Michael Tsarion on Race, Jordan Peterson, and Why Conspiracy Work is Spiritual Work |372|

In the same interview, West also briefly touched upon slavery. “When I saw Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, that’s when I wanted to use bitcoin,” he said. “It’s like all the slave movies. Why you gotta keep reminding us about slavery? Why don’t you put Michael Jordan on the $20 bill?”

I stand by what I previously said about Kanye. Forget about me calling Candace an idiot, it’s clearly Kanye who is. If he legitimately can’t see the difference between Michael Jordan and Harriet Tubman....

All jokes aside, Kanye is a social climber. As the saying goes, “no publicity is bad publicity.” He’s acting like a damn fool so he doesn’t fade into irrelevancy. He is married to a Kardashian after all. I’d rather read his stupid ramblings than look at his god awful Yeezy clothes, but that could just be me.

Also, wth is bitcoin?
 
West Coast Rapper Issues "Crip Alert" To "Fu*k Kanye Up","Bang On His Ass"

By Tyler Durden

An associate of rapper Snoop Dogg has put out a nationwide "Crip alert" for Kanye West on social media, calling on "all the Crips out there" to "Fu*k Kanye up" over West's support of Donald Trump and black conservative Candace Owens.

"Yo national alert, all the Crips out there, y’all f— Kanye up,” reads an Instagram post by Delmar Drew Arnaud, aka Daz Dillinger of the "The Dogg Pound," as reported by a Los Angeles CBS affiliate before it was removed.

More here:
http://www.targetliberty.com/2018/05/west-coast-rapper-issues-crip-alert-to.html#comment-form

Doug
 
Also, wth is bitcoin?

It's a high tech attempt at apolitical money, y'know, like the gold standard, and with all the same problems, imo. Though I do slightly want to murder myself for not following a tip when Bitcoin was at around 20c a coin. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
Watch Ken Wilber speak about this at around 2h 31m 10s here:

Yeah, I haven't listened to this yet (I will), but am familiar with the gist of Wilber's idea - liberals (the usual vanguard of progress [his opinion, not mine]) have gone too far, getting lost in moral relativity and snobbish political correctness, leaving their conservative brethren behind to smoulder in a sulk of justified resentment.

To me, this is shockingly lacking in economic and or political perspective, ignoring the worst-of-business/worst-of-government political consensus that has done so much to wreck the world economy, gut state institutions, and increase inequality. (It's also worth noting the 'neo-liberal' project was initially a baby of the right.)

Don't get me wrong, I love Wilber, but I find the history of capitalism, industrialism, the nation state, and cycles of globalisation/deglobalisation to be essential ingredients in any attempt to situate ourselves politically. Culture, on it's own, just doesn't cut it.

Y'know, if you're gonna go meta on politics, mix in at least a little dose of material analysis at the foundational level of your extrapolations. (Wilber, not you.)

The reason Trump was elected, even though people in general thought he wasn't qualified to be president, was because people wanted change; wanted to escape from the deadening hand of political correctness. The regressive left still hasn't accepted this and is doubling down on its message.

Didn't Trump get less votes than cranky McCain and Mitt the Mormon?

Anyway, the right wing media has spent decades demonising liberals/socialists/the left with a wide range of bizarre and distorted caricatures..... same goes for global institutions, immigrants, government institutions, conservation, etc..... they also regularly throw in race baiting and crass identity politics. Trump positioned himself on this primed ground rather skilfully.

Without completely denying the phenomena, I see the menace of Political Correctness in a similar light to the above.

BTW, I'm also not denying the toxicity of Hillary or the fact that Trump addressed some legitimate economic concerns.

resorting to name-calling and shouting

It's worth remembering the right have their own version of PC enforcement. Fox News, conservative tabloids, etc. viciously attack those who disagree with them.... like this British tabloid cover featuring pop-star Lily Allen:

tart-e10.jpg


Shocking!

-- even violence.

Certain groupings in the American right regularly, and explicitly, threaten violence and social disorder to get their point across:

phoenix-knuckleheads.jpg


So, to blame the current toxic atmosphere solely on liberals is, to me, rather strange.

As for me, I'm neither left nor right. The nearest term I'd sort of accept is libertarian, which the progressive left used to be. Libertarians can be found both on the left (now quite rarely) and the right.

Yes, I'm not aiming any of the above at you. Promise.
 
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Hey, dpdownsouth, I don't deny that the right has its own defects. I'm not defending the right so much as focussing on the shortcomings of a regressive left that thinks of itself as whiter than white. It's very far from that, and at the moment, I see PC as the most insidious threat to the West, because it undermines free speech. Without free speech, we're all totally screwed, left or right.
 
