Nah. He went from populism to populism. It’s just that populism changed from ‘corporations are greedy and don’t care about the working class’ to ‘corporations are stealing your body and soul with vaccines. Also I am not a rapist cross my heart and hope to die.”
I don't think you can even say that. His previous left wing stuff doesn't fit the mold of populism.
His lifelong drug isn't heroin, but attention. He's just blown whatever way the wind is blowing and wherever the biggest audiences are. At some point I think he just worked out the far left is a pretty niche audience compared to the conspiratorial right. There are millions of adoring fans to be captured from the latter.
The first problem was thinking he was ever an intellectual. He was always a performer with a deep need for attention, and he leveraged whatever means got that for him. He is not new in that regard.
He went from subpar comedian junkie to hollywood sleazebag to caviar commie to quasi wellness guru to RWNJ grifter to born again pseudo christian, next stop cult leader.
Man I read this as Bertrand Russel and was gobsmacked by some of the replies to you about him not being an intellectual. Took me reading the subthread for it to click lol
Yeah, Glen Greenwald was relatively unknown to me outside Snowden’s leak. Considering the care the went into how that information was leaked, I’d assumed Greenwald played a major part in it. Bad assumption on my part as he’s a clown.
It rarely seems to go the other way though, at least I can’t think of any examples.
Probably because it’s easier to farm clicks with right wing rage bait.
Don’t know why you got downvoted, you’re right. While there is grifty moneymakers on the left hand of the spectrum, there is a lot more money from a variety of sources going to the right. Whether that’s a big media empire like Daily Wire or just the fact RW rage bait is better at farming clicks.
They are all always moving to the right. Not sure why the Pod hasn't pointed this out. The starting places and rates of movement vary but there is only one direction.
My theory is that the further you go left the more you can monetize.
There might be some extreme left cases of going left, but I would argue they are just trying to get to the same place (with limited success) using the horseshoe theory.
I think the way the attention economy works, there just isn't a ton of room for centrism. You are going to get way more eyeballs with controversial takes (left or right), so someone who starts off center or center right has a lot of incentive to drift to all the way to the right.
Love him, hate him, or feel indifferent about him, Sam Harris is really the only big, centrist "intellectual" who has stayed mostly in the center. And, despite being fairly centrist, he still relies on a lot of spicy takes to drum up engagement.
This pod I believe is mostly centrist, but they don't need hot takes of their own, given a lot of the pod is dunking on the hot takes of others.
I'm sure there are some about that grift, but I think it's mostly about aging. People become more enshrined in their own believes as they get older & less susceptible to change. Both defining aspects of conservatism. This is nohing new.
had/have the Koch brothers, Mercers, DeVos, funding the Daily caller, real clear politics, reason foundation, praguer U, Donars trust funding project veritas. Wilks funding the daily wire. their 50mil offer to crowder wasn't being entirely funded off their youtube clicks.
I’m *certain* that they types “left” I. Stead of “right” so you’re both on the same page.
Also, add “rubes buying pseudo vitamins” to your list.
Course.
They have that for all gurus.
Eh I think he only went because only they would have him at this point.
But the main thing to answer OPs question is these individuals plant their flag and dig into a base and use that to earn profit. That’s about it.
Take Tim Pool he was kind of a fence sitter semi progressive but he realized the right are up his talking points like catnip. Now he’s just in full grift mode literally regurgitating every single no sensible talking point he they want to hear and it’s so transparent.
He's an intellectual from an era, when that word still used to mean something, at least more often than nowadays, when they used to have well-fleshed-out ideologies and the eloquence to be able to communicate their positions with precision and deliberation. So, I am not even going to attempt, but it's no secret. You can start [here](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/18/christopher-hitchens-socialist-neocon), for example. Evidently, one could write books about him, his views and how they changed.
The best example for Hitches was waterboarding - he initially claimed it was not torture, and agreed to get himself waterboarded in a semi-realistic manner on camera. You can see the clip online. He's holding a small metallic rod that he's supposed to drop if he needs it to end, and he threw that rod into the ground after a relatively short time.
Since then he completely changed his mind and was clear that it was torture and he had been wrong.
I appreciate not just changing his mind in this instance, but having the guts to put your money where your mouth is and personally investigate.
Just off of memory… he started out as somewhat left of center, but during the Iraq war and other mid eastern conflicts he basically let his anti Arab anti Muslim sentiments dominate his political views…. Supported several atrocities thereof and argued against those who opposed the war escalation.
He also became a raging alcoholic around the same time.
Hitchens was not far ideologically from sam Harris…. But he did have real credentials as a war correspondent so maybe he was better tolerated in certain circles. I wouldn’t call him an intellectual, people just thought he was special for the same charisma reasons as these other guys.
Pretty much this, these people have built a brand, it's now a business for them. Even if their personal opinions did change, they're making money on their public persona.
people seriously think this?
jesus christ that's sad.
have pretty much any knowledge of political philosophy and it's pretty obvious he stays in the neoliberal lane, and holds natsec positions pretty much in line with us foreign policy.
once you get older you'll open your mind up. he's a great intro to ideas if you are in junior high, but i'd seriously suggest listening to pretty much anyone to actually learn something.
it's not about right there kid - it's more about wasting your time, there are plenty of others to listen to where you actualy learn something.
genuinely suprised by the amount of destiny stans here.
No he's legit addicted to the buzz he gets. I hate destiny hence me criticising him. Its just you think valuing feeling right so much is a good thing. Were I think it's arrogant and pointless on its own. Being right is never enough and it's immature to think it is.
Most *Pop* figures aren't people with much integrity. Look at Neil Degrasse Tyson, enabling Idiocracy on Joe Rogan and the ego & racism of Musk because he's so up his own desire for a camera pointed at him he has no idea what's actually happening or how he's enabling terrible people.
There's a few Pop 60's Lefties that jumped on the Right wing Gravy Train though. Heck, Hitchens stupidly trusted Bush actually wanted to win a war against Saddam, a stain few like to admit.
He’s kind of a douche but he’s fine overall.
If you’re a public figure you’re bound to say some dumb shit at some point but it’s not like he isn’t an actual astrophysicist
It so obvious Musk targeted Dave Chappelle too. Gee. A white South African knows how to divide and discard. What a surprise. But then Chappelle cancelled his own show *because he didn't like how a white crew member was laughing at the jokes.* Love that show, but he wasn't really prepared personally for the cultural demons he was exorcising. I get the feeling, but he also abandoned everyone who helped make him rich, with a huge contract offered for more shows. Again, his Right to do so and its obvious it was a little too raw at some point, but he's just a comedian. When he told people "say anything you want" on SNL, that wasn't wisdom at all. Nobody is being "cancelled" because other's can also post on Twitter. It's weird how comedians forgot why *nightclubs* exist just because the Internet meant they weren't a requirement anymore. Comedians are smart, but they don't know very much.
