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Dave Smith could be a such great libertarian force if he could just tone down his tone... just a little. I often agree with him but, wow, he can be a little aggressive in his approach. I'm sure you'll see what I mean as you familiarize yourself. I know some situations call for it; I just see it as a weakness in his message.

tone down? how so? he is very good at spreading the message

He tends to get defensive in positions where he doesn't necessarily need to do so as staunchly as he does, at least from my 3rd party perspective. He is no doubt excellent at conveying ideas & understandably has to push back when pushed. No one's perfect, I just think he ostrisizes a fair number of listeners when the insulting language comes out.

In all fairness, it's a problem a lot of libertarian politicians have. But it might be the only way to get people to listen right now.

are there libertarian politicians? that's a contradiction

The whole libertarian movement is a contradiction. I'm just rolling with it. 😅

one problem is that he talks too much about how right he is

Yes.. and he will insult anyone who says he might be wrong... which is wrong, even if he is right.

I still like the guy though, and I'm grateful he's out there doing his thing.

I hadn't noticed it. I guess he doesn't pull punches. I actually appreciate being straightforward even if that means awkward disagreeableness.

He is definitely straightforward and I do appreciate that.

bret weinstein is not impressive at all either

I just listened to his friendly debate with tucker carlson and he couldn't even win that one and made a bunch of non sequiturs, kept trying to pose as a specialist biologist but he really doesn't have any clue

I watched that, 3 weeks ago or whenever. I didn't see what you see.

I think Bret understands the principle of natural selection, and how it necessarily affects everything, and he thinks in game-theoretic terms. So he uses that evolutionary lens to get insights into all kinds of things outside of the field of zoology. Which is a quite useful cross-disciplinary talent. It doesn't mean he will come up with the right answers on everything though and I don't agree with all of his stuff. But I don't think he's so far out there as the other names I've mentioned.

I'm an atheist. Their discussion of religion wasn't even interesting to me. But I don't think Bret really came at Tucker's questions from a good angle. I would happily reply to Tucker much more straightforwardly.

natural selection is trivial, any imbecile understands it

(doesn't mean it explains the origin of species)

CitizenPleb 7mo ago

When you realize the only difference from the intellectual YouTube grifter set and Mr. Beast is that Mr. Beast is vastly more genuine and successful.

Brunswick 7mo ago

Its intellectual theatre, not much dark about it, nor coherent. However, we ask a lot out of these figures when perfection is out of reach for all of us. At least they, along with some others, paint a tapestry closer to truth than the mainstream surrealiam we are expected to except in order to be part of polite society.

Dissident Sound 7mo ago

speak for yourself sonny boy. perfection is out of reach for YOU.

i am perfect. everybody knows that. i am not being ironic.

Everybody has faults. We all get stuff wrong. And if these guys just got stuff wrong, that's not a big deal.

What I have a bigger problem with is sticking to what you got wrong after you should very well know that you got it wrong. This is a psychological sunk-cost fallacy though. Once you make statements publicly, people tend to stick to them and defend them even after they should have admitted fault and moved on.

All of these characters have gone WAY too far with ideas and narratives that are bunk and can't turn the ship around.

Eric should have long ago realized that his theory either wasn't great, or that he doesn't have what it takes to refine it to the level it needs to be considered by working physicists. Instead he blames and bad mouths the field.

Brunswick 7mo ago

I agree with all this but what we are witnessing is a constant in the intellectual space. This is why they say progress happens one funeral at a time. In this case, they are highly visible intellectuals. Imagine what it would be like if they had positions of power in universities, they would hold back progress at their institutions with their pet ideas for decades and nobody would know the source of resistance.

I agree with that.

But I think Eric is playing a scam. He's trying to get $$$ from the government. He wants the government to pay money to "blue sky" research, meaning "I have a crazy idea, fund me" and "fuck you Physics gatekeepers!" for not letting me in on the payola. Maybe my understanding is incorrect, but this is what it seems like to me. Bitch, drag people through the dirt, until they pay you to shut up or fund your silly idea that you can't even describe coherently.

