What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?
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@Horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
Unfortunately, the most incomprehensible sentence in the english language is "I support this candidate over the opposition, but I don't agree fully with everything this candidate does or says"
I beg to differ
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Phibes, I honestly tried, but I just cannot understand either of them due to their heavy accent and mumbling delivery. I tried adding CC (closed captioning) but it didn't help. It did translate the words better but didn't clarify the syntax.
Can you really listen to them and understand the conversation completely? It's just not that (usually) pleasant accent, like on a classical music station. -
I can’t understand Gerald at all. That’s a really strong West country accent, opposite side of the country to mine. We were near there over the summer, and most people don’t have anywhere near as strong an accent as that.
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Sam Harris continued his public spat with Elon Musk tonight, by releasing a 10 minute monologue on assholes. Assholes are characterized by a lack of shame. He names three names, Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, and someone I didn't recognize, but the name rhymed with Orange.
Meanwhile, on one recent podcast I heard Sam on, he proudly related how he's experienced zero negative feedback in "his world" for saying several months ago that he wouldn't have cared even if Hunter's laptop had pictures of dead babies. He was almost cocky about how socially impervious he is to the blowback others assume he felt. It's almost like he's shameless in his own social bubble.
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@Horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
Coleman Hughes interviewed the authors of this book:
Their thesis is fine, in that it boils down to a truism about how humans participate in groupthink for social advantage within tribes, and principle plays a minimal role. Hardly an original thesis, but it is among the true ideas that most of us could stand to remind ourselves of. But the authors take it too far, both in the podcast and in the book itself, by claiming that ideology has literally nothing to do with anything. They mostly accomplish this through anecdote and history-mining. If a party known today for one idea, was once known for the opposite, their thesis is proven. The fundamental ideological difference of big government vs small government, for instance, is claimed to be nonsensical, since GWB and Trump expanded the government, yet "conservatives" didn't "flee the GOP" (whatever that means. Flee where?) over that. Or the GOP tends to want to fund the military and the police, which means they are for the expansion of government. Lazy, anecdote based proofs of nothing in particular, based on framings of ideology that imply one idea at a time must reign supreme in a person's mind, to the exclusion of any other ideas. They accuse the American public of being blatantly stupid, then build a case against blatant stupidity. But few people are so blinkered as they describe. I do agree that most people are more consumed with socially advantageous groupthink than they realize.
Economist Bryan Caplan agrees with me that this book makes decent points, but goes too far:
Link to videoHe proposes his own set of left and right principles:
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The left doesn't like markets
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The right doesn't like the left
Some amusing secondary points:
- self-identified righties would by and large rather not think about politics at all, while self-identified lefties are more absorbed by politics. It can replace religion in their psyches.
- Libertarians (like Caplan) get so much hatred from the left mostly because libertarians love markets, and that conflicts with the essential single principle of the left. But it seems weird to be so hated so much, considering the tiny power wielded by libertarians.
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Sam Harris’ latest is a conversation with Graeme Wood. Many of you would have heard them talk several times in the past about jihadism, Islam, etc. They talk about the current situation in Israel but very much in the broader context of jihadism, ISIS, Saudi Arabia v Iran, etc.
I was getting to the point where I had heard enough experts interviewed about the situation for a while, but this discussion was very much worth my time.
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Glenn Loury is coming out with a memoir, I've pre-ordered.
Link to videoI enjoyed McWhorter's ode to not leaving the house, at 36:30. He's playing piano and reading a lot instead. It's a good life.
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Ezra Klein had a good discussion with a Democrat strategist who believes the party is stronger than it's ever been. Be that as it may, I was amused to hear Klein say that, if you zoom out a little bit, and think with ideas rather than labels, you can see that the American left is the party of cultural conservatism. Proving once again that if I write something here, it appears in the highest level intellectual conversations sooner or later. The thought didn't land with the guy Klein was talking to, who ignored it and changed course. The profundity of the insight was probably beyond him.
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Just finished listening to "Agent of Betrayal"
Amid the nuclear threat of the Cold War, America's prized secrets were falling into the hands of its sworn enemy. The FBI's hunt for the leak led to an astonishing discovery—the mole was one of its own, special agent Robert Hanssen. For two decades, Hanssen masqueraded as a devoted patriot while ruthlessly selling out his country, trading classified intelligence to the Soviet Union and later Russia, in exchange for cash and diamonds. He was a whirlwind of contradictions—a self-proclaimed patriot and a traitor; a family man who sexually betrayed his wife; an ardent man of God and a sinner. Through interviews with Hanssen’s family, friends, and colleagues, CBS News Chief Washington Correspondent Major Garrett (Host of “The Takeout”) delves into the double life of Robert Hanssen and unravels the chilling truth about the most damaging spy in FBI history in “Agent of Betrayal: The Double Life of Robert Hanssen”.
Quite good. It is an 8 part series, each one about 45 minutes or approx. I recommend it.