Article: pseudo realties and totalitarianism

[Pluvia]

I was sent this article:

newdiscourses.com/2020/12/psychopathy-origins-totalitarianism/

by a friend who said 'This explains a lot', and it does. It sounds and looks challenging, but I found it quite easy to understand the basic points.

We used to have a third friend who has become a 'be kind' social justice warrior who has found her cause in gender ideology and spends much of her time socialising with and promoting TQ+ and denouncing those who don't go along with it as bigots.

I've been struggling to understand why whenever I meet this former friend I feel a kind of almost paralysing, visceral fear. When I explain it in the terms that spring to mind — that I feel as if I'm a member of the resistance and she's a Nazi or informer, or I'm a Chinese intellectual and she's a member of the Red Guard — it sounds ridiculously dramatic. But that's how it feels. The article explains why and makes total sense to me, despite the long words. I hope it may help others in a similar position.

I'm going to loiter around and see if a certain poster has Sundays off.

Honestly, I don't know where they find the time. I've no idea how they fit an actual life around keeping up with and commenting on so many threads.

@EdithStourton

I'm going to loiter around and see if a certain poster has Sundays off.

Honestly, I don't know where they find the time. I've no idea how they fit an actual life around keeping up with and commenting on so many threads.

I think it's because it's a hell of a lot easier to just spray out nonsensical all-purpose insults than it is to actually engage critically with an "argument" (however pointless and puerile that "argument" may be...). It's a tactic designed to attritionally demoralise your opposition, and it's covered in the article, but Blue wouldn't appreciate that, because they won't read it. (In fact, insofar as Blue doesn't seem to engage with any of the points or questions that are put to them, the balance of the evidence seems to suggest Blue can't read very well at all...)

@NecessaryScene

American, a writer or academic or possibly a philosopher? I've heard the name before but can't quite place him.

He's a mathematician by background, like Helen Joyce, so there's a kind of shared instinctive indignation at illogical nonsense with pretensions.

He first came to attention as part of a team submitting bogus "academic" papers, together with Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghassian - digging into something they term , basically nonsense posing as real disciplines.

One of my favourite discussions of that is . Interviewer, referring to how fast they produced the fake papers - "are you a critical theory savant?" Lindsay - "no, it's just really easy!".

And he co-wrote Cynical Theories with Helen Pluckrose. (Stupidly long subtitle - "How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody").

He doesn't tend to look at the gender aspect that much - dealing more with race and the wider picture. He do did some recent episodes on the history of queer theory working its way into education, but I didn't find them that compelling. Although it's interesting to trace the genealogy of ideas.

Thank you for that, NecessaryScene, Mathematician is not something I expected! That youtube was hilarious and shocking at the same time.
Lindsay: "We had a word limit problem", Having seen a sample of his writing, I sniggered at that.

The mild mannered professor's interjections and reactions.

On the hoax paper's idea of making 'privileged' students sit on the floor in chains: Prof: "You're basically proposing to torment certain students..." JL: "Yeah, yeah", Prof: "Interesting".

Prof: "You were being insufficiently sociopathic while trying to be over the top." JL: "Yes".

Prof: "I'm sorry, I'm a little more disturbed than I was hoping to get."

Prof: "I'm still actually a little shaken, literally"

Prof: [at the end] "It was a little more distressing than many of these." [talks]

@NecessaryScene

But WARNING to all who read it... Jame Lindsay is overly verbose and uses far too many unneeded and unnecessarily complex words to make himself seem smarter, it is a failing a lot of people who went to american universities suffer from it seems. He definitely wrote this with his thesaurus program running in the foreground! ;)

Partly to throw his Twitter feed into sharp relief, I feel. He acts at the other extreme there. The contrast is bizarre.

I find his podcasts are a happy medium - he's not dicking around like he does on Twitter, and he doesn't get to play with his thesaurus while speaking.

For this particular essay, I'd definitely recommend the podcast version linked in the OP of the previous thread over the essay.

This sort of discussion actually makes the gender/trans stuff interesting because there is actually some substance to it when looked at from this angle.

The actual ideas about sex or gender are total bollocks, and picking them apart like Emma Hilton or Ross Tucker or Jane Clare Jones does is necessary, but ultimately not that satisfying because the content is so fucking stupid.

But the social engineering being used to enforce the ideology, and its precedents in history are very worth tackling. There definitely is something sophisticated and powerful there in the techniques that needs to be tackled and analysed.

We definitely need more "Woke Studies" - in the sense of analysing the techniques and delivery mechanisms of Woke, and how it developed, rather than worrying about what it's actually saying.

On the whole, I think Lindsay's doing quite a good job of this. He's definitely at the hard-line end - kind of the Posie Parker of anti-Woke, in contrast to the squishy Jesse Singal types.

