiveness.
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Latest Making Sense podcast has Sam Harris talking to Marc Andreesen. Wide ranging and extremely interesting.
It held my interest even though I just heard Marc on Tyler Cowen’s pod a few weeks ago.
It’s always something.
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@jon-nyc said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
Latest Making Sense podcast has Sam Harris talking to Marc Andreesen. Wide ranging and extremely interesting.
It held my interest even though I just heard Marc on Tyler Cowen’s pod a few weeks ago.
I listened to that one too. Man does that guy talk fast. The most striking moment came towards the end where he accused high status philanthropists of participating in a destructive culture of supporting pro crime DAs. The line between fringe right conspiracy wackiness and the reasonable observations of intelligent people can become blurry.
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Sarah Isgur and David French do a “crossover” podcast on the MaL warrant. It’s basically one of their Advisory Opinion podcasts but they do it on The Dispatch podcast since it’s their flagship pod.
Sarah was the spokesperson for DOJ under Jeff Sessions and goes into interesting detail about how this would have been handled internally.
There’s a little bit of speculation and commentary about other commentary going around the internet.
It’s always something.
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Actually they released the same pod under Advisory Opinions too.
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Michael Shermer has James Doyle (the British comedian behind the Titania McGrath parody account) on his latest podcast episode. James is very educated and insightful and smart, his book is similar to McWhorter’s latest, discussing the religion of social justice. Great discussion, I highly recommend it.
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It’s always something.
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https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/listen-a-death-in-cryptoland-1.6035764
"Gerald Cotten was the founder of Quadriga CX, which launched in 2013, a cryptocurrency company and money exchange platform.
He unfortunately died in India recently while trying to open an orphanage for kids. What's doubly unfortunate is he was the only one who knew the password that holds $190 million of customer money locked in cryptocurrency."
Questions over whether he really died, etc. Interesting.
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Ooh, the latest Ezra Klein show is titled “A Powerful Theory About Why the Far Right is Thriving Across the Globe”. This should be good.
Ezra’s podcast is the top shelf attempt, across all of America, to intellectualize the tribal left viewpoint. There are no more intelligent or reasonable lefties in the country than the ones who participate in these conversations. I’m excited to once again get a gauge of righteous tribalists, out to help the world be better through an attempt at understanding the opposition. That’s the left’s Achilles heel. Empathy for the political enemy. Most of them just call us evil with a shrug and be done with it, but these people expect more of themselves. I love it when they reach for this impossibly high intellectual bar of humanizing members of the opposition tribe.
But “far right” might be a convenient escape hatch. Maybe they’ll just talk about the evil people in the other tribe. Not that they’re all evil. That would be boring. We will see.
Education is extremely important.
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@Horace I'm disappointed that Klein didn't use scare quotes.
Actually, I'm not, because the scare quotes would have made it look fringey. Keeping it the way he did it "normalizes" the "far right" and makes it look like it's, if not mainstream, at least something to worry about and contend with.
Well done, Mr Klein.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
@Horace I'm disappointed that Klein didn't use scare quotes.
Actually, I'm not, because the scare quotes would have made it look fringey. Keeping it the way he did it "normalizes" the "far right" and makes it look like it's, if not mainstream, at least something to worry about and contend with.
Well done, Mr Klein.
The podcast was a big disappointment. He was talking to Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris, whose powerful theory about why the far right is thriving is, wait for it, because they hate immigrants and people who don't look like them. Exactly what Ezra's crowd has been saying forever. Shocking. Ezra's one piece of data in this nearly entirely hand-waved discussion was that BLM support was so predictive of party affiliation. Republicans don't support BLM, Democrats do. To Ezra, that seals the deal that Republicans are racist. This is, seriously, the best of the best thinking in the intellectual leftist community. I'm not making up how dumb these people are. They overtly politicize BLM and make it about, eh, everything but a true concern about black lives, and then they call anybody not on board with their politicized nonsense, a racist.
One interesting thing I notice in these conversations is the use of the word "populist". I think it was used 100 times in this one. Inevitably, the far right mobs they are afraid of, are informed with populist ideas. So let's go back to the definition of populism.
relating to or characteristic of a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.
Fair enough, that describes Trump, if not standard conservativism before him or hopefully after him.
