Every once in a while, I stumble upon a topic idea that vexes me because I am not sure where to go with it. A month or so ago I stumbled upon a Jordan Peterson video in which he explained why Jews are so successful in America. It was a bizarre thing that presented many jumping off points. Then the video disappeared from YouTube, as he no doubt has minions policing the site, so I went looking for it elsewhere.
I did not find it, but I found something similar that he wrote on his site back when he was being stalked by alt-right types asking him about Jews at his events. What came to mind was a post from five years ago where I used Stefan Molyneux and Scott Adams to explain the sophist of ancient Athens. For some reason that brought to mind this interview on the site IM1776.
It seemed like there should be a show about sophistry there or maybe a long post on the topic of profilicity which is related. The trouble is the topic is probably too big for a thousand-word post and maybe not big enough for a show. Anyway, I decided to wing on a show and let the chips fall where they may. That means the show will either be cheered as one of my best or jeered as one of my worst.
Something that did not occur to me while doing the show is that certain topics have become sophists tests. In fact, in retrospect I should have called the show that and made the show about the topics that flush out the sophist from the crowded field of people who present themselves as analysist and critics. If you cannot manage topics related to race or ethnicity, for example, you are a faker.
We got a taste of this in the vice president debate when Walz started ranting about how Finland has low crime but lots of guns. The online audience erupted in “what else does Finland not have?” while others remained puzzled by the question. If you know the answer, you know the truth, but if you do not know the answer or cannot understand the question, then you a faker or simply ignorant.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Intro
- What We Mean By Sophistry
- What The Ancients Thought
- Leo Strauss
- Modern Sophistry (interview) (Link)
- Sophistry & Democracy
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The online audience erupted in “what else does Finland not have?” while others remained puzzled by the question.
The Thirteen Percent.
Cool avatar, man.
*gasp* Careful, he might be a Hospitalier in disguise!
In other news….water is wet and fire is hot, new study finds…..
If one looks at the stat’s for the USA, say PISA or simple gun violence, anywhere US Whites are a *separate* category from other races, the stat’s improve markedly. In short, most all the bad stuff we hear about America disappears when we remove the other (inferior ?) races and we (the USA) begin to rate/compare acceptably with our European counterparts, who as of yet have not quite caught up with our “diversity”—which we all know is our greatest strength as a nation. Conversely, if one then compares the selected minorities taken from US stat’s, we see a strong relationship… Read more »
Compsci, what you say is accurate. But bear in mind that cultures change over time. It is theoretically possible that the Hispanic in America will have grandchildren whose characteristics are at least slightly more like the heritage Americans.
The opposite is perhaps more common. Ergo, the parents who immivade AINO are reasonably good citizens, but their children or certainly grandchildren regress to the dysfunctional and antisocial mean.
Ostei, what about the Italian-Americans who moved away from the Mafia stereotype and became indistinguishable from heritage Americans?They were assimilated into the melting pot. American dominant culture is very strong. Blue jeans, Coca Cola, hip hop music … they get on the brain. Maybe you forget the barrio too.
Immivaders don’t like the citizens of their host countries, and the citizens don’t like them, either. But there they are:
“Animals have a special hostility toward other members of their species who are non-kin and therefore genetic competitors. A lot of human behavior simply puts a thin intellectual varnish on top of these biological reactions to ‘explain’ why they are the way they are.”
While feeding the magpies this AM, I noticed that they do not invite the hawks or the sparrows to join in??
Even Muhammed Ali was a noticer: “Bluebirds fly with bluebirds, redbirds wanna be with redbirds, pigeons wanna be with pigeons…..”
“What white man is gonna want his kids to have kinky hair?!”–Ali’s animadversion of miscegenation
To add to Jordan Peterson becoming flummoxed on stage, the audience member asked him about Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book “200 Years Together”, which is a criticism of the J’s. Peterson is a huge Solzhenitsyn fan, but given the subject of the book, after a period of silence, walking back and forth on stage, and some hemming and hawing, he finally announced, “I can’t do it.”