Hey, dpdownsouth, I don't deny that the right has its own defects. I'm not defending the right so much as focussing on the shortcomings of a regressive left that thinks of itself as whiter than white. It's very far from that, and at the moment, I see PC as the most insidious threat to the West, because it undermines free speech. Without free speech, we're all totally screwed, left or right.

So I take it you’re just going to keep ignoring my posts?
 
So I take it you’re just going to keep ignoring my posts?

That’s generally what happens when you are added to ‘ignore’. I used to get mad at Michael when he ranted, but now? Not so much. It’s just his way, we all have weaknesses, I just see this as one of his. I wouldn’t take offence, but then, I’m not you. Come to think of it, I might, for a bit. ;)
 
That’s generally what happens when you are added to ‘ignore’. I used to get mad at Michael when he ranted, but now? Not so much. It’s just his way, we all have weaknesses, I just see this as one of his. I wouldn’t take offence, but then, I’m not you. Come to think of it, I might, for a bit. ;)

I didn’t even know I was on ignore! What a shame. I’m not offended or anything, just confused? He complained about political correctness stopping debates/discussions, then he puts me on ignore so we can’t debate/discuss. Kind of ironic. It isn’t PC that is ruining this country, it’s an unwillingness to listen to the other side.
 
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I didn’t even know I was on ignore! What a shame. I’m not offended or anything, just confused? He complained about political correctness stopping debates/discussions, then he puts me on ignore so we can’t debate/discuss. Kind of ironic. It isn’t PC that is ruining this country, it’s an unwillingness to listen to the other side.

I don't want to discuss this particular issue with you because you said a few posts back you have a mental illness, okay? I didn't know that, and don't want to upset you any further. I've put you on ignore for a while to avoid any possibility of doing that.
 
Trump won because he used scare tactics and appealed to the ignorant.
OK I didn't have a vote because I am not an American, but honestly Hillary Clinton scared me - she wanted to intensify the war in Syria (maybe involving a war with Russia) - a war she had kicked off while she was Secretary of State. She had also cooperated with David Cameron to wreck Libya. If she hadn't cheated her way to win the nomination (see Donna Brazile), the Democratic party might have had a better candidate, so maybe I would have rooted for him/her. However, honestly, I don't think I can fault President Trump's efforts so far.

BTW as a moderator, I ignore nobody!

David
 
OK I didn't have a vote because I am not an American, but honestly Hillary Clinton scared me - she wanted to intensify the war in Syria (maybe involving a war with Russia) - a war she had kicked off while she was Secretary of State. She had also cooperated with David Cameron to wreck Libya. If she hadn't cheated her way to win the nomination (see Donna Brazile), the Democratic party might have had a better candidate, so maybe I would have rooted for him/her. However, honestly, I don't think I can fault President Trump's efforts so far.

BTW as a moderator, I ignore nobody!

David

David, my hand was heading towards the like button...then I read your first paragraph’s final sentence and I just had to carry out a missed approach. ;)
 
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I don't want to discuss this particular issue with you because you said a few posts back you have a mental illness, okay? I didn't know that, and don't want to upset you any further. I've put you on ignore for a while to avoid any possibility of doing that.

I appreciate your concern, but my mental illness doesn’t stop me from partaking in discussions. I’m not upset or anything, even if it seems like I am. I posted this on Psience Quest, but I’ll post it here, too. I have Shizotypal Personality Disorder. I won’t go into too much detail here, but one of the symptoms I suffer from is “bizarre/inchorent speech patterns”. This basically means I talk and write very weird. When I try to explain/articulate something it can come off as “crazy talk” and be very hard to follow/comprehend. So I have to be extra careful when I’m trying to say something, which makes it hard for me to write what I’m thinking. No need to be careful around me.
 
OK I didn't have a vote because I am not an American, but honestly Hillary Clinton scared me - she wanted to intensify the war in Syria (maybe involving a war with Russia) - a war she had kicked off while she was Secretary of State. She had also cooperated with David Cameron to wreck Libya. If she hadn't cheated her way to win the nomination (see Donna Brazile), the Democratic party might have had a better candidate, so maybe I would have rooted for him/her. However, honestly, I don't think I can fault President Trump's efforts so far.

BTW as a moderator, I ignore nobody!