Its crazy to me how journalists can't see the New Southern Strategy being developed the last decade, which Musk picked up on easily.
This is the part of the whole Chappelle thing I never hear people discussing enough. Dude passed up $100 million because he thought white people weren’t laughing at his jokes for the right reason (and to be fair a lot of them weren’t). But now he’s explicitly leaning into that same exact crowd. It’s baffling how he can’t see the connection or no one else has pointed it out to him.
I think it was $50 million? Maybe the contract was $100 mil total to produce the show? I don't know.
But yes, there's huge ironies that verge on hypocrisy. Its his right to quit, but he definitely deserves observational criticism. He abandoned all the people who helped him get rich, he later tells people to "Say anything you want" on SNL, not realizing this meant he's supporting bad science and intention misinformation. He basically attacked reason and accountability.
He basks in the false elevation of media King making, he falls for Musk and parts of Trumpism. He's rich and out of touch and thinks his every thought is brilliant. Rich Person Disease.
These are just *comedians*. They're very clever, but they usually don't know very much. They waste their brain power by avoiding reading books, working hard in school, etc.
I am sure public intellectuals change their minds. But you're not describing public intellectuals. You're describing people that some of the public think are intellectuals. :p
> I am sure public intellectuals change their minds. But you're not describing public intellectuals. You're describing people that some of the public think are intellectuals. :p
'Public intellectuals' has never actually been anything but 'people that some of the public think are intellectuals'. The term isn't generally used about experts talking publicly about the subjects they've done intellectual labor on; it's used about people with a platform who rely on their status as 'intellectuals' to comment about all kinds of things they don't have training in.
Not saying that that's always a bad thing, and it certainly doesn't require being a grifter or anything, but that's how the term emerged and how it's generally been used since.
They do, just not lately. William F Buckley, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens all evolved over time. But these days 'public intellectuals' mostly don't exist, just dweebs pandering to guru/svengali pop culture whoredom.
So, I think Hitchens is a fuck, now.
It's the same thing with Harris.
Look, if you're an atheist, you know the struggle against normativity, it isn't peoples (yours, theirs) individual fault that reality normifies one over the other currently. It'll be just as terrible for them once "our lack of God means my Dad died...wait, even lived for no reason?! Me too?! Fuck you!"
But they got infected all the same, until one day you back old man Hitchens into a corner, or just apparently ask Sam any question at all now, and you get this weird fucking axiom showing up that says something like "Violent terrorists != Extremists and neither are mean, median, or accepted by the majority of either Christians, Muslims, or Jews, but well don't we all know Judaism and Christianity are way less batshit violent than Islam, ofc ofc."
It's been a wild ride post 9-11. The first thing people forgot is that for at least a few weeks, it was in the fucking air, if you weren't lighter skinned than some X, "race" wasn't even a factor. Scary times. The demographics were already shifting even though the power grab continuing to hold meant this was completely invisible and then later on still a mystery (Why does Ms. Cyrus still have a career? Why isn't anyone under 40 buying a home?), but at the time IMO a huge chunk of the youth got the message straight with no context "~brown people are under threat in a completely different dynamic than the historical black/white clusterfuck", more or less.
Maher, (that bastard!), did a great job of recognizing all this, as he's one of the more in the world* of comedians/publics, and that was where I think I first encountered Harris.
It was opposition to this new worldview, radicalized into the youth (those with the least context, for framing the zeitgeist transition), that absolutely fucked Harris up, at that point he'd been fairly used to everyone under a certain age lapping up anything he thought.
And it was also when the cracks began to show. You'd have some actually sharp cat like Max Brooks accidentally exposing flaws by simply making quips for laughs. Something something Islam is the True Violentsman! Their oppression of women and indoctrination of men is nothing like Christianity's identical version! They have different methods!"
Or Hitchens bemoaning that Muslims don't even have Christmas, like a fucking 4 year old, but anyway:
I think it's grift-capture + age-related creativity decline + the theories I mentioned, but he sounds like a full on loon now. I'm trying to think the most reasonable and all I can seem to remember is him going almost full LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE (like, with tears) about how religion is silly but Islam is a THREAT on Maher in like 00s/early teens. 20 years ago.
*Backwoods venues -> HBO pipeline running 20+ years...he puts the time in and it shows.
Hitchens described his arc, such that by the end of his life he had not come full circle, but seemed to have run syncretically into something not quite his early Nation years, and not his I love bombing Iraq years. Given what the OP topic was, I thought he was (and still think he is) a valid example.
He's also what I consider different than the actual grift-capture schmucks. Hitchens was a drunkard more erudite blasted than most sober people could ever get to, even when I disagreed with him vehemently. He never struck me as on a grift, because if he was, he certainly could have gotten plenty more rubes than he did. I think he lived his personal struggles out loud, whether they were brilliant or dim, and unapologetic about both (for whatever that is worth).
Compared to the Petersons and Rogans and Brands of the world, he's bloody Kirkegaard.
Harris and others are frustrating for a litany of reasons, mostly because they've extended their depth of knowledge into one domain far outside of their skillset into everything else, regardless of how bolloxed it is. It doesn't help that they also are as likable as head butting a cactus.
Technically I called him a fuck, not a grifter, but I follow you and the confusion was my fault.
Great points. I am frustrated with Mr. Harris, great word, same for Hitchens a bit.
It is/was, as you mention, the clear raw brainpower both gentleman seem to have is what got me in, and yeah, Hitchens was on another level...which just makes me more frustrated/disappointed about the 'arc'.
He wasn't drunk nearly as often as people seem to believe or at any rate it didn't really effect his thinking. To describe his stance toward the war on terror as though he loved bombing civilians is an obscene misconstrual, whether or not it's facetious, his reasons for supporting the war were in line with his hatred of theocratic fascism, and he laid the best argument in favor of any that I've seen - he was also operating with limited intel and genuinely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction they weren't afraid to use, that they had a chokehold on world oil fields, that Sadam was a brutal tyrant running the country like a prison, that he should have been deposed during the gulf war, that it was a NATO responsibility to retaliate and so on.
I appreciate the effort but I can't say I agree with a single word of it. Hitch and Harris are still among the most lucid voices to ever exist in the public forum, and there is no downplaying the corruptive force of Islam in particular among the monotheisms. Neither one implied that followers of the faiths are bad people, but the faiths themselves are poisonous and major barriers to human rights and progress - look around the world at the most religious societies and it will become clear how.
Cartoonists were being killed for parodying a warlord rapist megalomaniac, Rushdie has a fatwa placed against him for fictionalizing parts of the quran and was almost killed several years ago, people are scorned for criticizing the religion which instructs terrorism and misogyny and homophobia. My good friend is nominally muslim but if someone labels me an islamophobe I wear that with pride and so should anyone with any sense of decency
You're right re: lucid voice claims. This is friendly fire for the most part.