In an email exchange I had with joseph Pearce the racist turned antiracist, he wrote this:
Now I don’t know if Solzhenitsyn really said that but it’s funny
That doesn’t sound like Solzhenitsyn, but it is the kind of thing a prominent Russian would say. (A normal one wouldn’t.) A reason Russia was chosen for revolution/conquest was because the pre-Soviet empire was multicultural, a proto-globohomo. Putin’s imperial vision is that, a nation- and people-erasing dominion that isn’t so gay, ugly, and stupid. Claims that he wants to restore the USSR are sort of right. He’s boomer nostalgist “old left,” Eastern division. He definitely confuses our guys. He’d gulag us all for being racists. His enemies list is 80% identical to Nuland’s. “Our” hostility baffles him. /our/ support disgusts… Read more »
You cannot understand Russia or the Russian leadership through the liberal lens, which is why you have so many things wrong here.
Not merely so many things wrong, but absolutely nothing right.
Russia straddles East and West. It’ll never quite be one or the other because of that. Friendly relations are possible and desirable, but stable, close relations are probably impossible. There will always be some antagonism.
To avoid being double-secret cancelled, a lot of public figures tiptoe very carefully around certain subjects. Scott Adams, for example, argues that the problem with DIE is that it limits the candidate pool, inevitably excluding more-qualified candidates. For decades, that has been the standard libertarian argument against racial discrimination. It’s valid but it prudently avoids noticing the elephant in the living room.
Yep. Tout court, one could discriminate against negroes and harm the applicant pool fractionally at most. And there might be social benefits to doing so that would outstrip any minute harm.
I find the whole thing baffling. He is a showman and he is a gifted rhetorician. These questions should be simple for him, but for close to a decade he has been haunted by an inability to address the topic coherently.
Maybe they should be simple but the weight of culture is a crushing one. The West can be almost Japanese in its suppression of awkward facts.
He’s a public figure and has something to lose. Musk is a perfect example. The regime could shut down SpaceX and Starlink with the stroke of pen and play games with his shares and probably even personal money. Imagine if Trump approached the BQ or JQ. Whoa, Nellie.
I have found myself warning entertainment YouTubers not to play around with the JQ in their comments sections. These people are not culture warriors, just normal people with something big to lose if they even play at the edges of it. To see them get wiped out for no immediate gain just seems foolish. The cracks are forming and the West will have deal at some point. There will be a someday, it’s just not today.
The West is amazing at suppressing facts that we can’t handle. We’re still number one in this area. Go us! *ahem*
You’d think he’d have at least a pat answer ready by now.
I think you’ve identified the answer. Scott is a rhetorician, and his goal is persuasion. If you “go there” with a forbidden belief, your listeners’ minds immediately shut down and you can’t persuade them of anything. Scott gets away with being noticing-adjacent but doesn’t want to cross the line.
Perhaps his soul is genuinely ripped asunder by the truth. I was that way not so very long ago. But once I evacuated the sorrow of group inequality from God’s purview, the truth was cleansed and rendered palatable.
Western society carefully trains everyone to have a base emotional reaction to the JQ. They are strong emotions that bypass logical thinking entirely. They are sorts of exile/shame/disgust reactions previously reserved for single mothers, homosexuals and the like. Nobody knows why the Jews are supposedly helpless victims for all of history. They don’t know why observing even the mildest of criticism of them as Jews makes one clearly bent on mass murder. They just know that everyone accepts it as true. Therefore it is true and the shaming/exile emotions kick in. It takes time and deliberate will to undo the… Read more »
It’s gotta be the reindeer. All those reindeer in Finland help keep the peace. They’re better than magic dirt!
real DEI would be forcing all of us to wear magical underpants..
Actually, it’s the presence of Midnight Ski Jump Ramps in Finland’s underprivileged neighborhoods that give at-risk youth a purpose in life and something positive to occupy their time…
In my professional life, I was largely surrounded by high IQ white guys in jobs that required you to be a realist. Luckily, physics, math, and material science is boring as hell to most folks and societal sophistry was as rare as hen’s teeth. And when it did find its way into the room, it was usually met with blank stares of incredulity. Unbeknownst to the offender, they were silently categorized as a system defect. And our job was to eliminate such defects because if failure occurred, important things broke or innocent people died. This principle applies broadly.