David

If it’s worth anything, I’m not a fan of Hillary, either. To be honest, I wasn’t really rooting for any candidate this past election. I liked Bernie the most but I wasn’t behind him 100%. We’ll have to agree to disagree on that final paragraph sentence;)
 
Not wanting to steal your thunder, TheRaven, but I've done a little digging into the YouTube video interviews posted by Michael and I figured I'd post a summary of what I've found.

Candace Owens seems to be a genuinely good, idealistic, well-intentioned person who wanted to fix online harassment. She came up with an idea that unfortunately was misconceived and counter-productive[*]: the "Social Autopsy" website, for which she sought funding via Kickstarter. She didn't realise that she was stumbling into the middle of a culture war on the internet. Both sides of the culture war saw that her idea was flawed, but two critics in particular seemed to catch her attention:

Zoe Quinn criticised Social Autopsy both privately by phone and publicly on social media, and Randi Harper critiqued it harshly in an angry public rant. Naturally, Candace did not enjoy that rant in particular. Her negative experiences with these two led her to form the theory that they orchestrated the campaign of harassment that she, her company, and her Kickstarter campaign subsequently experienced.

Her strongest evidence for this theory seems to be that Zoe had warned her over the phone about the likelihood of impending harassment, and that this warning soon proved to be accurate. Interpreting this warning as a threat, Candace seems to have come to the strange conclusion that she has "an open and shut case" against Zoe and Randi. She doesn't seem to take seriously the likelier possibility that Zoe's warning came out of experience.

In fact, Candace claims that Zoe faked, for notoriety and profit, the earlier harassment that she (Zoe) experienced. Presumably, Candace is (or was at the time) ignorant that chat logs had been publicly released in which 4channers gleefully, sadistically, and perversely described their orchestration of the campaign of harassment against Zoe.

Another problem for this theory is that Candace claims that her critics were motivated by fear that their (she conjectured) anonymous, double-agent harassment accounts would be unmasked by the Social Autopsy website, whilst also having claimed that Social Autopsy would operate only with publicly available data, such that anonymous accounts would remain anonymous. If Social Autopsy would respect anonymity, then it is hard to see how it could pose a threat to the (conjectured) anonymous, double-agent harassment accounts of her critics.

It seems, though, that at other times, Candace claimed or implied that Social Autopsy would dox anonymous users. Others, in critiquing it, have noticed these sorts of inconsistencies in the Social Autopsy proposal.

Kickstarter, sensibly, then, took the funding page for Social Autopsy down, apparently under pressure from its critics (according to Randi's angry rant linked to above). Candace seems, also sensibly, to have abandoned the project.

This is not to say that her two critics are unblemished. In the online culture wars, plenty of dirt has been dug up on them, and Candace too seems to honestly have had bad experiences with them. I don't know them personally, so can't comment on how representative this dirt and Candace's experiences of them are, but in any case, imperfect as Zoe might be, the idea that her harassment was (as Candace believes/believed) faked is demonstrably false, and the idea that it was (as the actual harassers believed) deserved is reprehensible.

Could Zoe and/or Randi have at the least tipped off the communities which ended up harassing Candace and Social Autopsy? I suppose it's possible, but, not knowing Zoe and Randi personally, nor knowing well the community of which they're a part, it's hard for me to judge - based on what I do know, though, it seems unlikely.

This is not to say either that the supporters of Candace's critics behaved well at all times. Candace documents that one media piece critical of Social Autopsy and her conspiracy theory was written by a journalist who privately misrepresented his intentions to her, failed to reveal that he was friends with both Zoe and Randi, and used his published piece to mock her on social media. Despite these problems, in my opinion the piece is cogent and well worth reading - it might even have been as informative to have simply linked to it as to have written out this post!

In any case, it seems that on the basis of her conspiracy theory and the unkind treatment she received, Candace has extrapolated that the left as a whole is corrupt, and picked her side in the culture wars, although as she admits she had conservative tendencies in the first place. And thus we get the sort of (in my opinion, unbalanced) views that she expressed in the entirely uncritical interviews of her by Stefan Molyneux and Dave Rubin. It's important to me though to emphasise that I think that Candace is a good person who means well. I like her and find her charming and engaging.

Because TheRaven has indicated that she's working on a blow-by-blow response to Candace's interview by Stefan, I won't attempt that myself, but before I end, here is a semi-related thought:

It's interesting that certain political and culture-war pundits are more concerned about the increase in power of, and (potential for) abuse of that power by, minorities and outsiders than about that of the corrupt hegemony.

