Nathan Robinson is the GOAT takedown artist of pseudointellectuals

[Dusty Bake Activate]

I appreciate that Robinson doesn't just list the worst things about each of them (like I would), but he shapes his essays to address the fundamental root of their credibility and expose it as rot.


I was interested by your grouping of Shapiro/Peterson as the clowns and Harris as the one with illusory credibility. I think depending on your perspective they could group in several different ways


1. To many people Peterson looked as credible as Harris until he went sorta crazy with the no-beef obsession and collapsed with that complete mental break. You could frame Peterson and Harris as the academic intellectuals, perhaps with a few eccentric opinions, while Shapiro was the political hack.


2. Or you could see Shapiro and Harris, both the sons of Hollywood executives, as the fame-seekers, people who rather than pursuing any productive career were already publishing books and creating an image as a "pundit" years before they'd even finished their degrees. Whereas Peterson at least had a real career and a job for decades before he entered the public eye.


3. Or, for those deceived into thinking that Harris is actually some sort of scientist, he gets to be the rationalist who is basing his views on pure science, whereas Peterson and Shapiro are the flimsy humanities hacks just making up untestable frameworks of belief out of their own imagination.


What they all have in common is a bit of a hardon for white supremacy and unfortunate tendency to support the abuse of power as a means to an end.



Not that it's important, just musing on some of the interesting similarities/contrasts between the three.

Well all 3 are clowns and Shapiro is the biggest clown of the 3. He has zero intellectual credibility about anything and everything he ever said in his life is dumb and wrong.

Harris is a pseudointellectual with awful, borderline sociopathic ideas about the world.

As far as what I said about his “illusory credibility,” I mean only in terms of his attacks on religious fundamentalism/dogma. I described it as low-hanging fruit because it’s not that hard to do what his does with his religious critique. It’s basically philosophy 101 assertions about why religion dogma is false. So while not very intellectually heavy, he does an effective job at it: basically making the logical critiques of religion that any philosophy professor might make in a convincing digestible way.

That appeals to many who feel a very negative way about religion due to whatever experiences they have. I think he catches people with the religious critique, but as soon as he tries to say anything beyond those basic points (god of the gaps, biblical circular reasoning, etc) he goes off the deep end. Someone like me can see how swimmingly he attempts to leap from that to justifying indiscriminately bombing/profiling Muslims, etc. and call bullshyt. Many don’t though and his white supremacist/scientist elitism can take hold in their minds. The way he tries to lay out his arguments is to establish some agreed upon fundamental truth then pretend that every half-assed assertion he makes is logical function of that truth, and if you disagree you’re mischaracterizing his argument.

 

[MischievousMonkey]

I think I read his article about Jordan Peterson a while back but it didn't leave me with a particularly good impression. I'll re-read it.

However, I just read his article on Sam Harris and yeah: it's fukking great. Not hyperbolic nor sassy/snarky, fully referenced, straight to the point with what I take as a synthesized but fair painting of Harris' views, and full of sharp arguments.

He was spitting

 

[Sukairain]

"Public intellectuals" are nothing more than a superficial brigade of so-called scholars. If you're any good you won't have any mass appeal because 21st century Anglo-Saxon culture is profoundly anti-intellectual. The suggestion of public intellectualism is an oxymoron