What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?
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Sam Harris felt compelled to weigh in on the anti-vaxers with their mis- and dis-information. He felt compelled to do so, because he went to a restaurant and noticed some staff wearing masks, and some not. He asked his waiter, who said that the policy was that anybody vaccinated doesn't need to wear a mask. Sam concluded that all the mask wearing staff, and there were many, had not been vaccinated, likely due to all the misinformation. So, Sam to the rescue!
I don't think he actually asked any mask wearer whether they were vaccinated, and I think his assumption that they were not was, well, stupid. Most vaccinated people around here are still wearing masks, in places where the rule is that you no longer have to, if you're vaccinated.
Be that as it may, he and his guest took aim at Bret Weinstein and his conspiracy theories. Bret got wind of this and listened to the podcast, and was heartened to hear that Sam and his guest had proven incapable of accurately characterizing what Bret said. This reinforced Bret's contention that our cultural ideas around COVID are surrounded by nearly impenetrable walls of confusion and group-think, when even a guy like Sam Harris gets a deluded notion of the contentions of anybody who strays slightly off the path - even when a respected friend. Bret hopes he and Sam can sit down and discuss their views on COVID, Ivermectin, and vaccinations someday. I hope so too.
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In the Red Clay — eh, interesting enough. Good for long car rides.
Lost Hills — better-than-average True Crime. @Horace might be interested in knowing that the host seemed to side with the defendant at first, but didn't double down when more facts emerged. The real story, though, is about the deputies.
Please love yourself.
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@aqua-letifer said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
In the Red Clay — eh, interesting enough. Good for long car rides.
Lost Hills — better-than-average True Crime. @Horace might be interested in knowing that the host seemed to side with the defendant at first, but didn't double down when more facts emerged. The real story, though, is about the deputies.
I will have a listen, thanks Aqua. Always on the lookout for something to listen to on my walks. Finishing up Chasing Ghilaine now.
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@horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
Sam Harris felt compelled to weigh in on the anti-vaxers with their mis- and dis-information. He felt compelled to do so, because he went to a restaurant and noticed some staff wearing masks, and some not. He asked his waiter, who said that the policy was that anybody vaccinated doesn't need to wear a mask. Sam concluded that all the mask wearing staff, and there were many, had not been vaccinated, likely due to all the misinformation. So, Sam to the rescue!
I don't think he actually asked any mask wearer whether they were vaccinated, and I think his assumption that they were not was, well, stupid. Most vaccinated people around here are still wearing masks, in places where the rule is that you no longer have to, if you're vaccinated.
Be that as it may, he and his guest took aim at Bret Weinstein and his conspiracy theories. Bret got wind of this and listened to the podcast, and was heartened to hear that Sam and his guest had proven incapable of accurately characterizing what Bret said. This reinforced Bret's contention that our cultural ideas around COVID are surrounded by nearly impenetrable walls of confusion and group-think, when even a guy like Sam Harris gets a deluded notion of the contentions of anybody who strays slightly off the path - even when a respected friend. Bret hopes he and Sam can sit down and discuss their views on COVID, Ivermectin, and vaccinations someday. I hope so too.
I listened to the Harris podcast. My take is let’s review everything he and Eric Topol said in about 6 months to judge their accuracy. Fair enough?
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@loki said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
@horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
Sam Harris felt compelled to weigh in on the anti-vaxers with their mis- and dis-information. He felt compelled to do so, because he went to a restaurant and noticed some staff wearing masks, and some not. He asked his waiter, who said that the policy was that anybody vaccinated doesn't need to wear a mask. Sam concluded that all the mask wearing staff, and there were many, had not been vaccinated, likely due to all the misinformation. So, Sam to the rescue!
I don't think he actually asked any mask wearer whether they were vaccinated, and I think his assumption that they were not was, well, stupid. Most vaccinated people around here are still wearing masks, in places where the rule is that you no longer have to, if you're vaccinated.
Be that as it may, he and his guest took aim at Bret Weinstein and his conspiracy theories. Bret got wind of this and listened to the podcast, and was heartened to hear that Sam and his guest had proven incapable of accurately characterizing what Bret said. This reinforced Bret's contention that our cultural ideas around COVID are surrounded by nearly impenetrable walls of confusion and group-think, when even a guy like Sam Harris gets a deluded notion of the contentions of anybody who strays slightly off the path - even when a respected friend. Bret hopes he and Sam can sit down and discuss their views on COVID, Ivermectin, and vaccinations someday. I hope so too.