Lindsay irritates me and interests me in equal measure, @NecessaryScene. He's very self-absorbed and often childish, but he's right about an awful lot of things. And he's undeniably more intelligent than many of the people he criticises.

Mathematician is not something I expected!

Watch out - there's quite a few of us in this fight.

That youtube was hilarious and shocking at the same time.

Glad you appreciated it! It's one of my favourite things from the last couple of years. That interviewer was the perfect foil for Lindsay.

Check out the YouTube comments:

May I humbly suggest that this discussion video be titled "Good Innocent Man Comes Face to Face With Evil."

And this one I think is quite insightful:

"This is something people actually do!?!" Great moment. James does the Lord's work. He's so intelligent and reasonable that people should deduce from his antic behavior we're in serious trouble. The man's a mathematician, fer Chrissakes! But no, they never stop to consider that.

I've just spent Saturday night watching/ listening to those. I agree that he's irritating as well as enlightening and I can't help but notice that he and the Grievance Studies three really seemed to have it in for feminist publications and, I suspect, feminism. (I know Pluckrose has said she's not a feminist.) I'm not informed enough or nimble enough to understand the allusions he makes. He strikes me rather as Jordan Peterson strikes me. Some useful, incisive insights but not from a position I can feel comfortable with and not acknowledging female experience. Perhaps women with PhDs who speak this language could illuminate for me. Perhaps the answer is on the previous thread, which I'll go back to.

@crazyjinglist

Interesting, if unnecessarily wordy and rather pompous, article. And all of it very recognisably describing the state we're in.

I initially scrolled too fast down the thread and landed on this comment You're right, it does sound ridiculously dramatic and is all happening entirely in your own head. Predicted who'd posted it. Scrolled back up to check - yup.

Tbh I don't think you get to decide that the vibes the OP (whom you've never met) gets from her friend (whom you've also never met) are nonsense, @BlueberryCheezecake. It's not the first thread I've seen where you seem to think you're omniscient though.

I did exactly the same!

@NecessaryScene

Mathematician is not something I expected!

Watch out - there's quite a few of us in this fight.

That youtube was hilarious and shocking at the same time.

Glad you appreciated it! It's one of my favourite things from the last couple of years. That interviewer was the perfect foil for Lindsay.

Check out the YouTube comments:

May I humbly suggest that this discussion video be titled "Good Innocent Man Comes Face to Face With Evil."

And this one I think is quite insightful:

"This is something people actually do!?!" Great moment. James does the Lord's work. He's so intelligent and reasonable that people should deduce from his antic behavior we're in serious trouble. The man's a mathematician, fer Chrissakes! But no, they never stop to consider that.

Good foil indeed. They were like a comedian and straight man act, although he is very serious and not playing a funny man at all. My heart sank when he started with 'The Frankfurt School' - how many times have I heard people coming out with that one? - but it got better as he went along. And the poor prof who went from bemused to shell shocked, looked quite comical at times with his expressions and reactions.

I couldn't stop thinking why isn't JL doing mathematics, as far more interesting than this stuff? It seems a waste not to, in a way. He is very deeply into all this debunking and clearly has read all the background and has it at his fingertips. As he said, it's all too easy, yet it's noticeable how meticulous he was in going about the creation of the hoax papers.

That was an interesting article. I think it's really important with the gender ideology to remember that it's part of a bigger picture that is CT and identity politics. As long as those are accepted there will be this environment where gender ideology, or something else just as bad, will be ale to thrive.

This is why I think it's so important to push back against the way so much of current activism focuses on using the right language and avoiding taboo words, phrases, or ideas. Even when it's not something that important, or it's arguable it's more about a polite presentation, giving life to the ideas that it's appropriate to control language in that way is allowing the enemy to have a powerful weapon, the main weapon they use to achieve their goals.

@Pluvia

I've just spent Saturday night watching/ listening to those. I agree that he's irritating as well as enlightening and I can't help but notice that he and the Grievance Studies three really seemed to have it in for feminist publications and, I suspect, feminism. (I know Pluckrose has said she's not a feminist.) I'm not informed enough or nimble enough to understand the allusions he makes. He strikes me rather as Jordan Peterson strikes me. Some useful, incisive insights but not from a position I can feel comfortable with and not acknowledging female experience. Perhaps women with PhDs who speak this language could illuminate for me. Perhaps the answer is on the previous thread, which I'll go back to.

Are they wrong though to have it in for journals that were willing to publish that kind of crap?

This is why I think it's so important to push back against the way so much of current activism focuses on using the right language and avoiding taboo words, phrases, or ideas. Even when it's not something that important, or it's arguable it's more about a polite presentation, giving life to the ideas that it's appropriate to control language in that way is allowing the enemy to have a powerful weapon, the main weapon they use to achieve their goals.