Brunswick 7mo ago

Its a symptom of a greater problem, but yes, either he's a grifter or unaware of his mental incapability

jordan peterson is completely lost in a maze of words

I guess that's what you get when you just interpret stories and look for symbols but never comes back to the world

I do remember he closed his patreon account that was huge in loyalty to his principles

something that most bitcoiners and even nostr sympathizers cannot do today at much lower stakes

He is all wordcel, no shape rotator.

I respect his intention to stick to his values and principles. Even if he hasn't quite. And even if he virtue signals them a little bit.

I quit google. I closed my Amazon account and do not buy anything from Amazon. I also quit the USA, moved to NZ in 2005 to not fund the USA's wars. I don't hide these facts, they have been mentioned before, but I don't make a point of virtue signalling them either. I did it to feel right in the head. I take that Jordan Peterson does what he believes also to feel right in the head. I relate to him on that.

Damn that isn't quite correct. I quit the USA for multiple reasons, some of which I'm not going to disclose. But funding overseas wars was one major reason.

j 7mo ago

Agree 100%

The brother Brett Weinstein is the only one I still listen too. I would not have expected this outcome all those years ago.

Bret continues to be able to explain his reasoning. Then I can take from that part of his beliefs without taking all of them. Because I see which ones are well reasoned and which ones are rather more presumptive. I don't fully agree with all his COVID related beliefs, but I agree with some of them wholeheartedly, like the fact that the shot could not possibly be considered safe. I think the level of proof required to get him to believe something about COVID is too low, and he has accepted things without great evidence, more on hunches and on what other people have told him.

My take on COVID has been:

* It was created in and escaped from a WIV lab among bioweapons research, funded and monitored by the US. I held this belief very early on.

* As a respitory virus it would become less and less severe over time, and my best strategy was to lock myself down until that happened.

* The vaccine was initially effective, but the virus quickly mutated away from it. And this was obviously not going to work because good virologists predicted exactly that - you cannot vaccinate into a pandemic.

* Vaccinating everybody to stop the spread was never going to work, even if they forced everyone to take it. So giving it to children was abusive and dumb.

* The vaccine has had more side effects than the medical community will admit ... but it is very hard to tell how many, and not every bad thing that happens is a vaccine injury. For example I got pulsatile tinnitus exactly 1 week BEFORE I took the vaccine. If it had happened 2 weeks later, I would surely be tempted to blame the vaccine. Science doesn't work that way though for good reasons.

* Big pharma companies spend a lot of time and money protecting themselves legally. And so you can't just trust them outright. But overall they are trying to provide safe and effective products.

j 7mo ago

Well put 👍

jb55 7mo ago

Yeah eric looked like an idiot there, not sure what he was thinking.

Dissident Sound 7mo ago

what about this guy:

https://x.com/JFGariepy

he claims he read Dawkins when he was 11

frankly one should be able to write that stuff when one is 11 unless one is an American who grew up being edjewcated about Jeebus

Dissident Sound 7mo ago 💬 1

i knew Jordan Peterson was a joke within about 100 milliseconds of seeing his picture

i didn't need to see the picture of him dining with Netanyahu or his tweet " give them hell Netanyahu ! "

if you can't tell JP is a joke from just his facial expressions you're not gonna make it sorry

Poppy 7mo ago

I agree 💯

Matt 7mo ago

Hitchens was almost a class of his own. Few could compete with his wit.

nostr:nevent1qqstcldhca5t7x2j5j06xn6rafahrwn0qjsamzvk0ku5varqer4ugugpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7q3qacg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeysxpqqqqqqzwtyv9c

He knew hard alcohol wasn't healthy, but he chose it anyways and it killed him. Very much in parallel with what he said about Palestinians, that it's a dumb idea to try to fight Israel but it is their right if they choose it.

I'm not sure I agree with all he said because I'm not sure I even understand all that I've heard him say. But much or most I thought was brilliant.

Matt 7mo ago

Yeah, he had a way of speaking and thinking that demanded respect even if I disagreed with him on something. That's what intellectuals should be.

Matt 7mo ago 💬 1

He also had a very broad understanding of politics and history, so I often had to do some reading to grasp a lot of what he was saying. But that was very good for me as a young man at the time.

47 7mo ago

not sure i fully agree re eric but may need to update my perspective but its a strong agreement on the others. cognitive sludge disguised as intellectual and moral exceptionalism

frphank 7mo ago

Spot on.