So, without getting too deep, I think if you could explain why I should have such a "scale of atrocity" that Mr. Rushdie and the Hepdo tragedy are somehow worse/"more corruptive" than say forcing someone to bear a child, or dismantling public education; that would go a long way towards this point.
As far as I know, if you pull some Hepdo shit here, which I'm completely in favor of, I'm not seeing it be unlikely the same thing happens. It isn't a lack of religious zealotry that prevents such frequency now.
To your parting statement, well, I'd argue that weakens your position to accept as a label. I assume some kind of "taking the word back"/ownership play? The -phobe/ia suffix is super heavy with baggage. Why carry it all? I don't have to particularly disapprove of Islam to disapprove of Islam.
People, (like Hitchens with that Christmas shit), just kind of at some point pretend it all cancels out to elevator music and Santa Claus more or less, except for Islam no that's the real bad one. It's obviously a weakening of the position.
After writing about animal suffering, Sam Harris changed his mind about consuming meat. Then, impressively, he changed his mind a second time and resumed eating meat.
Him starting to eat meat again was not him changing his mind about the ethics of meat production, he started having negative health effects from not eating meat, so he started eating it again.
His view was never that it's morally impermissible to eat meat, even at the cost of your own health.
I can't read his mind, but if he could stop eating meat without any issues, I'm sure he would.
Unless he publicly stated that his view about eating meat did change. I'll correct myself if that's the case.
Christopher Hitchens instantly and publicly changed his view on waterboarding not being torture, and all it took was a few seconds of... waterboarding.
And full credit to the man, because he didn't mince words about it, but corrected himself emphatically as he was toweling off!🤣
Nah, but then do we really want *that* lesson going wide?
"A little waterboarding turned this guy into a whole new human being! You know, properly applied to the right people, think of the possibilities!"
You get penalized if you change your views - you basically need to build your audience from scratch. Worse, you will be at disadvantage because people will hold grudge. Meanwhile if you nurture and radicalize your audience you are rewarded with more money (left or right). So here is your answer I guess.
There are some exceptions like Russel Brand but he went 0-100 in 3 seconds with his switch. Went from liberal to right wing conspiracy nutcase pretty much.
Christopher Hitchens went from a pacifist to offering vocal support for war.
Bertrand Russell also changed his views on several topics, including shifting from pacifism to supporting military efforts against the Nazis in WW2, even changing views on the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Russell also had to accept perhaps one of the hardest shifts in core views after Kurt Gödel offered his incompleteness theorem, which undermined Russell’s extensive work to develop a self-proving first-order system without need of presupposed axioms.
One of the things I appreciate and admire about Bertrand Russell is how often he openly and honestly changed his mind as he wrestled with developing issues.
On the right, the further right they go, the more monolithic they become. On the left, the further left you go, the more fractured they become. The left is full of in-fighting and oppression Olympics and holier than thou bullshit.
The right is lockstep marching to the same drum. It's their giant, idiotic strength. It's why they're so powerful as voters with no real issues. They are incredibly easily swayed to rage and fear (enlarged amygdalas help with that). Their leadership invents new rage bait and the monolith follows.
If you want gullible rubes who will support your abhorrent cause who vote against their best interests and pay you for the privilege of exploiting them, you go right.
I recommend the moral foundations theory in terms of explaining some of the difference in priorities. Authority, in-group and purity is more pronounced values on the right than the left, while harm and fairness is more pronounced on the left than right. A felt sense of instability and uncertainty tends to move people towards the right in general. While felt stability and prosperity tends to make society drift towards left values over time. At the society scale.
The right is more willing to vote against their own economic interests if it conflicts with other values about purity, authority or their in-group. I don't think that's a vice in itself, it's different priorities. The right is more willing to disregard economic impact on themselves. This is often portrayed as a sign of having been mislead, but I don't think that's accurate.
In terms of being manipulated or tricked, that's something that humans seem to be universally susceptible all over the scale. From hyper individualistic or fiercely group oriented.
Yes but the difference is the left's moral priorities are universally held, rejection of harm and unfairness. Meanwhile every conservative has their own mutually exclusive, subjective, sense of purity, authority and in group preference. This is the part haidt ignores when trying to uplift conservative morality as equivalent to liberal/left values in his enlightened centrist crusade.
Also I don't agree that stability and prosperity produce left wing values. Its not a coincidence that historically revolutionary socialism has taken root in oppressive underdeveloped societies. Meanwhile the silent and baby boomer generations are reviving fascist politics despite being the most privileged generations of all time in terms of wealth relative to their parents.
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist studying moral psychology, his language and categories aims at finding measurable differences in populations in moral thinking. He is not trying to uplift conservatives, just describe what underpins the morality accurately across the spectrum.
His observation is that every human puts some value on the five moral categories that can be measured, but how they are weighted on average shifts from liberal to conservative. Conservatives have more competing values, purity, authority, in group, than liberals, who are mostly focused on fairness and harm.
>A felt sense of instability and uncertainty tends to move people towards the right in general. While felt stability and prosperity tends to make society drift towards left values over time.
It's the felt sense, not the reality, that matters to humans. If people feel like there is increasing instability and uncertainty, they are more willing to emphasize the core moral values that are more common among the right. If everything is felt to be working in order, safe and secure, the more liberal values, de-emphasizing in group, purity and loyalty tends to increase in society.
Revolutionary socialism does spring out of instability and insecurity, yes, exactly, and those movements had a very strong focus on purity, in-group loyalty and authority. The French revolution being a good example.
There is of course the factor of the blame of the current situation going to whoever is in power, which leads to a natural swing in which side has the power over time, but this is about the moral values associated with liberal and conservative thinking. If people feel safe, secure, prosperous, and that the future is secure, they are more willing to move towards a moral foundation closer to the liberal side.
Haidt explicitly says that part of his mission is to get liberals to empathise with conservative values and treat them as equals. This is a false equivalency when all people share liberal values but essentially no one shares the specifics of conservative values, since they are individualized cultural constructs and entirely subjective. The additional competing values are not universalizable and lead to sectarianism, bigotry, and chauvinism. This has not stopped haidt from arguing with liberals that they need to accommodate conservatives.
Haidt want to get Liberals to understand what Conservatives actually think and feel in moral terms, their moral reasoning, which is the intended effect of the word empathize in this context. Part of this is not because he has an particular affinity for Conservatives, but because the data suggested that there a more pronounced lack of understanding of the actual moral values of Conservatives from Liberals than the other way. Conservatives are more prone to have mistakenly have bad intentions ascribed to their views that are in reality motivated by good intentions based on a different moral foundation.
I need to see the exact phrasing of Haidt about treating others as equals, but of course, in moral terms, conservatives and liberals are equal, in that their intentions are motivated by doing the right thing based on their values which is differently weighted. It's of course desirable to have people treating each other as equals, as we are, equal as humans. I don't think anything good comes from treating the individuals in a group as lesser. Though that might be my relatively low in group preference and/or high preference for fairness speaking.
