If Mort Divine ruled the world

[Dak]

Those are social science papers though. That's outside of Ein's area. Frankly personality research is even out of my area if we want to get specific. I imagine the papers on fiction reading and psychological constructs might at least be interesting to him.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I was joking.

Mentioning something, again, is not the same as addressing something. A throw-away joke comment can mention something while not addressing that same something, this is pretty basic stuff.

That's exactly the point you fucktard. He made a racist joke and in the following paragraph you start talking about Native alcoholism as a sociological phenomenon, yet you pretend you weren't conflating the two and that it wasn't initially obvious that it was a joke.

Still waiting for all those white males attacked for mentioning Native alcoholism, btw, you slimy fuck.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

No, it really isn't, and I'm not. He's nowhere near Chomsky's level. He's a good speaker and has absorbed a certain amount of sociological analysis, but he basically regurgitates the data that work for him. He's not a critical thinker.

I don't want to get into a spitting match, but the lengths you go to defend him are absurd.

Also, lmao @ the scientific process being "basically regurgitat[ing] the data". You probably sat through an undergraduate 100-level lecture once and assumed that's all it was, a bunch of guys sitting around memorizing and regurgitating "the data", which fall from some magical place in the sky, or perhaps purely from the subjective interpretations of some silly scientist that doesn't realize he knows nothing. Unless you specifically believe/know that Peterson is an unethical researcher that throws away data he doesn't like or something, but I kinda doubt a dataphobic pomoman like yourself has bothered.

 

[CiG]

The Twitterati are trying to smear Jordan Peterson as a racist because he has in some vague context brought up the link between indigenous people and alcoholism.

I love how these advocacy groups and orgs spend thousands of dollars doing outreach programs to try and fix indigenous community problems of domestic violence, alcoholism and drug abuse and then when someone (especially if they're white) mentions the problem they become racists.

Not that I don't love racist jokes, but I don't see how that addresses issues of alcoholism any more than replying to a photo of a white guy shooting a gun at the range with "Better you than some black guy shooting it at his wife" addresses black gun violence.

Well I didn't say he addressed alcoholism.

You clearly drew an equivalence between advocacy groups on the issue of Native American alcoholism and Peterson's likely-joke tweet. He's not being criticized for mentioning statistics on the link of alcoholism and being a Native, he's being criticized for making what appears to be an unprompted racist joke.

Addressing something and mentioning something are not the same thing.

Mentioning something, again, is not the same as addressing something. A throw-away joke comment can mention something while not addressing that same something, this is pretty basic stuff.

That's exactly the point you fucktard. He made a racist joke and in the following paragraph you start talking about Native alcoholism as a sociological phenomenon, yet you pretend you weren't conflating the two and that it wasn't initially obvious that it was a joke.

No I didn't pretend that, I said that Peterson brought up the link between indigenous people and alcoholism in some vague context, which we now know wasn't even there anyway.

Initially it seemed as if he was mentioning the link, as in briefly and without detail, which is the direct definition of the word 'mention' which is why I used it. It was vague and imo the outraged reaction really acted as a window into the racism of the outraged, which is what I riffed on when I talked about the hypocrisy of advocacy groups.

You brought up whether he addressed the issue or not. A short throwaway joke Tweet pre-popularity isn't the kind of thing I would personally characterise as an addressing of something, just based on what that word means. That's why I said I didn't say he addressed the issue, but rather vaguely mentioned it.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

And Chomsky stopped being relevant in the 70s, if I'm being generous (more realistically the 50s and 60s when all of his work on linguistics was wrapping up prior to a career of being a political provacateur).

"Dude, like, Pol Pot was a good guy, man"
"Dude, like, capitalist death squads killed millions of Indonesians, man"
"Dude, like, international trade isn't international if an international company trades parts from one division in a country to another country, man"
"Dude, like, free trade agreements are actually all simply protectionism, just look at how high tariffs are right now, man"

He's a brilliant guy with an encyclopedic mind willing to take on issues many aren't, but he's still a political hack at the essence of it all, and frequently makes up or exaggerates data to make a point.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

No I didn't pretend that, I said that Peterson brought up the link between indigenous people and alcoholism in some vague context, which we now know wasn't even there anyway.

Initially it seemed as if he was mentioning the link, as in briefly and without detail, which is the direct definition of the word 'mention' which is why I used it. It was vague and imo the outraged reaction really acted as a window into the racism of the outraged, which is what I riffed on when I talked about the hypocrisy of advocacy groups.

You brought up whether he addressed the issue or not. I short throwaway joke Tweet pre-popularity isn't the kind of thing I would personally characterise as an addressing of something, just based on what that word means. That's why I said I didn't say he addressed the issue, but rather vaguely mentioned it.