The USA, a nuclear-armed state, maintains hundreds of military bases in dozens of countries across the world. It undeniably uses both overt warfare and covert agency to interfere in the politics of other countries, sometimes overthrowing democratically-elected governments. It does all of this in its own self-interest and that of its corporate accomplices, and not in the interests of the citizens of the countries in which it meddles - often directly opposed to their interests. Certain political pundits though are more concerned about the potential for abuse were the nuclear aspirations of smaller countries like Iran to be realised than about this existing and ongoing abuse by the nation that is the world's biggest bully.

In the same way, certain culture-war pundits are more concerned about the increase in power of, and (potential for) abuse of that power by, female and transgender social activists, who are vastly underrepresented in the cultural areas at issue (in particular, game development), than about that of the existing hegemony (in particular, gaming corporations).

Priorities?

[*] Social Autopsy was to be a website to which people could submit screenshots of harassment to which they'd been subjected by other people, under those other people's real names, so as to hold those other people accountable for their harassment. The fundamental problem with this idea is the lack of realistic and reliable means of verifying some given online account's real-world identity. This leaves the site wide open to abuse: anybody could create on some given public online platform an account under somebody else's real name, manufacture harassing posts apparently by that other person, and then submit them to Social Autopsy. Given what we know about online trolling, often motivated by no other reason than "for the lulz", this possibility would be bound to be realised. The site would then become a tool to facilitate the harassment it was intended to prevent. There are other problems with the idea, but given that I can't see a way around this one, and the length of this post, I won't go into them.
 
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David, my hand was heading towards the like button...then I read your first paragraph’s final sentence and I just had to carry out a missed approach. ;)
Obviously I may ultimately be proved wrong, but my feeling is that he actually wants to create a more contented America that is not interfering al over the world, and that he fundamentally dislikes war.

If he pulls off a deal in Korea (maybe now it will be unified one day), that is certainly a blow on behalf of peace. Remember that only a few months ago everyone was as scathing about Trump's policy over NK as they are now over his policy with Iran.

I have long thought that World Trade favours businessmen at the expense of most of the workers. Having less international trade is probably a good thing. The same goes for mass migration - it is simply a mechanism to destroy the value of workers' wages.

I doubt if CO2 induced Climate change is real, and if it is, I very much doubt if it is much of a threat. Therefore taking off restrictions in this area are an excellent move.

He has downplayed identity politics, and I think he is right to do that.

He is most definitely not PC, and I support him on that. PC provides the means to censor all sorts of debates, while masquerading as a laudable sensitivity to all sorts of minorities.

The two Syria attacks were organised to as to kill essentially nobody (the best kind of war). I suspect both those chemical attacks were either faked or performed by opposition groups against their 'own' people to try to pull the US into the war. President Trump was not fooled.

He is older even than I am, and has achieved all that while being constantly distracted and abused by 'intelligent' America.

What is there not to like about this president?

David
 
Not wanting to steal your thunder, TheRaven, but I've done a little digging into the YouTube video interviews posted by Michael and I figured I'd post a summary of what I've found.

Candace Owens seems to be a genuinely good, idealistic, well-intentioned person who wanted to fix online harassment. She came up with an idea that unfortunately was misconceived and counter-productive[*]: the "Social Autopsy" website, for which she sought funding via Kickstarter. She didn't realise that she was stumbling into the middle of a culture war on the internet. Both sides of the culture war saw that her idea was flawed, but two critics in particular seemed to catch her attention:

Zoe Quinn criticised Social Autopsy both privately by phone and publicly on social media, and Randi Harper critiqued it harshly in an angry public rant. Naturally, Candace did not enjoy that rant in particular. Her negative experiences with these two led her to form the theory that they orchestrated the campaign of harassment that she, her company, and her Kickstarter campaign subsequently experienced.

Her strongest evidence for this theory seems to be that Zoe had warned her over the phone about the likelihood of impending harassment, and that this warning soon proved to be accurate. Interpreting this warning as a threat, Candace seems to have come to the strange conclusion that she has "an open and shut case" against Zoe and Randi. She doesn't seem to take seriously the likelier possibility that Zoe's warning came out of experience.

In fact, Candace claims that Zoe faked, for notoriety and profit, the earlier harassment that she (Zoe) experienced. Presumably, Candace is (or was at the time) ignorant that chat logs had been publicly released in which 4channers gleefully, sadistically, and perversely described their orchestration of the campaign of harassment against Zoe.

Another problem for this theory is that Candace claims that her critics were motivated by fear that their (she conjectured) anonymous, double-agent harassment accounts would be unmasked by the Social Autopsy website, whilst also having claimed that Social Autopsy would operate only with publicly available data, such that anonymous accounts would remain anonymous. If Social Autopsy would respect anonymity, then it is hard to see how it could pose a threat to the (conjectured) anonymous, double-agent harassment accounts of her critics.