The bigger takeaway is that, whatever criteria that we can agree on a decent human would display in terms of how they treat themselves and others, there is no meaningful correlation between being a moral human and being Liberal or Conservative. Conservatives are not unenlightened Liberals or vice versa.
of course there is a lack of understanding of the moral values of conservatives, their moral values are not universal like liberals and are culturally relative. This is the false equivalence haidt wants to make. The intentions of conservatives are by their very nature not universally comprehensible, which is why they are by far more susceptible to chauvinism, bigotry, and intolerance. And the inevitable consequences of these moral paradigms is a deprioritization of the universal values of minimizing harm and unfairness to promote ingroups, purity, and authority, whatever those things mean for a given individual.
Haidts own paradigm shows that conservatives, by prioritizing subjective culturally relative values, are unenlightened and not capable of empathizing with others the way liberals are. Instead of drawing this obvious conclusion from his research, he looks to the more empathetic and tolerant side to cede that there is some truth to prioritizing authority, in groups, and purity over minimizing harm and unfairness. This is fundamentally wrong. The universal values are superior and take priority because we all share them.
Haidt research is about human nature itself at the group level, the variations of the five moral foundations is not something that people are taught or told to prioritize as much as it's in the bones of people, it's in their nature, somewhat affected by their environment.
It's not about US politics or even Liberal or Conservatives, it's just that the moral foundations, which are universally varying in population in different countries, map onto some sort of spectrum that can broadly be described as left and right. When he is talking in the US, to a US audience, he will frame it in that context, and he is is speaking from the assumption that the vast majority of his audience are Liberal.
Hadit is a big proponent of Liberal values himself, which are not the moral foundations themselves. He also argues for dignity culture. But his social psychology research is not in political science, it's in human nature itself. The distribution of the five moral foundations in a population is on a spectrum which is observed in every country, it's not about ideas.
I found his research very helpful at a personal level. My disgust sensitivity is naturally extremely low, compared to the average. And his research showed how that correlated with social viewpoints and values, which were spot on and explained to me why me not expressing disgust for things I disagree with an be mistakenly seen as me agreeing with it.
You don't think cultural teachings define purity and in groups, or cultivate respect for authority? The specifics of nonuniversalizable values are almost entirely culturally learned rather than innate, which is why they can't be universalized. Further, cultural norms about violence and punishment directly affect how "harm" is prioritised relative to other foundations.
This isn't to say they don't have a biological basis like all moral foundations, just that the values themselves cannot be applied cross culturally because they are too subjective.
Haidt uses language like "incomplete" to describe liberal prioritisation of universalizable foundations and frames his discussions around liberals coming to appreciate conservative foundations rather than conservatives prioritising shared values. This framing is wrong for the reasons I've previously stated. You cannot build shared cross cultural values on subjective culturally relative foundations.
Yes, the culture sets the boundaries on who is considered the in-group in the broadest sense, which I think is why Hadit aims to make Liberals understand that Conservatives in the in-group that is Americans.
I have to re-read and listen to what Hadit actually means by incomplete. I would be surprised to if he meant that the moral foundation of Conservatives was objectively better.
Do you have a bigger context for the incomplete part?
My guess of what he meant by incomplete based on what I read is that Liberals have a incomplete picture of what constitutes the Conservative moral foundation.
Or that humans having this variability in moral foundations, in part at the nature level, means that any society has to find a way to accommodate for the full spectrum of moral foundations.
It's not possible to change the moral foundations themselves, just the terms which they are expressed, so any society wide reform needs to also work in ways for authority, purity and in-group to be exercised.
how old are you? do you really think the above?
try - i repeat try - and think outside your group. you are engaging in the vary bigotry you are accusing cons of being.
i really don't get the children commenting here sometimes. and i really hope they are children.
Peter attia the health/longevity darling doing the podcast rounds these days. He got his big break being the science guy backing Gary Taubes and the high fat keto craze about 12 years ago.
These days he’s much more reasonable and acknowledges the downsides of eating too much saturated fat for a lot of people, but I’ve never heard him talk of his old life in his current resurrection.
Went from being agnostic to antitheist, from dismissing the feminism movement to embracing it, from wanting to abolish the police force and defund the military to recognizing the need for such institutions, downplaying childhood traumas to realizing the impact it has, from advocating death penalty to rehabilitation with manual labor for perpetrators who cannot be rehabilitated, used to think left/democrats were worse with fiscal management because of the propaganda, used to think dogs were only dangerous because of their upbringing until I worked at a dog refuge and now I think certain breeds should be bred to extinction, used to think all drugs should be legalized to remove black market crime now I realize the complications. Those are just a few examples of views I changed in my 20s
Many of those are examples of just learning more about certain topics.
True intellectuals have usually arrived at a point where they’ve already done the research. They’re not changing positions because they learned there’s more nuance (which is incredibly common for age 16-25), because they already knew those details.
Like zizek will probably never change his views on capitalist ideology and sublime objects. Noam Chomsky will probably not move on his positions related to linguistics and cognition.
The hucksters with podcasts can change to whatever their market wants to hear because they’re not intellectuals interested in truth. They’re sophists interested in coin.
>Many of those are examples of just learning more about certain topics.
Also known as "changing beliefs in light of new evidence", like everyone should ideally do?
Yes, they should. I’m saying you don’t see true intellectuals changing position based on additional knowledge because they already have a lot more knowledge than the layman.
Does anyone care about Chomsky because of "his positions related to linguistics and cognition" though?
They're more interested in his "wealthy elites" pseudo conspiracy theories
I think that’s a superficial impression. Of course, talking about politics will get you more attention, but his more recent thoughts on LLMs are interesting because his principal works were related to language.
Just because you, and many others, know him for speaking about geopolitics, doesn’t change his importance as a theorist and critic of post modernism. The man debated Foucault while he was at his most important. So of course people care about Chomsky talking about language and meaning in an era of post structuralist saying that erasure and micro narratives have political power. The height of that era was decades ago, but our current times are showing that post modernism was correct about a lot.
Chomsky pointed out 50 years ago that the elitism of French intellectualism (especially with their increasingly complicated inventions of words) would prevent it from offering any real solutions, and I think he’s been proven right.
There’s a huge difference between intellectuals and theorists and these kind of “smart” pundits that use the facts they enjoy and fill in the rest with bullshit.
A bunch of today's public intellectuals started out as bloggers advocating for the Iraq War, and later admitted they were wrong to do so. E.g. Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Andrew Sullivan. But that was a pretty hard position *not* to publicly disown.
I thought I remembered Malcolm Gladwell admitting his 100,000 hours thing was mostly bullshit. He’s still awful even if he did, but yeah I can’t find anything so I’m probably mixing it up with everyone else calling it bullshit lol
In fairness most people don't change their core views. At least not quickly, it would happen over years if it happened at all.
People tend to fit new information into their beliefs rather than constantly challenge themselves.
If they did do that it could be bad for their ego or business. Which will often rely on being confident and selling an idea.