But to mention the link without direct context in the conversation, and with the added context of theft is clearly drawing on racial stereotypes to the end of making a racist joke. It wasn't remotely vague, anyone that isn't a Peterson fellator could see that the generous interpretation was a joke. The explanation after adds some context, but "some Indian" obviously makes reference to a group of people, not a specific Indian bartender, and unnecessarily.

And you're dodging again. You mentioned IN THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH your problem with white men being unfairly attacked for simply mentioning the problem. Maybe I did read too far into your initial post and you equated all forms of "mentioning" as the same, because there are cases where people are attacked for mentioning a problem. Trump was called racist for simply mentioning the obvious fact that inner-city black neighborhoods have high levels of gun violence. Maybe what you really meant to say was

I love how these advocacy groups and orgs spend thousands of dollars doing outreach programs to try and fix indigenous community problems of domestic violence, alcoholism and drug abuse and then when someone (especially if they're white) makes a racist joke about the problem they become racists.

So name these white males then if that's all you were talking about.

 

[CiG]

Still waiting for all those white males attacked for mentioning Native alcoholism, btw, you slimy fuck.

So name these white males then if that's all you were talking about.

And you're dodging again. You mentioned IN THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH your problem with white men being unfairly attacked for simply mentioning the problem.

I didn't say "white males" lol.

I really don't know how to word such a search but right off the top of my head a politician over here Mark Latham got reamed for talking about alcoholism and domestic violence in indigenous Australian communities. You see it on TV here so much, especially on programs like Q&A.

The explanation after adds some context, but "some Indian" obviously makes reference to a group of people, not a specific Indian bartender, and unnecessarily.

No "some Indian" refers to the bartender whom they didn't personally know. She was just some Indian bartender.

 

[CiG]

This isn't exactly a good example because the poster remained anonymous but it's a pretty funny example: http://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-new...s-fashion-label-after-racist-instagram-tirade

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I didn't say "white males" lol.

I really don't know how to word such a search but right off the top of my head a politician over here Mark Latham got reamed for talking about alcoholism and domestic violence in indigenous Australian communities. You see it on TV here so much, especially on programs like Q&A.

No "some Indian" refers to the bartender whom they didn't personally know. She was just some Indian bartender.

I Googled "Mark Latham aboriginal alcoholism" and found a neutral interview, a story accusing him of tokenism for something unrelated to alcoholism, and other stuff that failed to show him being attacked for mentioning alcoholism among those people.

No, she was an Indian bartender, a specific person. If he wanted to make it a specific reference, he knows English well enough to say "that Indian" at the very least, and he is presumably intelligent enough to recognize that saying "that Indian" instead of "that bartender" or "that thief" carries a lot of sociopolitical baggage.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

This isn't exactly a good example because the poster remained anonymous but it's a pretty funny example: http://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-new...s-fashion-label-after-racist-instagram-tirade

And those are clearly charged, provocative messages at the very least, which serve not to provide any solutions or meaningful discussion beyond "You guys suck and need to stop being lushes".

 

[Einherjar86]

That's fair enough, I'm sure there's a lot of reading material out there you could use to measure the man, if this is anything to go by: http://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=wL1F22UAAAAJ

Those are social science papers though. That's outside of Ein's area. Frankly personality research is even out of my area if we want to get specific. I imagine the papers on fiction reading and psychological constructs might at least be interesting to him.

Yeah, I'll give them a try. Cheers.

Lots of humanities academics take the time to publish beyond academic venues (e.g. L.A. Review of Books, or The Atlantic, or The Guardian, or Aeon Magazine, etc.). I've tried to find something like that by Peterson, but haven't come across anything (granted, I also haven't looked super hard).

You probably sat through an undergraduate 100-level lecture once and assumed that's all it was, a bunch of guys sitting around memorizing and regurgitating "the data", which fall from some magical place in the sky, or perhaps purely from the subjective interpretations of some silly scientist that doesn't realize he knows nothing.

That is exactly what happened.

I also find this humorous considering how fondly I've written of science on this forum.

[Chomsky is] a brilliant guy with an encyclopedic mind willing to take on issues many aren't, but he's still a political hack at the essence of it all, and frequently makes up or exaggerates data to make a point.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

That is exactly what happened.

I also find this humorous considering how fondly I've written of science-fiction on this forum.

ftfy

It's not a great surprise. I think what I said was completely uncontroversial. Anyone can go read it in his transcripts. It's all there.