Constant 7mo ago

The whole IDW was a grift, and that entire group pretended to be the frontier, whilst in actuality they just came in when the beachhead was already made, the walls were breached and the hill was taken. Only to parade as if they fought that war.

Oh and the new athiests were a bunch of dorks as well.

I think a little more highly of the group, if only just. They each have their own little thing that they get right. The trouble is that they each struggle to get outside their one corner of expertise. If you take a little of each you can do pretty well for yourself.

I actually think Eric is the clearest thinking of the bunch, but he can't get out of his own way in communicating it. He insists on using his own words and doesn't bother with trying (or doesn't know how) to clarify.

Bret is the most tolerable because he has the smallest ego, relatively.

I liked Peterson, but he is full on incoherent at this point because he walked all the way to the door but doesn't have the courage to walk through. If he did he'd be a neophyte and a nobody. He'd have to let go of himself and learn.

I have similar opinions of the New Atheists. They were clever, but in the end they were also idiots. All their arguments are shallow and don't hold up to serious inquiry. They made their living knocking over the strawman that is evangelical Christianity.

If mainline protestantism is Bitcoin Cash then Evangelical Christianity is NFTs.

I will grant that Evangelicalism is a wonderful collection of strawmen that aught to be knocked over, so I guess I am grateful for their service. They just didn't score the points that they thought they did.

Christianity seems to have had a comeback. I'm still atheist. And firmly so, no doubts.

I'm not really inclined to try to convince anybody of it though, and never understood why Dawkins tried to take that on. Too hard. You have to understand a hell of a lot of psychology, not just science, and he doesn't have that part of the necessary aptitude.

Generally I think people's religious beliefs are their own private business.

But there is an exception that has been growing. I think religious thinking is a primary reason for much of the clearly amoral violence in the world.... the belief that God chose your people and not those other people. Seen by the actions of Israel, by the actions of extreme Islam (global caliphate crap). Christians seem to be the least bad, at least most of them.

Daniel Wigton 7mo ago 💬 1

That is fair. I am not quite sure if it is religious thinking or tribal thinking giving itself dangerous justification. But plainly religious excuses are happily received.

I am not over familiar with Islam, but with Judism they are plainly getting being the chosen people wrong. I some times wonder if they have read any book of the Bible aside from Judges. It is replete with them getting conquered when they are unjust to the downtrodden.

For myself I do think the insanity that is Catholicism is actually the sanest explanation of what is going on. If it isn't true it would still be the most evolutionary advantageous set of beliefs.

I'd love to make converts myself, probably to validate my beliefs 😛 but I kinda doubt I'll ever succeed. I overshare my own doubts and play self-devil's-advocate with my own biases and psychological explanations for my beliefs.

About the best I can do is to point out that faith isn't the absence of doubt, it is deciding to trust your eggs to one particular basket. I just have to pick one that has internal logical consistency. It happens to be the one I was born into. Lucky!

(After much pondering I actually believe, but fully admit that it is suspiciously convenient for me.)

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago 💬 1

personally i consider my form of christianity to be much what the Essenes stored in the cache that was called the Dead Sea Scrolls, i have read most of one version of enoch and have another two (jewish and orthodox) to read yet, i have read Jasher and Jubilees, these are all from that cache, and there is also one i really want to read, Thomas (the doubter)

enoch is central though, and explicitly makes clear that angels are literally humans, and specifies also that they are tall, red/blonde hair and pale skin, and that breeding with our type of human resulted in giants, eg, Goliath

once all that started to seep into my mind i read the entire bible in a different way, now when i see the word Lord it doesn't necessarily mean The Lord it refers to "angels" who the author was interacting with, and when the author is suspicious of them, they call them "watchers" (eg, Daniel)

if you keep in mind that the angels had advanced science and technology, a lot of "miracles" are just the profit of their advanced knowledge and potentially devices they have. Lazarus, for example, because Jesus (who was as gestated as a surrogate within a "regular" human host Mary, performed by the angel called Gabriel) was trained by masters and other angels in many things and knew he was looking at a man in a coma, with extremely depressed breathing, and knew ways to trigger him to wake up... and the crucifixion... again... if you are interested in far out religious things, you know about the yogis who pierce their skin and can control their respiration and induce coma and recover from it... in coma, even with quite serious wounds, the onset of death can be delayed a very long time

and the flying chariots... well, i mean, idk what to say. these are of course the same thing as what legitimate sightings of UFOs see. i don't know exactly about the butt probe stuff but at least one account of this suggests that these ancient ancestors/"angel" humans have been living off planet for a long time and have a long running plan to rescue some of us from an event they know with precision by their astrophysics will be an extinction event coming up real soon, and they want us to be able to integrate with them "in heaven" as in "the heavens" as in ... out there...