One of the better words of advice I’ve ever received was from my major professor when I was a graduate student: “If you are the smartest guy in the room, you’re in the wrong room!” It was my great fortune later in career to not be in such rooms.
Progressivism (called communism or liberalism or wokeism by your normie cousin) is a completely insane lie. Either that, or it’s a form of kayfabe for people who know better but don’t care (this is the bourgeois Bobo who watches MSNBC because it’s their version of wrestling.) To be fair, lots of religions are objectively insane, and wrestling is diverting in a low theater way, if you’re into that. Worse than progressivism (communism, liberalism, wokeism) is mainstream conservatism. This is much more pernicious because it not only claims to offer an alternative when it doesn’t, but offers a solution, usually for… Read more »
‘Smart and stick together’ and ‘can they function in Western society without creating problems for it’ are different questions. One is ‘how’ and the other is ‘ok, then what’.
I thought I made that clear. The “Q” of the “JQ” is not why Jews have done so well in America. That has been answered. I often recommend the book The Jewish Century for this reason. It pretty much covers the that topic. The “Q” that remains unanswered is if having an unassimilated minority in positions of power is workable. I am old enough to remember when Jewish intellectuals debated this exact question, but that was long ago in a foreign land. That said, I doubt it remains a question for much longer. Diaspora demographics will make the question moot… Read more »
Respectfully, I disagree. People have been writing off the Jews since the Merneptah Stele. Fewer numbers only concentrates their power. They cracked the code. The key is nepotistic control of the institutions. Fewer Rothschilds only means greater influence for those that remain.
Maybe. I do not think Jews will disappear. I think the diaspora will whither in both relative numbers and in influence. The main reason is Jews are getting dumber at a much faster rate the rest of the population. They are facing a collapse in general IQ.
“They are facing a collapse in general IQ.” Yes, ironically it’s in part because the Jews drank their own kool-aid first. Many of the mulattos that people see in the news are the children of a Jewish mixed couple. It seems became fashionable even, rather than just a way to make Dad upset before settling down to a real marriage. Hollywood is an easy place to see it. There’s Amandla Steinberg, who I had to keep reminding myself was half black because I listened to podcasts, rather than keep seeing her face. There’s Rachel Ziegler. I’m guessing Pedro Pascal is… Read more »
There is also the basic math of the Breeder’s equation. If I 120 population starts mating with the 100 population, the result will be some figure below 120. Mate with the 85 IQ population and the results are catastrophic.
“I think the diaspora will whither in both relative numbers and in influence.” I agree with this assessment, given the assumption that there is no replenishment. However, if there is diasporic replenishment it will be in FUSA … I wonder if Netanyahu is deliberately pushing a ‘go long or go home’ scenario, given the context of the impending destruction of the International-Jew colonial state of Ukraine. That is to say, he is attempting a radical change of the demographic landscape surrounding the current borders of Israel in the full knowledge of poor Jewish demographic projections inside Israel, knowing that in… Read more »
“The “Q” that remains unanswered is if having an unassimilated minority in positions of power is workable.”
Or maybe whether having positions with that much power is even a good idea. The last few years have made it pretty plain that no one can be trusted with it.
South Asians fit that example.
Still, the other group has a long, long history of exhibiting outright hostility to its host populations, with frequent reprisals and then eternal grudges that escalate over the millennia.
Somebody has to be in charge of all societies, whether we like it or not. We can know their name and address and ethnicity. *Or* we can live as we do now, run by an olicharacy who when not Jewish ethnics, is run as a Jewish society.
Our American rash to authority, which the 20th century made much worse, only leads to rule by the equivalent of Voldemort. We can not not even name them.
Further musings: The American
Republic died in 1861, a victim of scale and a Western lawyer with dreams of empire. We are run as olicharachy by anonymous committee, which is why we’re allowed to vote at all. It does not matter.
We can accept a flawed ruling class as having God’s OK to rule over us. That ruling class will all be sinners, but if we’re lucky they may care about the people. OR we can pretend we run ourselves and still get ruled over anyway. Except as now, we don’t know their names or faces.