It seems, though, that at other times, Candace claimed or implied that Social Autopsy would dox anonymous users. Others, in critiquing it, have noticed these sorts of inconsistencies in the Social Autopsy proposal.

Kickstarter, sensibly, then, took the funding page for Social Autopsy down, apparently under pressure from its critics (according to Randi's angry rant linked to above). Candace seems, also sensibly, to have abandoned the project.

This is not to say that her two critics are unblemished. In the online culture wars, plenty of dirt has been dug up on them, and Candace too seems to honestly have had bad experiences with them. I don't know them personally, so can't comment on how representative this dirt and Candace's experiences of them are, but in any case, imperfect as Zoe might be, the idea that her harassment was (as Candace believes/believed) faked is demonstrably false, and the idea that it was (as the actual harassers believed) deserved is reprehensible.

Could Zoe and/or Randi have at the least tipped off the communities which ended up harassing Candace and Social Autopsy? I suppose it's possible, but, not knowing Zoe and Randi personally, nor knowing well the community of which they're a part, it's hard for me to judge - based on what I do know, though, it seems unlikely.

This is not to say either that the supporters of Candace's critics behaved well at all times. Candace documents that one media piece critical of Social Autopsy and her conspiracy theory was written by a journalist who privately misrepresented his intentions to her, failed to reveal that he was friends with both Zoe and Randi, and used his published piece to mock her on social media. Despite these problems, in my opinion the piece is cogent and well worth reading - it might even have been as informative to have simply linked to it as to have written out this post!

In any case, it seems that on the basis of her conspiracy theory and the unkind treatment she received, Candace has extrapolated that the left as a whole is corrupt, and picked her side in the culture wars, although as she admits she had conservative tendencies in the first place. And thus we get the sort of (in my opinion, unbalanced) views that she expressed in the entirely uncritical interviews of her by Stefan Molyneux and Dave Rubin. It's important to me though to emphasise that I think that Candace is a good person who means well. I like her and find her charming and engaging.

Because TheRaven has indicated that she's working on a blow-by-blow response to Candace's interview by Stefan, I won't attempt that myself, but before I end, here is a semi-related thought:

It's interesting that certain political and culture-war pundits are more concerned about the increase in power of, and (potential for) abuse of that power by, minorities and outsiders than about that of the corrupt hegemony.

The USA, a nuclear-armed state, maintains hundreds of military bases in dozens of countries across the world. It undeniably uses both overt warfare and covert agency to interfere in the politics of other countries, sometimes overthrowing democratically-elected governments. It does all of this in its own self-interest and that of its corporate accomplices, and not in the interests of the citizens of the countries in which it meddles - often directly opposed to their interests. Certain political pundits though are more concerned about the potential for abuse were the nuclear aspirations of smaller countries like Iran to be realised than about this existing and ongoing abuse by the nation that is the world's biggest bully.

In the same way, certain culture-war pundits are more concerned about the increase in power of, and (potential for) abuse of that power by, female and transgender social activists, who are vastly underrepresented in the cultural areas at issue (in particular, game development), than about that of the existing hegemony (in particular, gaming corporations).

Priorities?

[*] Social Autopsy was to be a website to which people could submit screenshots of harassment to which they'd been subjected by other people, under those other people's real names, so as to hold those other people accountable for their harassment. The fundamental problem with this idea is the lack of realistic and reliable means of verifying some given online account's real-world identity. This leaves the site wide open to abuse: anybody could create on some given public online platform an account under somebody else's real name, manufacture harassing posts apparently by that other person, and then submit them to Social Autopsy. Given what we know about online trolling, often motivated by no other reason than "for the lulz", this possibility would be bound to be realised. The site would then become a tool to facilitate the harassment it was intended to prevent. There are other problems with the idea, but given that I can't see a way around this one, and the length of this post, I won't go into them.

This wasn’t sealing my thunder at all. It was definitely a needed post. An update, I’ve been busy with school the last week, so I haven’t had too much time to work on my response to the video, but it’ll be done soon. This will be my last post for a little bit so I can focus more on completing it.
 
Obviously I may ultimately be proved wrong, but my feeling is that he actually wants to create a more contented America that is not interfering al over the world, and that he fundamentally dislikes war.

Who knows David? I’m slowly coming round to thinking that maybe I shouldn’t care. That may sound flippant, it’s anything but. I was becoming overwhelmed by all this negative/confusing input, and my divine intuition is to simply let it all go.
 
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