If you can get the whole of today's "politics live" in your countries then it's worth a watch. As well as the BS interview there's lots of stuff on the favorite forum topic of free speech, higher education etc including the sacking of Noah Carl (nope I'd never heard of him either) after complaints about his extremist research/associations

https://www.theguardian.com/educatio...inks-noah-carl

This just seems like a bad inference to me. Lots of centrists and liberals enjoy triggering the left, especially people who are into leftwing identity politics. The inference that places people who do this on the right presupposes too monolithic a view of the left or center.

Like who? There is a difference between "the left" and "the democratic establishment" here. Lots of leftists might enjoy trolling or breaking down the democratic party and their ways, but I can't think of any prominent leftists who trigger fellow leftists through identity politics and concern trolling like the IDW and their ilk.

I mean, Jeez, where to start with this.

Everyone right of center lives in such a bubble of self-serving fairy tales they can't even get the broad strokes right.

Liberals are the people who are triggered, man, this might have flown if you had said *the left* enjoys triggering the liberals but you couldn't even get that right.

So real quick, please provide a representative prominent example of the left, a liberal who enjoys triggering the left, and a centrist who enjoys triggering the left.

Or hell, can you just explain in your own words what distinguishes "the left" from "liberals"? Like which do you think I consider myself, and why?

This conversation where IDW fans try spluttering explanations that Dave Rubin can't be a right winger because he's gay(why? Is the right wing somehow hostile to gay rights? That sounds like SJW nonsense to me!) is the PERFECT complement to BY FAR the smartest IDW member absolutely eating **** on national television and calling Andrew ****ing Neil a leftist.

Matthew Yglesias and Noah Smith are center-left people who seem to enjoy trolling the left. Freddie deBoer would regularly go on tirades against the left back when he was on the internet. Jonathan Chait also seems to enjoy throwing red meat to more leftwing people regularly.

Of course, as you point out as well, people further to the left, eg CTH and related other people on the dirtbag left, will often troll center-left and centrist people also.

The specific ways in which the IDW caricature the left - the whole snowflakes and SJWs on campus thing - is more characteristic of the right, but that is not an entire ideology. And you should expect centrist and center-left people to accept some ideas from the right.

For those who enjoyed Andrew Neil's latest work. Here's the end of the Alex Jones interview. I wont post the whole thing as it probably contains some forbidden content.

Nah, "triggering the libs" is a rightwing phrase and as is typical for rightwingers, doesn't really distinguish between leftwing progressives and liberals more broadly.
In my own terminology, I usually use "liberal" in the way it is used in political philosophy, to refer to people who place liberty as the most basic political value, typically understood as the guarantee of basic human rights. There are leftwing liberals - broadly this refers to people who think consistent with this emphasis on freedom that the government should also try to alleviate poverty and inequality. There are rightwing liberals - broadly referring to people who think consistent with liberty the government should focus on upholding the rule of law and property rights.

In the US, because of our own tradition of liberalism running through Dewey and others in the early 20th century progressive movement and the postwar conservative movement, "liberalism" has come to refer almost exclusively to leftwing liberals, although some people on the right are trying to revive the rightwing liberal label by calling themselves "classical liberals."

The "left" as I understand it refers to people who favor an egalitarian society. There are socialists, who are focused on breaking down dominance and hierarchy structures based on economic class and economic inequality. There are feminists, who are focused on gender and sex-based based hierarchies. Various anti-racist groups and people are concerned with race-based hierarchies, etc. Obviously these are overlapping categories as well.

Liberalism and the left can be enemies as well - most obviously by Marxists who view the liberal emphasis on rights and liberty as a way of entrenching status quo hierarchies through property rights or so on, or by liberals who view Marxism as disregarding the basic distinction between the private and the public and so leading to a totalitarian control of people's lives by the state.

I don't know what you consider yourself, although I have a vague memory of you referring to yourself as a liberal under this kind of framework a few years ago.

Which exactly?

Ah yes, the “I’m a classical liberal” liberals. Like Milo Yianopolis.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ben-sh...r-heard-of-you



Lol Shapiro - is he dark web?

Yea he is.

That interview was career-ending. How humiliating.

It might be if anything mattered.

He's the big hitter, too, in addition to being the only one honest enough to accurately place himself on the political spectrum as a conservative he's also far and away the smartest member.