I listened to the Harris podcast. My take is let’s review everything he and Eric Topol said in about 6 months to judge their accuracy. Fair enough?
That’s not really a take, but I’m happy to compare predictions to reality. Which predictions are you referring to?
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@loki said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
I listened to Bret’s podcast and looked through his Twitter feed. But I continue, are you a fan?
You know, I don’t ask my questions to you rhetorically. When I asked what predictions you wanted to test against reality, I really did want to know. You literally never answer questions in these discussions.
As for your question, I do like Bret Weinstein. Which is not to say I agree with everything he thinks. Again, If your like to mention something specific about what he has said, and why you believe it’s crazy, that would be great.
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@horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
@loki said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
I listened to Bret’s podcast and looked through his Twitter feed. But I continue, are you a fan?
You know, I don’t ask my questions to you rhetorically. When I asked what predictions you wanted to test against reality, I really did want to know. You literally never answer questions in these discussions.
As for your question, I do like Bret Weinstein. Which is not to say I agree with everything he thinks. Again, If your like to mention something specific about what he has said, and why you believe it’s crazy, that would be great.
Ivermectin effectiveness
The vaccine’s ability to break the blood brain barrier
Big Pharma profit conspiracy
Encouraging folks to find alternatives to the vaccine
The realization in 6 months just how much damage the Bret’s of the world have done .
His lack of empathy for over stressed healthcare workers, our ability to have no more lockdowns etc.Here is my prediction it’s Bret’s ideology that will cause boosters to be needed sooner rather than later, that more masks will be necessary because of the viral spread, that passports will become mandatory in most places, more deathbed confessions of wishing they took the vaccine and serious healthcare burnout.
I will say one thing, the skeptics are extending the pandemic. Nice!!
I’m not interested in the intellectual dark web of contrarian philosophers while lives and the economy are in the balance. Talk about freedom and liberty?!
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@loki said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
@horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
@loki said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
I listened to Bret’s podcast and looked through his Twitter feed. But I continue, are you a fan?
You know, I don’t ask my questions to you rhetorically. When I asked what predictions you wanted to test against reality, I really did want to know. You literally never answer questions in these discussions.
As for your question, I do like Bret Weinstein. Which is not to say I agree with everything he thinks. Again, If your like to mention something specific about what he has said, and why you believe it’s crazy, that would be great.
thank you Loki. Again you didn't answer which predictions Harris made that you'd like to keep in mind in six months, but this list of Bret's alleged points is a step in the right direction.
I will say one thing, the skeptics are extending the pandemic. Nice!!
Bret wants people to get vaccinated, but would rather they be able to take Ivermectin. He also thinks vaccines are potentially risky and that that risk outweighs the benefits of the vaccine, for people with the natural resistance conferred by prior COVID infections. I can understand disagreement on those points, but I don't think he's coming from an evil or selfish or unempathetic place.
I’m not interested in the intellectual dark web of contrarian philosophers while lives and the economy are in the balance. Talk about freedom and liberty?!
Sure, I'll continue valuing freedom of speech. Someone has to. I don't think you will, if it's a contest against whatever you're feeling righteous about on any given day.
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Horace
What you and I personally think is irrelevant, what is relevant is the real outcome of our positions. There is no measure here of that so by your measure your words of emotion and self righteousness have great power. But I respectfully withdraw. The juice is not worth the squeeze.
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@loki said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
Horace
What you and I personally think is irrelevant, what is relevant is the real outcome of our positions. There is no measure here of that so by your measure your words of emotion and self righteousness have great power. But I respectfully withdraw. The juice is not worth the squeeze.
You can certainly withdraw, but let's not pretend your attitude is a respectful one towards those who disagree with you. You haven't earned that.
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Sam Harris had another rebuttal to Bret on Sam's most recent podcast. Doesn't want to have Bret on, because he doesn't want to platform Bret's anti-vaccination messaging.
The issue Bret will have with that, as I predict it, is that Bret does not propagate anti-vaccination messaging, and does hope everybody gets vaccinated. Bret realizes Ivermectin is not widely available and is not a practical alternative currently.
Sam's point boiled down to the notion that Bret is failing in his moral duty to keep all discussions unambiguously pro-vaccination, full stop. No questions should be asked publicly. I get where he's coming from, but he did end up straw-manning Bret again.