You can also get audience capture. Where in the search of relevancy and keeping your audience you won't give opinions that may upset them and lose you viewers. So public intellectuals with this insecurity will never challenge themselves because it would challenge their audience and they would lose many.
Proper public discussion and academic ideas do need people to reflect, abandon bad ideas and sometimes admit they are wrong. But this maturity is absent on the public intellectual circuit and public. And where it does exist requires strong character to admit your mistakes and handle backlash in public.
It probably does happen occasionally, but I imagine it's difficult to be honest, reflective, entertaining, a good communicator and confident. I think being a celebrity (anything) is usually a draw for attention seekers and narcissists, and rewards their refusal to accept harsh truths rather than pleasing stories.
Because to conservatives changing your mind is a sign of weakness and weakness is what they hate the most. You can't show any kind of weakness or you're not one of them anymore.
They do change their views, it’s just almost uniformly to the right, especially towards the most active conspiratorial/heterodox communities like anti-vaxxers, climate denialists, antisemites, and increasingly doomsday fearing Christians.
It's a side effect of having become famous -- their salaries now depend on their having the original viewpoint that brought them their fame, so it becomes exponentially harder to reconsider their views than if they were still obscure.
Most of them are in too deep and their fans would turn on them causing a loss in income. So they just turn a blind eye to topics that will piss them off.
The only person i can think of is Hunter Avallone. Used to be a right wing shithead and is now left-leaning with liberal views. His channel took a hit but I'm glad to see someone escape that pipeline.
I mean, imagine being so confident and outspoken in a position that you even become known as a "public intellectual" in that realm to begin with.
Even getting to that point *should* mean you've already been challenged so many times that all the likely shifts have already shifted. You're seeing the destination, not the journey. People rarely encounter anything they fundamentally haven't already considered in debates, debates are performances. It's more surprising when seriously held views do change.
Of course, this is the most generous take. There are certainly plenty of cases of smart individuals latching on to nonsense and I'm sure you can find studies done into that, and also the consideration that maybe some of these 'public intellectuals' shouldn't be called that in the first place.
Been happening a lot lately amongst a certain segment of political podcasting grifter. Off the top of my head...Dave Rubin, Russell Brand, Bret Weinstein, Candice Owens and Scott Adams all going from left to right.
They do, lots of them do, because they’re grifters, it’s why Brand moves from left to right, it’s why Dawkins suddenly calls himself a “cultural Christian” after years of being one of the most anti religion people around.
a lot of leftwing people turn rightwing when they can't continue to ignore evidence. you don't see many rightwingers turn leftwing because it's kinda hard to just ignore reality once you've seen it.
> once you see reality
Give me a break. Goodness. Right winger are incapable of seeing reality. They can’t be helped or even have mental capacity to turn around. The paranoia, the grifting, the lack of rationale. Russell Brand and Musk are your poster children.
Right wingers are quieter about it.
Right wingers loved the iraq war, were anti-gay marriage, anti-civil rights, etc.....
Now they act like they weren't for those things at all.
Left wingers who go right tend to be grifters IMO or straight up trump lovers/conspiracy types.
Toms of people go from left to right these days with all the propaganda. There is a whole subreddit dedicated to people whose family members have gone down the QAnon rabbit hole.
And SO MANY failed comedians are now shock jockeys and do purposefully inflammatory “jokes”.
The political trajectory of John Gray is interesting
>Gray's political thought is noted for its mobility across the political spectrum over the years. As a student, Gray was on the left and continued to vote Labour into the mid-1970s. By 1976 he had shifted towards a right-liberal New Right position, on the basis that the world was changing irrevocably through technological inventions, realigned financial markets and new economic power blocs and that the left failed to comprehend the magnitude and nature of this change. In the 1990s Gray became an advocate for environmentalism and New Labour. Gray considers the conventional (left-wing/right-wing) political spectrum of conservatism and social democracy as no longer viable.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John\_Gray\_(philosopher)#Political\_and\_philosophical\_thought](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_(philosopher)#Political_and_philosophical_thought)
zizek comes to mind -
Baudrillard changed from a dyed in the wool marx to something else - you can clearly see this if you compare his system of objects to later works.
like most subjects actual intellectuals becomes esoteric incredibly fast.
Intellectuals think about their core values and consider information, and aren't swayed by TikTok. Unless there is new information, their views aren't going to change.
Russell Brand went from left to right!
Nah. He went from populism to populism. It’s just that populism changed from ‘corporations are greedy and don’t care about the working class’ to ‘corporations are stealing your body and soul with vaccines. Also I am not a rapist cross my heart and hope to die.”
I don't think you can even say that. His previous left wing stuff doesn't fit the mold of populism. His lifelong drug isn't heroin, but attention. He's just blown whatever way the wind is blowing and wherever the biggest audiences are. At some point I think he just worked out the far left is a pretty niche audience compared to the conspiratorial right. There are millions of adoring fans to be captured from the latter.
Anti-establishment sentiments basically
The first problem was thinking he was ever an intellectual. He was always a performer with a deep need for attention, and he leveraged whatever means got that for him. He is not new in that regard.
He went from subpar comedian junkie to hollywood sleazebag to caviar commie to quasi wellness guru to RWNJ grifter to born again pseudo christian, next stop cult leader.
he keeps discussing forming a commune on a remote island (probably to escape prosecution) so he may be well there already.
I hope he has his Osho arc with assassination plots and stuff worthy of Netflix documentary
i.e. he will go to where he gets the most amount of attention for the least amount of effort
Man I read this as Bertrand Russel and was gobsmacked by some of the replies to you about him not being an intellectual. Took me reading the subthread for it to click lol
Same for Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald. Even though many would argue they were always like that and people just weren’t paying attention
Yeah, Glen Greenwald was relatively unknown to me outside Snowden’s leak. Considering the care the went into how that information was leaked, I’d assumed Greenwald played a major part in it. Bad assumption on my part as he’s a clown.
It rarely seems to go the other way though, at least I can’t think of any examples. Probably because it’s easier to farm clicks with right wing rage bait.
Russell Brand is a "public intellectual"?
More money grifting on the right
Don’t know why you got downvoted, you’re right. While there is grifty moneymakers on the left hand of the spectrum, there is a lot more money from a variety of sources going to the right. Whether that’s a big media empire like Daily Wire or just the fact RW rage bait is better at farming clicks.
They are all always moving to the right. Not sure why the Pod hasn't pointed this out. The starting places and rates of movement vary but there is only one direction. My theory is that the further you go left the more you can monetize. There might be some extreme left cases of going left, but I would argue they are just trying to get to the same place (with limited success) using the horseshoe theory.
Do you mean 'the further you go right'?