Unfortunately it happens all the time, often by people who really think they are doing good.

What a balsy answer Blueberry!

SantaClaws: no — and I didn't say that. But they seem to have particularly targeted feminist journals and nothing Lindsay said in any of the videos did anything to reduce my suspicion that he/ they have feminism as one of their targets. I'm wary of these super-smart, super-articulate, super-confident, super-logical, super-masculine types who reel off endless impressive-sounding quotes and references. I thought the clear difference of style between Lindsay and the unpretentious, unpompous professor in the second clip stood out very starkly.

I agree that Lindsay et al aren't approaching this from a feminist angle at all.

But don't mistake them for being anti-women. They're current allies because they're attacking the same forces that are currently attacking women.

Lindsay doesn't help himself in that he often will talk dismissively about "feminism", particularly in podcasts, which can make him sound superficially like a dumb right-winger with "lol, feminists were asking for equality".

But he is usually specifically talking about "feminism" as an "academic" discipline - ie the place where a lot of this Woke/Grievance Studies stuff arose, and an area which is equally subject to critique by radfems. If you mentally add a "lib-" prefix to all his mentions of feminism, I think you'll find a fair degree of alignment.

Now, if radfem journals were publishing crap - if he was submitting stuff to The Radical Notion - you'd have something to complain about. But there's a night and day difference between the content in there and the shit coming out of the journals the Grievance Studies team targetted. They targetted them because they were publishing crap (in the name of feminism), not because they were feminist.

Two things can be simultaneously true - women can be in a struggle for their fundamental rights, and some "feminists" can be Grievance Studies merchants doing bad identity politics rather than helping women.

When the libfems are defeated, then maybe radfems and the Lindsay crowd can go their separate ways...

Thank you, NecessaryScene, that's really, really helpful. Okay, now I understand better I take back what I said upthread. That's the problem listening to debates between academics. They take so much as read and understood that a lay person like me can get the wrong idea. At one point Lindsay did clarify that one of the journals was a liberal feminist publication but I didn't realise all the journals were.

You're absolutely right about the battle throwing some unlikely people together on the same side. It can get very confusing.

Oh, Pluvia, I just noticed you mention Jordan Peterson above - if you want to see thoughts on him, check out this long thread.

There seemed to be quite a few big fans here. But despite him often being insightful, I can only handle small doses myself. I find him even more irritating than Lindsay - I guess I'm not his target audience. But I waffled on in defence of him on that thread regardless, just as I'll waffle in defence of Lindsay.

@Pluvia

SantaClaws: no — and I didn't say that. But they seem to have particularly targeted feminist journals and nothing Lindsay said in any of the videos did anything to reduce my suspicion that he/ they have feminism as one of their targets. I'm wary of these super-smart, super-articulate, super-confident, super-logical, super-masculine types who reel off endless impressive-sounding quotes and references. I thought the clear difference of style between Lindsay and the unpretentious, unpompous professor in the second clip stood out very starkly.

Hmm, I don't think that's really true, except in the sense that feminist journals are some of the worst producers of this kind of material. And there are a fair number of them. An awful lot of CT comes out of academic feminism and there have been gender studies/women's studies departments in universities for longer than some of the other CT type departments.

It's unfortunate but I think feminism is going to have to recon with it's academic incarnation because a lot of it is not only crap scholarship, it's dangerous to women.

I don't particularly think of that way of talking as being super-masculine, myself.

Ah, it looks like Necessary already said what I said, never mind!

Well, necessary also included the vital insight that the feminist journals they targeted were lib-fem journals, not the radical feminist journals I assumed because no one in the debate made the distinction.

Well, necessary also included the vital insight that the feminist journals they targeted were lib-fem journals, not the radical feminist journals I assumed because no one in the debate made the distinction.

To be fair, I haven't actually dug into the details that closely, so I wouldn't take my word as gospel - I'm mainly inferring it from Lindsay's descriptions rather than some formal categorisation.

But I'm pretty sure that (a) there aren't many radfem journals in academia - it's dominated by Sally Hines types - (b) radfem journals wouldn't be publishing the sort of tripe that Lindsay etc were producing. (But if they were, they probably would have deserved it).

No, I don't think it did require that information. The fact that they accepted the submitted papers told you everything you needed to know about them.

Rad fem and lib fem really were not the issue, it's a problem around Critical Theory. It's bogus and bad scholarship. Is a rad fem journal actually doing anyone any good if it's accepting papers about how dog parks tell us that we should put shock collars on men to get rid of rape culture, with obviously bogus stats? No, it's dangerous bs.