But let's compare that definition to the foundational idea of the progressive left, which is the race narrative. Of course, the race narrative, where disadvantaged people must be protected against established elite white supremacy, is by definition a populist ideology. Which is what I've been saying forever, but you will rarely hear progressive politics described as "populist". Because "populist", in common parlance, is a word dumb people use, to describe ideas they hate, held by large numbers of people they hate. The word "populist" is, in practice, only a signal to self-identify one's tribal affiliation.
Education is extremely important.
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Sam Harris spoke today about Sam Bankman-Fried, who's been on his podcast. Apparently word on the street is that the bankruptcy of FTX was due to fraud. I had thought it was just a consequence of the crypto facemelt that happened recently.
Then I googled and found a transcript of a chat SBF had with a Vox reporter. SBF doesn't admit to anything fraudulent but does admit that his 'altruistic' persona was a front to maximize his social reputation. Not sure why he'd go around admitting that. Also he says that one of his co-founders with FTX took the ethics very seriously, has left the company, and (my inference) may currently be a suicide risk.
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Two recommendations:
For fans of Glenn Loury - he was on Andrew Sullivan’s podcast Jan 13. They talked a lot about his very interesting past and his intellectual journey. I had gleaned much of it from listening to him many years but still learned a lot and found it interesting.
For those interested in the national debt in general, and the coming debt ceiling fight - Jonah Goldberg’s ‘The Remnant’ podcast from last Thursday has Brian Riedl, a former aid to Senator Portman and now at the Manhattan Institute, and has made something of a career out of proselytizing about the debt. He has a lot to say about the recent history of the debt and the efforts, or lack thereof, to tame it. Very interesting and informative. (The episode is called ‘The Broccoli Wars’ after the idea that politicians haven’t been very diligent about eating their broccoli before going straight to fiscal dessert)
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I listened to young black public intellectual Coleman Hughes discuss the trans moral panic, which got his guest fired from her professorship, after she expressed some views similar to JK Rowling's.
They touched on the faddish trend of transgenderism in young kids, and how the trend is obviously not entirely about a "gendered soul", independent from biology. It's obviously an absorbed trend, appealing to kids, and even parents, who want to be cool. From that perspective, I think it's interesting that something as dramatic as gender dysphoria can be absorbed from the prevailing culture, while the activists deny that a person's experiences could fix that dysphoria. I think, if a person can be convinced it's cool to feel like you're gender dysphoric, they could also be convinced that they are not gender dysphoric. Just by living life as the gender they look like. It seems like a normal person, if they were treated as a woman, and looked like a woman, would end up feeling like a woman, regardless of this mystical soul gender they think they have when they are young.
The guest mentioned a new term of shame floating around the community, "sexual racism". It's when a lesbian refuses to date a transgendered woman. That's a fun turn of phrase. The obvious phrase would be sexual bigotry, like racism is skin color bigotry. but 'racism' is such a useful cudgel to use, they just shoehorn it in wherever they can. The guest also notes that the people doing most of the shaming over these things, are straight progressive women.
The guest, who is a self-described butch lesbian, wants nothing to do with the opportunists appropriating the labels she feels like she earned. After getting fired from her university, she began working with an organization started by Bari Weiss. Some institution of higher learning comprised of refugees from the dominant academic culture.
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Listening to this conversation between Coleman Hughes and Roland Fryer, Macarthur genius economics professor at Harvard. Roland had what you might call a stereotypically bad black childhood, and one of the first things they touch on, was what allowed him to excel? Shrugs all around, who could possibly know one way or another? Nothing jumps out. He just sort of decided to go to school, and succeeded. Mentioned in passing was that he scored in the 99th percentile in a math standardized test when he was young. Which they never told him about because school wasn't a thing. Both Coleman and Roland know what his advantage is. But they still won't say it out loud. I guess IQ will remain a taboo subject forever. Maybe there's a good reason for that.
Link to videoEducation is extremely important.
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@Horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
Both Coleman and Roland know what his advantage is. But they still won't say it out loud.
I don't think it's actually that important. It's a lot like money: there are some folks who don't have enough and struggle because of it, a rare few who have so much they might as well be from Mars in terms of how to relate to them, and then the vast majority of us who are in the middle. Many of whom consider money a big issue but really isn't.
At least with the kind of crap I do for a living, a baseline IQ is required but after you reach that, it no longer serves you all that much. Most definitely it's not the trait you need to advance further.
Please love yourself.