Later in the podcast, which was an Ask me Anything, Sam addressed the CRT stuff. His 12 year old daughter was assigned to read a piece by Ibram X Kendi. In Sam's words, you can imagine his joy at his daughter's school attempting to indoctrinate her into that flavor of paranoid identitarianism. This goes to the discussion about whether CRT is being taught in schools - this is part of it, and it is insidious. Child abuse, really.
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I listened to Ezra Klein's podcast today, which is released under the banner of the New York Times. The episode was enticingly titled "How Identity Politics Took Over the Republican Party". It was an hour long discussion about how the Republican base is motivated almost entirely by racial animosity. How, as white Christian males, they are threatened by the notion of no longer being on top of the social hierarchy. None of this is debated or debatable, it's just the accepted and obvious premise from which the conversation begins.
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Coleman Hughes, young African American free thinker and public intellectual, has a podcast which is now 50 episodes old. He's had some good, interesting guests on. Sam Harris, Douglas Murray, Charles Murray, Noam Chomsky, Bret Weinstein, Ezra Klein, Loury, McWhorter...
I just listened to the Charles Murray one, who's written another book on race and IQ. Not because he wanted more of the attention that he'd gotten for The Bell Curve, but because he feels that the woke messaging about systemic white supremacy being to blame for all racial disparities, is destroying the culture. He thinks the achievement gap is an intractable problem that will never be solved. So, he wrote another book asking people to acknowledge realities of IQ differences. Since we'll inevitably attribute achievement gaps to something, he thinks IQ gap is a more socially stable idea than systemic white supremacy.
Coleman made the counter-argument I'm sympathetic to. That kids shouldn't be told that people of their skin color are on average different, and lesser, by such a viscerally important measure. No caveat about overlapping distributions is going to soften that basic idea. In fact that's my issue with CRT - it teaches the culture that white people hate black people, and we all go into our social and professional interactions with that basic idea implanted. The white person is the only one with full knowledge of whether they are actually rooting for the black person to succeed. What's the black person to think, if they've been taught conspiracy theories their whole lives about what must be going on in the minds of white people?
I would differ with Murray most strongly in his contention that we've done all we can possibly do to solve the problem, and that what we're left with is an acknowledgment and a mainstreaming of the idea of racial IQ differences. If most of the problematic people come from subcultures of terrible parenting and disastrous neighborhoods, we're losing a lot of good people to the effects of the culture they were born into rather than the effects of their genetics. And we are clearly not doing everything we can to fix those cultures, since as we speak the left is busy warmly accepting it and even romanticizing it.
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Btw I think Coleman is a smart guy, but he's catching on not because of the depth of his insight. He is in the business of picking the plentiful low hanging fruit available to any reasonable and intelligent person of color who wants to go against the epicenter of dumb in our culture - our mainstream ideas about race.
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Really good discussion with Shelby Steele and his son, who made a documentary on the kid from Ferguson who got himself shot. How that narrative was bent into fantasy to conform to the race narrative, how that narrative is entirely about the acquisition of political and cultural power, how Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder were complicit in that power grab. Personally, I'm convinced that nothing gives the lives of white progressives more meaning than a juicy anecdote about a white cop killing a black person. I think it literally induces orgasms in some. Meanwhile, that fictitious narrative continues to damage the culture in general, and the psyches of black children in particular.
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McWhorter was on Sam Harris' podcast today. Good discussion, and of course McWhorter has good ideas. Never touched upon was the idea that only someone of his skin color can say them publicly. It would be nice to have that acknowledged. I'm not entirely sure WcWhorter himself is comfy with acknowledging it. Maybe he thinks he's an academic and thinker that just happened to excavate this truth before anybody else did.
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@horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
Never touched upon was the idea that only someone of his skin color can say them publicly.
He notes that all the time on Loury’s podcast. Also last night I started his new book and he mentions that in the first chapter. Says he has an obligation to publish the book because a white guy couldn’t.
DON’T let them eat cake.
- RFK Jr -
@jon-nyc said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
@horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
Never touched upon was the idea that only someone of his skin color can say them publicly.
He notes that all the time on Loury’s podcast. Also last night I started his new book and he mentions that in the first chapter. Says he has an obligation to publish the book because a white guy couldn’t.
That's good.