 

[Dak]

Chomsky is a two trick pony. One trick is linguistics, the other is assigning all geopolitical problems to American foreign policy. Now, the modern nature of Academia generally requires one to be a one trick pony in that domain. That Chomsky has a second trick is nothing to denigrate. However, like many such persons, he often looks like a hammer in search of nails.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

He assigns all problems period to American foreign policy. And corporations, which of course run all American foreign policy. His anti-free trade, woe be the foreign working class schtick sounded great in the 70s, not so great now that neoliberal globalism has improved the world's standard of living unlike anything else ever seen in history. Reading some of his writings from that period is as embarrassing as reading conservatives insist up through the late 80s that HIV was some magical homo virus. He is just blatantly wrong and ignorant on it.

 

[Einherjar86]

ftfy

https://aeon.co/ideas/you-thought-quantum-mechanics-was-weird-check-out-entangled-time

Seriously, what the fucking fuck.

And it gets weirder:

More for my reading on epigenetics:

https://aeon.co/essays/science-in-flux-is-a-revolution-brewing-in-evolutionary-theory

I take issue with his reading of Kuhn, in which he seems to put forward a misreading of Kuhnian paradigm shifts; but that's pretty tangential to the overall subject of the essay.

Huh.

Well, some preliminary comments to demonstrate my curiosity yet also my suspicion, in response to some of his comments:



I'm not sure why he assumes it's so shocking. I actually think it makes a lot of sense.

For what it's worth, I fucking love reading about math even though I have little understanding of the specifics. I'm fascinated by early-twentieth-century mathematics and the fallout of logical positivism, as Wittgenstein's Tractatus all but spelled out its doom. I think the mathematical quandaries that arose from the work of David Hilbert, Kurt Gödel, and Alan Turing are some of the most interesting and substantial breakthroughs in the history of modern science. Why do "post-Heideggerian Comparative Lit departments" need to be shocked or perturbed by this, or even doubt the relevance of such discoveries?

Furthermore, I'm not over-generalizing by projecting my own fascination onto the majority of humanities scholars. If anyone bothers to actually talk with humanities scholars about mathematics, they'll find at worst indifference, and at best affirmation (my dissertation advisor has an undergraduate degree in mathematics, in fact). Our current Buzzfeed golden boy, Ted Chiang, wrote that a "proof that mathematics is inconsistent, and that all its wondrous beauty was just an illusion, would, it seemed to me, be one of the worst things you could ever learn." Deleuze, Derrida, and Lacan were all interested with mathematics, and not with the notion that it was a "social construct" (I get really tired of this being the go-to criticism of the humanities, by the way).

Deleuze and Guattari write that it "was a decisive event when the mathematician Riemann uprooted the multiple from its predicate state and made it a noun, 'multiplicity.' It marked the end of dialectics and the beginning of a typology and topology of multiplicities."

For Derrida and Lacan, mathematics issued a challenge analogous to the one stated in the blog, i.e. the Kantian dilemma of analytic vs. synthetic knowledge. The analogous challenge has to do with language--or more specifically, the subject's relation to the letter:



In other words, Lacan proceeded according to his own brand of positivism; but he went on to incorporate the post-Hilbert rupture of mathematics, what Hilbert called the Entsheidungsproblem, which in turn led to the halting problem and Gödelian incompleteness. For Derrida, mathematics manifests in the uncertainty relation between the spectator and a work of art--a framing problem, or parergon in Derrida's terminology. Mathematicians were fascinated by the question of how to verify solvability; continental philosophers were fascinated by the question of how to verify meaning. It's no coincidence that mathematical language and models found their way into continental thought, since both fields encountered the same dilemma (which yes, has its roots in Kant).

Additionally, Alain Badiou's entire philosophy is built on a reading of Georg Cantor's set theory, and premised on the notion that "mathematics is ontology":



And finally, I'm working on a paper that discusses the relationship between early-20thc mathematics and modernist writing (with which of course the continentals were obsessed). I'm going ahead and providing an excerpt (the paper itself is far from complete):



Given all this, I find samzdat's following comment misguided:



I don't think any notable continental philosopher has forgotten about Kant's influence or the influence of mathematical thought.

Anyway, it's my guess he'll turn eventually to the likes of Hilbert, Gödel, Turing, etc., since these guys basically inaugurated the epistemological crisis of mathematics in the twentieth century.

Those are just three recent examples. So you can stop talking about this now.

It's not a great surprise. I think what I said was completely uncontroversial. Anyone can go read it in his transcripts. It's all there.

Saying that Chomsky became irrelevant in the '70s is one of the dumbest things you've ever said. He published his most famous and influential book, Manufacturing Consent (with Ed Herman) in the 1980s. This book is one of the primary sources that informs some of the position of media skepticism that you and others here adopt.

Furthermore, this book contains copious amounts of "big data" and endnotes to justify their inclusion. The associations aren't irrational or under-researched. In fact, they've been confirmed by additional reporting and subsequent findings. One of my biggest internal conflicts is how to reconcile the fact that media is money.