and what else, oh yes, that literally jesus, was predicted to be the one who would achieve effective immortality and become one with the "mind of God"

what you said about catholic stuff, this all lines up pretty neat with it too, except for some key details like the nature of the angels physical existence, and the figurative meaning of the trinity, and so forth.

I have to admit that this is the first time I have heard most of that so I can't speak to it much. But in a much simplified version, the Old testament spends much of its time talking about the coming Kingdom of God which would last forever, then Jesus proclaimed that, good news, it had arrived, and now today we have exactly one instance of a thing that looks like a Kingdom of God in the Catholic Church and it has been here precisely since Jesus proclaimed that it had arrived.

As such the most logical conclusion is to believe the set of ideas that it proclaims about itself and God.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

well, i read a book which made a good analogy about how what is commonly called the "age of pisces" had a good phase of about 1000 years and then a bad one... we are coming to the end of the bad half of that cycle... the kingdom you speak of could be called the age of Jesus, and gave us the Catholic church and about 1000 years of relative peace, which are incorrectly described as primitive and dark, the "dark ages"

but actually as more is discovered about that period, roughly 0-1000AD, was actually better, and a lot of great things happened that didn't involve governments or violence.

and since then we have had the "enlightenment" and the emergence of the liberal democratic state and then the horrors of WW1, WW2, and the Forever Wars of recent past.

but it most certainly specifies in Genesis, Daniel and Revelation at least, that a time would come again when the righteous would be harvested and the sinners would be condemned to be left on earth as it gets literally set on fire.

if you read Revelation with this timeline of the thousand years of Christ and the rise of Babylon and then the Judgement, somewhere around 16 or 17 starts to refer to current times, and what goes before refers to the time between John and our time.

I agree that the "Dark Ages" is a slanderous misnomer.

My main point is that, whether or not we are currently at a high point or a low point, the promised kingdom is here and if I want more information then I should listen to the ministers of that kingdom.

My rule of thumb is that if there is a God worth following, then He is good and would have ordered things such that it would be as easy for an idiot to find Him and to live according to His will as it is for the very intelligent.

The only way this is possible, is if God constructs an obvious and visible institution where all can be taught right belief and action. It is the Proverbial City on a Hill. The "Reformation" has proven conclusively that even the very smart cannot come to truth on their own. Each has his own interpretation at odds with all others. This breaks my rule of thumb. If the intelligent cannot agree on the truth, what chance have the simple?

But by the Grace and promise of God we have His kingdom in the Universal (Catholic) Church as an everlasting beacon and bulwark of the truth. This is not to imply that it's Ministers are never corrupt or have wolves hiding among the shepherds, but the teachings and Sacraments are uncorrupt and a humble soul will ever be able to find God and His peace within His Kingdom.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 7mo ago

an idiot with courage to step off the well trodden paths that we know lead to hell and curiosity to consider and explore paths that have not been well trodden yet

the Law makes many simple and clear prescriptions about how to evaluate these other pathways and science is the general category.

it doesn't take a genius to recognise what comports with the Law and what is a deviation away from it, but it takes courage to go outside of the village and discover what God left us to see in the wilderness as guideposts towards becoming an instrument of His Will.

Satan strews these wild places with temptations and delusions and the Law is simple enough that even an IQ 80, or even lower, does not preclude sufficient grasp of the Law to be able to find the Way. we were all made different and our gifts open up pathways that we are uniquely created to follow.

understanding the primary laws of God is a prerequisite though. one of the most important ones is that there is no gain where it is not mutual and universal. universality is even the very meaning of the word Catholic, literally, the meaning.

the well trodden paths are a good entry point to this, and you have to walk those first before you can find the further routes towards what you were uniquely created to pursue.

there is no conflict between the individual and the universal, where the two things coincide.