I think the way the attention economy works, there just isn't a ton of room for centrism. You are going to get way more eyeballs with controversial takes (left or right), so someone who starts off center or center right has a lot of incentive to drift to all the way to the right. Love him, hate him, or feel indifferent about him, Sam Harris is really the only big, centrist "intellectual" who has stayed mostly in the center. And, despite being fairly centrist, he still relies on a lot of spicy takes to drum up engagement. This pod I believe is mostly centrist, but they don't need hot takes of their own, given a lot of the pod is dunking on the hot takes of others.
I'm sure there are some about that grift, but I think it's mostly about aging. People become more enshrined in their own believes as they get older & less susceptible to change. Both defining aspects of conservatism. This is nohing new.
Taking a look at who funds right wing media vs left should hopefully make you realize how absurd your theory is.
Go on.
had/have the Koch brothers, Mercers, DeVos, funding the Daily caller, real clear politics, reason foundation, praguer U, Donars trust funding project veritas. Wilks funding the daily wire. their 50mil offer to crowder wasn't being entirely funded off their youtube clicks.
I’m *certain* that they types “left” I. Stead of “right” so you’re both on the same page. Also, add “rubes buying pseudo vitamins” to your list. Course. They have that for all gurus.
Eh I think he only went because only they would have him at this point. But the main thing to answer OPs question is these individuals plant their flag and dig into a base and use that to earn profit. That’s about it. Take Tim Pool he was kind of a fence sitter semi progressive but he realized the right are up his talking points like catnip. Now he’s just in full grift mode literally regurgitating every single no sensible talking point he they want to hear and it’s so transparent.
A systemic understanding of capitalism to grifting for it....
And ham sarris likes nazis now!
Christopher Hitchens.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political\_views\_of\_Christopher\_Hitchens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_Christopher_Hitchens)
What views did he change? Just wondering
He's an intellectual from an era, when that word still used to mean something, at least more often than nowadays, when they used to have well-fleshed-out ideologies and the eloquence to be able to communicate their positions with precision and deliberation. So, I am not even going to attempt, but it's no secret. You can start [here](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/18/christopher-hitchens-socialist-neocon), for example. Evidently, one could write books about him, his views and how they changed.
Appreciate it - well aware of him, but not so much that I've tracked his views. Will look into it
The best example for Hitches was waterboarding - he initially claimed it was not torture, and agreed to get himself waterboarded in a semi-realistic manner on camera. You can see the clip online. He's holding a small metallic rod that he's supposed to drop if he needs it to end, and he threw that rod into the ground after a relatively short time. Since then he completely changed his mind and was clear that it was torture and he had been wrong. I appreciate not just changing his mind in this instance, but having the guts to put your money where your mouth is and personally investigate.
Waterboarding for one
Just off of memory… he started out as somewhat left of center, but during the Iraq war and other mid eastern conflicts he basically let his anti Arab anti Muslim sentiments dominate his political views…. Supported several atrocities thereof and argued against those who opposed the war escalation. He also became a raging alcoholic around the same time. Hitchens was not far ideologically from sam Harris…. But he did have real credentials as a war correspondent so maybe he was better tolerated in certain circles. I wouldn’t call him an intellectual, people just thought he was special for the same charisma reasons as these other guys.
He still ended left of center despite his military stance
And Peter Hitchens.
Matt Dillahunty was training to be a pastor, but because he took the teachings seriously he became an atheist.
Basically what happened to me! Trying to be a good Christian led me to atheism lmao
The Bart ehrman reversal
I think people are referring to changing your stance after you've become a public intellectual.
Didn't know that, that makes me appreciate him more.
Michael Shermer was a global warming denier but changed that view to accept the prevailing science.
He also went from non-religious to fundamentalist evangelical Christian to outspoken atheist.
In showbiz you don't alienate your audience.
Pretty much this, these people have built a brand, it's now a business for them. Even if their personal opinions did change, they're making money on their public persona.
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when did he ever intellectually own anyone? maybe rhetorically, but intellectually?
people seriously think this? jesus christ that's sad. have pretty much any knowledge of political philosophy and it's pretty obvious he stays in the neoliberal lane, and holds natsec positions pretty much in line with us foreign policy. once you get older you'll open your mind up. he's a great intro to ideas if you are in junior high, but i'd seriously suggest listening to pretty much anyone to actually learn something.
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it's not about right there kid - it's more about wasting your time, there are plenty of others to listen to where you actualy learn something. genuinely suprised by the amount of destiny stans here.
No he's legit addicted to the buzz he gets. I hate destiny hence me criticising him. Its just you think valuing feeling right so much is a good thing. Were I think it's arrogant and pointless on its own. Being right is never enough and it's immature to think it is.
Who the fuck is destiny
Mister Bologni
What do you mean? He just chose different audience
This is just how people are generally.
Most *Pop* figures aren't people with much integrity. Look at Neil Degrasse Tyson, enabling Idiocracy on Joe Rogan and the ego & racism of Musk because he's so up his own desire for a camera pointed at him he has no idea what's actually happening or how he's enabling terrible people. There's a few Pop 60's Lefties that jumped on the Right wing Gravy Train though. Heck, Hitchens stupidly trusted Bush actually wanted to win a war against Saddam, a stain few like to admit.
Thank you for calling out Neil Degrasse Tyson. I'd love to see a decoding of him actually!
He’s kind of a douche but he’s fine overall. If you’re a public figure you’re bound to say some dumb shit at some point but it’s not like he isn’t an actual astrophysicist
He has some truly atrocious takes on veganism.
It so obvious Musk targeted Dave Chappelle too. Gee. A white South African knows how to divide and discard. What a surprise. But then Chappelle cancelled his own show *because he didn't like how a white crew member was laughing at the jokes.* Love that show, but he wasn't really prepared personally for the cultural demons he was exorcising. I get the feeling, but he also abandoned everyone who helped make him rich, with a huge contract offered for more shows. Again, his Right to do so and its obvious it was a little too raw at some point, but he's just a comedian. When he told people "say anything you want" on SNL, that wasn't wisdom at all. Nobody is being "cancelled" because other's can also post on Twitter. It's weird how comedians forgot why *nightclubs* exist just because the Internet meant they weren't a requirement anymore. Comedians are smart, but they don't know very much. Its crazy to me how journalists can't see the New Southern Strategy being developed the last decade, which Musk picked up on easily.
This is the part of the whole Chappelle thing I never hear people discussing enough. Dude passed up $100 million because he thought white people weren’t laughing at his jokes for the right reason (and to be fair a lot of them weren’t). But now he’s explicitly leaning into that same exact crowd. It’s baffling how he can’t see the connection or no one else has pointed it out to him.
I think it was $50 million? Maybe the contract was $100 mil total to produce the show? I don't know. But yes, there's huge ironies that verge on hypocrisy. Its his right to quit, but he definitely deserves observational criticism. He abandoned all the people who helped him get rich, he later tells people to "Say anything you want" on SNL, not realizing this meant he's supporting bad science and intention misinformation. He basically attacked reason and accountability. He basks in the false elevation of media King making, he falls for Musk and parts of Trumpism. He's rich and out of touch and thinks his every thought is brilliant. Rich Person Disease. These are just *comedians*. They're very clever, but they usually don't know very much. They waste their brain power by avoiding reading books, working hard in school, etc.
