What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?
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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.
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Listening to "Queen of the Con".
https://johnathanwalton.com/queen-of-the-con
It has 5 seasons, each focusing on a female con artist. The guy who is doing the podcast started it because he was conned (the subject of season 1) and spent a lot of time trying to bring her to justice.
There are some really bad people out there, and con artists really damage alot of lifes.
I would call this a "light" podcast. Fun to listen to, and moves pretty quickly.
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I subscribe to something called Aporia, which is an intelligence-oriented cultural perspective magazine. They recently had an interview with a guy called Jeremy Carl which I thought was excellent. He wrote a book called The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. He had wanted to call it "It's ok to be white", but the publishers wouldn't have it. Which, as he notes, is exactly the point of the book. "It's ok to be <ethicity>" is great as a book title for all ethnicities but one. And we know which. They note that there is something peculiar about "white" that makes people believe that to say out loud that it's "ok" to be that, it means you want to take over the world, because you're that. It's so funny. I mean the animal brain is so dominant in that attitude. Tell me without telling me that you believe white people are actually superior.
It's a discussion between two legitimately intelligent people, and therefore of some value. They do release exerpts on youtube. You can't say out loud that you appreciate them. They get into that too. We're all white supremacists. And I really do know the target, behind it all, of those who say we're all white supremacists. It's markets. They don't hate white people. (Mostly, they are white people.) They hate markets, and competition. They hate feeling like losers.
Education is extremely important.
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George Will on Andrew Sullivan’s podcast.
From the show notes:
two clips of our convo — on why the presidency has too much power, and the necessity of stopping Putin — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: growing up in Lincoln country; the son of a philosophy prof and an academic editor; Isaiah Berlin was a family friend; George and I both attending Magdalen College, Oxford; his meeting with Thatcher in late '60s; how socialism is stultifying; Oakeshott; industrial policy as crony capitalism “from the start”; Milton Friedman; why “secure” is the most important word in the Constitution; just war theory; Vietnam as the “professors’ war”; collectivism vs national security; the trauma of 9/11 and the Iraq War; the China threat today; Gaza; why natcons are jealous of progressives; Elizabeth Warren; why Woodrow Wilson criticized the Founding as quaint; FDR and his fireside chats; in praise of Eisenhower; the spread of the administrative state; Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement; Reagan and the national debt; his bad wager on the Laffer Curve; the meaning of his smile; presentism; Hume at a dinner party; Madison’s genius; George the “amiable low-voltage atheist”; Christian nationalism; evangelicals for Trump; the entitlement crunch with Boomers; “not voting is an opinion”; our disagreement on immigration; the “execrable” 1924 law; climate change as a low priority for Gen Z; why Trump is unprecedented; Biden’s age and his “stupendous act of selfishness” in running again; Gina Raimondo; DEI as the new racial discrimination; the deep distrust in media; the flailing WaPo; “happiness is overrated”; the appeal of baseball; and the reasons why America is exceptional.
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Loury of course agrees with some sentiments expressed here about Biden's Morehouse College commencement speech.
Link to videoHis conversation partner McWhorter provides the interesting perspective that you can't even be mad at this sort of institutionalized psychological abuse of black people, because it's just what people like Biden say.
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Another clip from Glenn and John. Glenn introduces it like so:
Link to videoMy friend John McWhorter is a calm, rational, reasonable guy. So I was truly shocked when he implied some weeks ago that he wished someone would assassinate Donald Trump. I thought maybe John just got carried away in the moment. But in this clip from our most recent conversation, you’ll see him apologize for making the statement without quite taking it back. When even a moderate centrist like John, who is usually so mindful of his language, feels license to talk like this about Trump, we must be in a very dark place as a nation.
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Bari Weiss talked to a panel of Democrats who will be voting for Trump. Good listening for those of you who can't possibly imagine how any sane or decent human being might want to vote for Trump. Of course I do realize that after these people go through the meat grinder of the TDS addled mind, they will be some combination of insane and/or indecent. But, it's still a valuable exercise for those of us who can't imagine how or why the opposition might believe as they do.
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Ezra Klein did a monologue podcast a few days ago that IMO is the state of the art case for Trump the existential threat. He acknowledges that things weren't that scary under Trump's first term, but that there is a reason for that. In Trump's first term, there were people there controlling him, keeping him from his worst impulses. Klein mentions the NYT best seller by an anonymous white house insider, about adults in the room containing the disaster. Klein says such people won't be there this time. Klein mentions that Trump has talked fondly of unleashing the military against his political opposition. Klein imagines all governmental apparatus bent to Trump's whims, and nobody there to contain him as he becomes an autocratic dictator. It was breathless in places. At the beginning of the monologue, he mentions the big five psychological traits and how Trump might score. He also mentions his own scores, and admits that his neuroticism is rather high. That checks out.
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"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.
