What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?
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A heartwarming bromance and discussion between two of the smartest and most interesting thinkers on the planet, Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson. Hanson has been thinking about culture lately, and they bat around a few ideas here, mostly that the dropping fertility is a maladaptive cultural drift allowed for by a lack of selection pressures on culture.
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I will certainly listen. Just reading your sentence though I am curious why they say there are no selection pressures on culture. Those cultures with below replacement rate fertility rates will eventually die out and those above replacement rate will prosper. That’s how selection pressure works. It just takes time.
Only non-witches get due process.
- Cotton Mather, Salem Massachusetts, 1692
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I will certainly listen. Just reading your sentence though I am curious why they say there are no selection pressures on culture. Those cultures with below replacement rate fertility rates will eventually die out and those above replacement rate will prosper. That’s how selection pressure works. It just takes time.
@jon-nyc said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
I will certainly listen. Just reading your sentence though I am curious why they say there are no selection pressures on culture. Those cultures with below replacement rate fertility rates will eventually die out and those above replacement rate will prosper. That’s how selection pressure works. It just takes time.
Caplan makes this point, and Hanson acknowledges it. The selection pressures are not immediate enough to convince anybody they are behaving against their own interests, would be the point.
And my own take would be that there is a certain cultural suicidality associated with our current mainstream leftism, and many are convinced that "not this" is better than "this".
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@jon-nyc said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
For those of us who hate watching videos is there a podcast this appears on?
Not that I know of. I use youtube as a podcast ap anyway. If you pay for a subscription, you can lock your phone and it'll keep playing the audio.
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Sam Harris finally weighed in. I've been waiting for that one.
Link to videoHe starts out very weakly, by saying Trump will now have all three branches of government, including the Supreme Court. That is a terribly politicized perspective on the Supreme Court. I remain confident that the constitution has the Supreme Court, rather than Trump.
Beyond that, Sam accurately lays the defeat of his favored Democrats, at the feet of the cultural craziness of trans, DEI, border, etc, all of which, from the left, are dominated by the religious self-righteousness of fringe activists and academia.
I see no inclination amongst those sorts to do any self-reflection. This makes sense, when one recognizes it as a religion. If it's the meaning of life to be on the religious right side of history, it doesn't really matter what's on the other side of that scale. It will remain the right thing to do, to follow one's virtue, no matter the cost. You might say, the end game is to die a decent person, rather than make any incremental differences towards the good. You might recognize this sort of attitude in the writings of a certain pastor we're familiar with.
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Yeah, I thought Sam did a good job of noting the detriment of the Dem's support the trans activist community. That issue alone may have caused the loss though I still think Harris's answer as to how her policies might differ from Biden's was also pretty devastating.
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He ended with a long litany of the damage Trump has done and all of Trump's inadequacies. Somehow he got stuck in the idea that anybody who voted for him was "fine with all of that". Sam became characteristically unable to see nuance, once his TDS kicked in.
Education is extremely important.
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He ended with a long litany of the damage Trump has done and all of Trump's inadequacies. Somehow he got stuck in the idea that anybody who voted for him was "fine with all of that". Sam became characteristically unable to see nuance, once his TDS kicked in.
@Horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
He ended with a long litany of the damage Trump has done
Don't feel like finding it.
Can you summarize the litany?
"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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On Al Franken's podcast today, the guest described Trump's plan to "pardon January 6 rioters" as a plan to create a personal armed militia. Franken nodded solemnly. Serious stuff.
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@Horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
He ended with a long litany of the damage Trump has done
Don't feel like finding it.
Can you summarize the litany?
@George-K said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
@Horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
He ended with a long litany of the damage Trump has done
Don't feel like finding it.
Can you summarize the litany?
The punch line goes something like this:
- Sam imagines there would have been a civil war if the election was close and Trump lost after Kamala made a late comeback.
- Sam blames Trump for that civil war.
My take? There wouldn't have been a civil war.
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I think Sam was doing what a lot of never-Trumpers who wrote catastrophic checks leading up to the election, are doing. He's hedging his bets by concentrating on stuff that Trump has already done, and saying very little about what he thinks this upcoming administration will actually do. There'll be plenty of this subtle repositioning, as people prepare for any reputational hit they may take, if the next four years are successful.
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@Horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
plan to create a personal armed militia.
Will Jolly join?
@Copper said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
@Horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
plan to create a personal armed militia.
Will Jolly join?
Have gun. Will travel.
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Ezra was doing some more self reflection on his party and how it started losing minorities to Trump. He got into the nuts and bolts that I’ve only ever heard from conservative pundits. Like, in the rooms where Dem strategy happens, you’ll often have one person of color, and they’ll be given special deference, and they’ll be “speaking for their people”, but they’re not actually speaking for their people. They are just parroting progressive-approved identity politics, and it’s not necessarily resonant with the people they claim to represent, who aren’t in that room. (Because they have real jobs.)
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Ezra Klein's wife sighting in Jon Stewart's most recent podcast. I'd never seen or heard her. Quite a lovely woman. And to the credit of the lefties engaged in this discussion, I didn't hear much in the way of insanity.
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Kamala's campaign strategists break their silence. I was curious how they'd explain themselves about Kamala not being prepared with an answer to what she would have done differently from Biden. The answer can be heard starting at 21:30. But they don't actually have an answer. They don't think any mistakes were made on that front, and that her inability say anything at all that so much as sounds like she's given the question some thought, well, that was the strategy. Any answer she might have given, would not have been good enough for the electorate. So the non-answer was just as good as anything else. Also, Vice Presidents don't break with their presidents, except when Pence broke with Trump after Trump stormed the Capitol. They think the political norm of vice presidents never disagreeing with their presidents is too important to break for a campaign, even a campaign for our very democracy.
These are smart and serious people, and it is a real shame they weren't able to retain power.
Link to video -
Kamala's campaign strategists break their silence. I was curious how they'd explain themselves about Kamala not being prepared with an answer to what she would have done differently from Biden. The answer can be heard starting at 21:30. But they don't actually have an answer. They don't think any mistakes were made on that front, and that her inability say anything at all that so much as sounds like she's given the question some thought, well, that was the strategy. Any answer she might have given, would not have been good enough for the electorate. So the non-answer was just as good as anything else. Also, Vice Presidents don't break with their presidents, except when Pence broke with Trump after Trump stormed the Capitol. They think the political norm of vice presidents never disagreeing with their presidents is too important to break for a campaign, even a campaign for our very democracy.
These are smart and serious people, and it is a real shame they weren't able to retain power.
Link to video@Horace Kind of like people with an addiction. Until they can acknowledge they have a problem, they can never be cured.
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There was one Democrat strategy guy I heard in an interview roundtable with other democrat strategists. The others were argueing that the economy was the issue, etc. He said, no, the issue was that we were out of touch. You are not going to the vote of someone who is struggling to get by on $10/hour and you tell him he is privileged because he is white.