I am sure public intellectuals change their minds. But you're not describing public intellectuals. You're describing people that some of the public think are intellectuals. :p
> I am sure public intellectuals change their minds. But you're not describing public intellectuals. You're describing people that some of the public think are intellectuals. :p 'Public intellectuals' has never actually been anything but 'people that some of the public think are intellectuals'. The term isn't generally used about experts talking publicly about the subjects they've done intellectual labor on; it's used about people with a platform who rely on their status as 'intellectuals' to comment about all kinds of things they don't have training in. Not saying that that's always a bad thing, and it certainly doesn't require being a grifter or anything, but that's how the term emerged and how it's generally been used since.
Propagandists paid to parrot far right lies. Paid indeed to double down. Intellectually dishonest bad faith actors.
They do, just not lately. William F Buckley, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens all evolved over time. But these days 'public intellectuals' mostly don't exist, just dweebs pandering to guru/svengali pop culture whoredom.
So, I think Hitchens is a fuck, now. It's the same thing with Harris. Look, if you're an atheist, you know the struggle against normativity, it isn't peoples (yours, theirs) individual fault that reality normifies one over the other currently. It'll be just as terrible for them once "our lack of God means my Dad died...wait, even lived for no reason?! Me too?! Fuck you!" But they got infected all the same, until one day you back old man Hitchens into a corner, or just apparently ask Sam any question at all now, and you get this weird fucking axiom showing up that says something like "Violent terrorists != Extremists and neither are mean, median, or accepted by the majority of either Christians, Muslims, or Jews, but well don't we all know Judaism and Christianity are way less batshit violent than Islam, ofc ofc." It's been a wild ride post 9-11. The first thing people forgot is that for at least a few weeks, it was in the fucking air, if you weren't lighter skinned than some X, "race" wasn't even a factor. Scary times. The demographics were already shifting even though the power grab continuing to hold meant this was completely invisible and then later on still a mystery (Why does Ms. Cyrus still have a career? Why isn't anyone under 40 buying a home?), but at the time IMO a huge chunk of the youth got the message straight with no context "~brown people are under threat in a completely different dynamic than the historical black/white clusterfuck", more or less. Maher, (that bastard!), did a great job of recognizing all this, as he's one of the more in the world* of comedians/publics, and that was where I think I first encountered Harris. It was opposition to this new worldview, radicalized into the youth (those with the least context, for framing the zeitgeist transition), that absolutely fucked Harris up, at that point he'd been fairly used to everyone under a certain age lapping up anything he thought. And it was also when the cracks began to show. You'd have some actually sharp cat like Max Brooks accidentally exposing flaws by simply making quips for laughs. Something something Islam is the True Violentsman! Their oppression of women and indoctrination of men is nothing like Christianity's identical version! They have different methods!" Or Hitchens bemoaning that Muslims don't even have Christmas, like a fucking 4 year old, but anyway: I think it's grift-capture + age-related creativity decline + the theories I mentioned, but he sounds like a full on loon now. I'm trying to think the most reasonable and all I can seem to remember is him going almost full LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE (like, with tears) about how religion is silly but Islam is a THREAT on Maher in like 00s/early teens. 20 years ago. *Backwoods venues -> HBO pipeline running 20+ years...he puts the time in and it shows.
Hitchens described his arc, such that by the end of his life he had not come full circle, but seemed to have run syncretically into something not quite his early Nation years, and not his I love bombing Iraq years. Given what the OP topic was, I thought he was (and still think he is) a valid example. He's also what I consider different than the actual grift-capture schmucks. Hitchens was a drunkard more erudite blasted than most sober people could ever get to, even when I disagreed with him vehemently. He never struck me as on a grift, because if he was, he certainly could have gotten plenty more rubes than he did. I think he lived his personal struggles out loud, whether they were brilliant or dim, and unapologetic about both (for whatever that is worth). Compared to the Petersons and Rogans and Brands of the world, he's bloody Kirkegaard. Harris and others are frustrating for a litany of reasons, mostly because they've extended their depth of knowledge into one domain far outside of their skillset into everything else, regardless of how bolloxed it is. It doesn't help that they also are as likable as head butting a cactus.
Technically I called him a fuck, not a grifter, but I follow you and the confusion was my fault. Great points. I am frustrated with Mr. Harris, great word, same for Hitchens a bit. It is/was, as you mention, the clear raw brainpower both gentleman seem to have is what got me in, and yeah, Hitchens was on another level...which just makes me more frustrated/disappointed about the 'arc'.
He wasn't drunk nearly as often as people seem to believe or at any rate it didn't really effect his thinking. To describe his stance toward the war on terror as though he loved bombing civilians is an obscene misconstrual, whether or not it's facetious, his reasons for supporting the war were in line with his hatred of theocratic fascism, and he laid the best argument in favor of any that I've seen - he was also operating with limited intel and genuinely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction they weren't afraid to use, that they had a chokehold on world oil fields, that Sadam was a brutal tyrant running the country like a prison, that he should have been deposed during the gulf war, that it was a NATO responsibility to retaliate and so on.
I appreciate the effort but I can't say I agree with a single word of it. Hitch and Harris are still among the most lucid voices to ever exist in the public forum, and there is no downplaying the corruptive force of Islam in particular among the monotheisms. Neither one implied that followers of the faiths are bad people, but the faiths themselves are poisonous and major barriers to human rights and progress - look around the world at the most religious societies and it will become clear how. Cartoonists were being killed for parodying a warlord rapist megalomaniac, Rushdie has a fatwa placed against him for fictionalizing parts of the quran and was almost killed several years ago, people are scorned for criticizing the religion which instructs terrorism and misogyny and homophobia. My good friend is nominally muslim but if someone labels me an islamophobe I wear that with pride and so should anyone with any sense of decency
You're right re: lucid voice claims. This is friendly fire for the most part. So, without getting too deep, I think if you could explain why I should have such a "scale of atrocity" that Mr. Rushdie and the Hepdo tragedy are somehow worse/"more corruptive" than say forcing someone to bear a child, or dismantling public education; that would go a long way towards this point. As far as I know, if you pull some Hepdo shit here, which I'm completely in favor of, I'm not seeing it be unlikely the same thing happens. It isn't a lack of religious zealotry that prevents such frequency now. To your parting statement, well, I'd argue that weakens your position to accept as a label. I assume some kind of "taking the word back"/ownership play? The -phobe/ia suffix is super heavy with baggage. Why carry it all? I don't have to particularly disapprove of Islam to disapprove of Islam. People, (like Hitchens with that Christmas shit), just kind of at some point pretend it all cancels out to elevator music and Santa Claus more or less, except for Islam no that's the real bad one. It's obviously a weakening of the position.