More specifically, when many corporations have more wealth and power than many countries, you’ve got a real problem. Even more so when those corporations are so enmeshed with fedgov that they are wholly unaccountable for their actions.
“Diaspora demographics will make the question moot in a generation or two.”
It appears that mulatto Jews, of which there is a surprising number, are not fully on board with Jewish interests,. “Look Who is Coming to Dinner” apparently was just a movie about Jews post WWII. Given what I see in Hollywood, the mulattos will gladly take the benefits of Jewish privilege. Then they will be mediocre in in their personal efforts and actively side with their other heritage on any question pertaining to preserving Jewish privilege.
Even my non-political wife figured out why Finland has a low murder rate. This is a good trend.
She was also able to cogently rant about how hold folks can’t afford their taxes that are being raised to purchase housing for immigrants. Also very good, but I wish she wouldn’t explain it all to me at 2a.m. being unable to sleep, angry about it all.
Jordan Peterson is a brand in a world of competing brands. The name of the game is to get your name out there. Sites like Zman’s achieve slow, organic growth, whereas visual clips on YouTube expand virally in rapid motion. Jordan has quit his job at one of Toronto’s universities so that he can better manage his media explosion. In this he is like another YouTube product, Justin Bieber, who was discovered on YouTube by superagent Scooter. Anyone who seeks to employ solely text is wielding a rusty sword. Look at movies. In the 1930s and 1940s films were dialogue-heavy… Read more »
What initially comes to mind about sophists is they were place/people/culture specific. They were cultural relativists. What’s good for Athens may not be good for Thebes . i guess it depends on the issue. they also were kind of a necessary transition from a philosophy that was so lofty and abstract to what they the sophists, were promoting , which was a overly down to earth philosophy of what’s good for me now where I am. in a way our side is kinda doing that, and I’m not criticizing. Liberal democracy is a political philosophy which is suppose to apply… Read more »
Things are clearer at the margins, positions are easier to argue. You get a dialectic. Left/right, woman/man, sophist/philosopher, practical/abstract. Imo, the best position is somewhere in the murky middle. Finding the middle by letting the extremes duke it out is retarded. It’s learning strictly by failing.
“It’s learning strictly by failing.”
Yes but if you want to have a large number of human beings, that is the only way that a large number of them can learn. They can’t visualize a few steps after a decision is made. That is why arguing with them is pointless. Hence they must step on the rake and have it smack them in the face.
“Hence they must step on the rake and have it smack them in the face.”
What is wrong with that? Other than perhaps inefficiency?
I’ll take a brief stab at it before listening or checking the links, as this is a think-piece that needs to be digested:
Sophistry, here, is the right wing version of post-modernism.
One must cloak the origin and intent of one’s thrust with a lot of bafflegab.
Too late, do ones like JP realize they’ve swallowed a nice-sounding draught of a poisoned chalice. The philosophical concepts themselves were were a dark mirror caricature from a foreign mind, and too late do the Petersons realize they’ve signed up with the wrong team.
For some reason, this sample seems to resonate, but I’m not sure why:
There can be no Revolution without Women’s Liberation
There can be no Women’s Liberation without Revolution
It is always delicate to dance around certain awkward questions. But to watch the dance from the sidelines can be …. interesting. What are the sidelines of political debate in North America? As the hiding places of unpopular thought, they are found in marginalized locales. The South. Appalachia. The Rust Belt. And those in California who cannot afford to buy a home. Driven to despair by life’s circumstances, they put aside rose-colored 🌹 glasses in order to see clearly through the murk, their questions unanswered by the media and the political elite. These sidelines fester like open wounds, breeding the… Read more »
A food bucket is something you buy to await TEOTWAWKI.
A meat bucket is something you date, and possibly marry if you’re silly enough 😆
We are absolutely awash in sophistry. Most of our “public conversations” are little more than sophistry. The whole purpose of modern “news” is not to inform, but to convince you of something.
Just look at the coverage of Israel/ Hezbollah, Iran and Hamas. Everything Israel does is good and right and everything the other guys do is evil and terrorism. Even Iran defending itself becomes an unjustified act of terrorism. Everything is framed in such a way that “we” are always the good guys.