In other words, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

Chomsky is a two trick pony. One trick is linguistics, the other is assigning all geopolitical problems to American foreign policy. Now, the modern nature of Academia generally requires one to be a one trick pony in that domain. Tbat Chomsky has a second trick is nothing to denigrate. However, like many such persons, he often looks like a hammer in search of nails.

Come on man, how the hell are you unaware of Manufacturing Consent? American foreign policy is the icing on that argument; the cake is media manipulation and propaganda--your favorite!

 

[Dak]

You would think that media money could pay for better journalists. Of course, good journalism is in low demand so why bother, I guess. Important information can't compete with streaming entertainment.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I was parodying Chomsky's general style of speech with that post btw.

Chomsky was hardly the first to realize that close relationships between private media and public officials results in reporting bias. Pre-WW2, American isolationists and sympathizers towards Nazi Germany frequently made that case, for example. When it came time for war to begin and FDR didn't want to go full Wilson, he simply collaborated strongly with Time and other magazines to promote the war effort using stooge reporters. He tries to make a case that corporate mergers consolidate power over the press by setting the starting position around the mid-Cold War period, largely ignoring that media business and government were just as interlinked during the heydays of trust busting and the "progressive" movement.

In the first data table of Manufacturing Consent Chomsky brings to attention the bias in the use of the word "genocide" only when it serves American war purposes. He of course made no qualms of denying Pol Pot's genocide in the 1970s, likely because it represented a conflict of interest with his personal communist-sympathizing beliefs as well as own industry, the highly profitable Cult of Chomsky(tm). He boils everything down to some kind of insidious corporate profit motive without realizing that humans are simply innately biased machines which must be strictly trained to process data objectively if they have any hope of it at all. At the root of Chomsky's entire existence is nothing more than the world's feistiest underdog cheerleader. He sounds like an objective critical thinker because he attacks the most obvious arguments of the most powerful targets.

 

[Dak]

Most recently, we have the complete complicity of the traditional media with the anti-Trump deep state, or however you would like to refer to the powers that pervade DC.

 

[Einherjar86]

I was parodying Chomsky's general style of speech with that post btw.

Chomsky was hardly the first to realize that close relationships between private media and public officials results in reporting bias. Pre-WW2, American isolationists and sympathizers towards Nazi Germany frequently made that case, for example. When it came time for war to begin and FDR didn't want to go full Wilson, he simply collaborated strongly with Time and other magazines to promote the war effort using stooge reporters. He tries to make a case that corporate mergers consolidate power over the press by setting the starting position around the mid-Cold War period, largely ignoring that media business and government were just as interlinked during the heydays of trust busting and the "progressive" movement.

In the first data table of Manufacturing Consent Chomsky brings to attention the bias in the use of the word "genocide" only when it serves American war purposes. He of course made no qualms of denying Pol Pot's genocide in the 1970s, likely because it represented a conflict of interest with his personal communist-sympathizing beliefs as well as own industry, the highly profitable Cult of Chomsky(tm). He boils everything down to some kind of insidious corporate profit motive without realizing that humans are simply innately biased machines which must be strictly trained to process data objectively if they have any hope of it at all. At the root of Chomsky's entire existence is nothing more than the world's feistiest underdog cheerleader. He sounds like an objective critical thinker because he attacks the most obvious arguments of the most powerful targets.

None of this contradicts anything I've said or rebuts my criticism toward your comments, which specified some such nonsense about Chomsky being irrelevant by the '70s (hilariously incorrect) and about his not relying on data.

Prior to Chomsky and Herman's book, no one had developed such an extensive model of media manipulation (in the West, at least)--which has, of course, now been given its own name: the "propaganda model" of media bias.

Then you do a side shuffle and change the topic--"Okay, he used data to discuss the use of 'genocide,' but he has no problem ignoring genocide!!!"

I should point out that I'm not even a fan of Chomsky's politics! More often than not, I disagree with the guy. But that doesn't mean I think his work is a hack job. Just because you find his interpretive conclusions shitty doesn't mean the research behind them is flawed.

Most recently, we have the complete complicity of the traditional media with the anti-Trump deep state, or however you would like to refer to the powers that pervade DC.

I won't even try to argue with the content of this post--suffice it to say that it simply makes my point about the importance and influence of Chomsky's 1988 model.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

No, it's just that even the military-industrial complex-complicit media has its limits when it comes to true unabashed evil, and Trump is it. It's really quite elementary. Power structures are evil. Those in power control the power structures. Corporate money anti-communist boogieman scapegoat Reagan-era language propaganda. Therefore, I'm right.

EDIT: irt Dak