Wikipedia puts the roster at:

Is Joe Rogan like the mascot or something?

Again, it depends on your definition of what a right is and where it comes from, but in general, yes, right wingers are against gay marriage etc because their definitional basis is preservation of tradition and social structure.

How can this be news to you?

There is also a strong correlation with religious belief, which is why it's highly rare to find an atheist determinist conservative. They exist, but they are so rare you may as well leave them out of the conversation about general definitions.

Peterson strikes me as someone who is profoundly intellectually convinced of the correctness of Derrida, and simply can't accept it on an emotional level, which is why the seemingly neverending, blustering storm of rationalizations from him that can be found on youtube.

As I said, the only one who could even be considered to be a right winger is Shapiro.

For anyone looking for some real juicy right wing thought (and entertaining to boot), check out Mencius Moldbug at his blog here:

https://www.unqualified-reservations...-progressives/

This diatribe is actually addressed to progressives, but I doubt any here will read it.

he's like the cool uncle who could fight their bullies for them..

According to a 2018 survey, 36% of conservative Republicans, 40% of conservative Democrats, and 49% of conservative Independents believe that same-sex marriage should be legal. I'm guessing that among gay conservatives, this number is higher. It shouldn't come as a surprise to you that a gay man can be a conservative. In fact, Andrew Sullivan, one of the earliest and most prominent advocates for same-sex marriage is a conservative.

Evidently you've never heard of Ayn Rand? More importantly, being an atheist isn't part of the definition - you're substituting correlated identities with what it actually means to be a conservative or rightwing.

Okay?

Sigh.


Sigh again.

He's a crank who needs to take his medication.

Every single member is conservative. It's a reactionary movement to liberal/left cultural norms.


"Moldbug"(not his real name lol) is also a severely mentally ill crank but I cannot stress enough he's quite literally claimed Hitler was acting in self-defense:
https://www.unqualified-reservations...ry-sourcebook/

Beyond the atrocious writing style(wealthy parents can get even the most troubled youth through grad school) and the excessive use of block quotes, some highlights for those less willing to sit through this dreck:

I think the more interesting question with people like DoOrDoNot here is WHY they are so invested in identifying themselves and their allies farther to the left than they actually are. The IDW moves to the center, ****ing Dark Enlightenment NRx white supremacists move to the IDW, there is no fringe right in this worldview.

I make no such protestations, I'm a dem soc leftist, I don't pretend to be a ****ing centrist.

The Holocaust started before WW2 and the Wannsee Conference happened in January of 1942, barely 6 weeks after America entered the war. The Allied mass bombing campaigns didn't start in earnest until spring of '42. These people, above everything else, are quite dull.

As Fly said, I at least give Shapiro credit for being honest about his own views sometimes. He knows he's conservstive and says as much. The rest of the people who are right wing try to pass themselves off as something besides what they've done their whole careere yet it still fools the bottom 10% of people.

Oh man Shapiro was manhandled in the bbc interview lol

I wouldn't say he was manhandled. I watched the whole video and didn't really think the interviewer came at him hard at all, Shapiro just kind of self-destructed. If he was manhandled it would have been even worse.

Shapiro's reaction is telling imo. A perfect example imo of how 80-90% of modern "conservative" (whatever that means at any given moment) views are based on easily dismantled propaganda, and need a delicate protected hothouse to survive.

US right-wing media has agreed to give all these crazy false assumptions a pass and never question any of the ever-growing list of sacred cows. IE - all gun laws are bad, scientists are scamming for grant money, the free press is the enemy of the people, Obama was lazy in appointing federal judges, Trump's rhetoric isn't racist, latino immigrants are destroying the country, job creators create jobs when they are given more money, in-person voter fraud actually exists, trickle-down works, etc. etc.

But the Brits apparently haven't gotten the memo yet.

Its funny because he just needed to stick to the pocket, maintain composer, and give back softball answers about "Its not that complicated, bad people do bad things. When you incentivize evil through your culture you get evil actions" and "I believe that tweet is on my website, but if its not maybe its worthy of being on there!" and then, have a few non offensive quotes to vaguely relate a few topics to his book so people can hear it and nod their head. Hes used to being a steam roll debater and hes marketing a pseudo think piece book and its just different to what hes used to. He stepped out of his comfort zone and now hes paying the price.