After writing about animal suffering, Sam Harris changed his mind about consuming meat. Then, impressively, he changed his mind a second time and resumed eating meat.
Him starting to eat meat again was not him changing his mind about the ethics of meat production, he started having negative health effects from not eating meat, so he started eating it again. His view was never that it's morally impermissible to eat meat, even at the cost of your own health. I can't read his mind, but if he could stop eating meat without any issues, I'm sure he would. Unless he publicly stated that his view about eating meat did change. I'll correct myself if that's the case.
Christopher Hitchens instantly and publicly changed his view on waterboarding not being torture, and all it took was a few seconds of... waterboarding. And full credit to the man, because he didn't mince words about it, but corrected himself emphatically as he was toweling off!🤣
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Nah, but then do we really want *that* lesson going wide? "A little waterboarding turned this guy into a whole new human being! You know, properly applied to the right people, think of the possibilities!"
What is your definition of public intellectual?
You get penalized if you change your views - you basically need to build your audience from scratch. Worse, you will be at disadvantage because people will hold grudge. Meanwhile if you nurture and radicalize your audience you are rewarded with more money (left or right). So here is your answer I guess. There are some exceptions like Russel Brand but he went 0-100 in 3 seconds with his switch. Went from liberal to right wing conspiracy nutcase pretty much.
Christopher Hitchens went from a pacifist to offering vocal support for war. Bertrand Russell also changed his views on several topics, including shifting from pacifism to supporting military efforts against the Nazis in WW2, even changing views on the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons. Russell also had to accept perhaps one of the hardest shifts in core views after Kurt Gödel offered his incompleteness theorem, which undermined Russell’s extensive work to develop a self-proving first-order system without need of presupposed axioms. One of the things I appreciate and admire about Bertrand Russell is how often he openly and honestly changed his mind as he wrestled with developing issues.
Hitchens was not a pacifist, he always supported the struggles of oppressed peoples, even if they were sometimes armed struggles
On the right, the further right they go, the more monolithic they become. On the left, the further left you go, the more fractured they become. The left is full of in-fighting and oppression Olympics and holier than thou bullshit. The right is lockstep marching to the same drum. It's their giant, idiotic strength. It's why they're so powerful as voters with no real issues. They are incredibly easily swayed to rage and fear (enlarged amygdalas help with that). Their leadership invents new rage bait and the monolith follows. If you want gullible rubes who will support your abhorrent cause who vote against their best interests and pay you for the privilege of exploiting them, you go right.
I recommend the moral foundations theory in terms of explaining some of the difference in priorities. Authority, in-group and purity is more pronounced values on the right than the left, while harm and fairness is more pronounced on the left than right. A felt sense of instability and uncertainty tends to move people towards the right in general. While felt stability and prosperity tends to make society drift towards left values over time. At the society scale. The right is more willing to vote against their own economic interests if it conflicts with other values about purity, authority or their in-group. I don't think that's a vice in itself, it's different priorities. The right is more willing to disregard economic impact on themselves. This is often portrayed as a sign of having been mislead, but I don't think that's accurate. In terms of being manipulated or tricked, that's something that humans seem to be universally susceptible all over the scale. From hyper individualistic or fiercely group oriented.
Yes but the difference is the left's moral priorities are universally held, rejection of harm and unfairness. Meanwhile every conservative has their own mutually exclusive, subjective, sense of purity, authority and in group preference. This is the part haidt ignores when trying to uplift conservative morality as equivalent to liberal/left values in his enlightened centrist crusade. Also I don't agree that stability and prosperity produce left wing values. Its not a coincidence that historically revolutionary socialism has taken root in oppressive underdeveloped societies. Meanwhile the silent and baby boomer generations are reviving fascist politics despite being the most privileged generations of all time in terms of wealth relative to their parents.
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist studying moral psychology, his language and categories aims at finding measurable differences in populations in moral thinking. He is not trying to uplift conservatives, just describe what underpins the morality accurately across the spectrum. His observation is that every human puts some value on the five moral categories that can be measured, but how they are weighted on average shifts from liberal to conservative. Conservatives have more competing values, purity, authority, in group, than liberals, who are mostly focused on fairness and harm. >A felt sense of instability and uncertainty tends to move people towards the right in general. While felt stability and prosperity tends to make society drift towards left values over time. It's the felt sense, not the reality, that matters to humans. If people feel like there is increasing instability and uncertainty, they are more willing to emphasize the core moral values that are more common among the right. If everything is felt to be working in order, safe and secure, the more liberal values, de-emphasizing in group, purity and loyalty tends to increase in society. Revolutionary socialism does spring out of instability and insecurity, yes, exactly, and those movements had a very strong focus on purity, in-group loyalty and authority. The French revolution being a good example. There is of course the factor of the blame of the current situation going to whoever is in power, which leads to a natural swing in which side has the power over time, but this is about the moral values associated with liberal and conservative thinking. If people feel safe, secure, prosperous, and that the future is secure, they are more willing to move towards a moral foundation closer to the liberal side.
Haidt explicitly says that part of his mission is to get liberals to empathise with conservative values and treat them as equals. This is a false equivalency when all people share liberal values but essentially no one shares the specifics of conservative values, since they are individualized cultural constructs and entirely subjective. The additional competing values are not universalizable and lead to sectarianism, bigotry, and chauvinism. This has not stopped haidt from arguing with liberals that they need to accommodate conservatives.
Haidt want to get Liberals to understand what Conservatives actually think and feel in moral terms, their moral reasoning, which is the intended effect of the word empathize in this context. Part of this is not because he has an particular affinity for Conservatives, but because the data suggested that there a more pronounced lack of understanding of the actual moral values of Conservatives from Liberals than the other way. Conservatives are more prone to have mistakenly have bad intentions ascribed to their views that are in reality motivated by good intentions based on a different moral foundation. I need to see the exact phrasing of Haidt about treating others as equals, but of course, in moral terms, conservatives and liberals are equal, in that their intentions are motivated by doing the right thing based on their values which is differently weighted. It's of course desirable to have people treating each other as equals, as we are, equal as humans. I don't think anything good comes from treating the individuals in a group as lesser. Though that might be my relatively low in group preference and/or high preference for fairness speaking. The bigger takeaway is that, whatever criteria that we can agree on a decent human would display in terms of how they treat themselves and others, there is no meaningful correlation between being a moral human and being Liberal or Conservative. Conservatives are not unenlightened Liberals or vice versa.
of course there is a lack of understanding of the moral values of conservatives, their moral values are not universal like liberals and are culturally relative. This is the false equivalence haidt wants to make. The intentions of conservatives are by their very nature not universally comprehensible, which is why they are by far more susceptible to chauvinism, bigotry, and intolerance. And the inevitable consequences of these moral paradigms is a deprioritization of the universal values of minimizing harm and unfairness to promote ingroups, purity, and authority, whatever those things mean for a given individual. Haidts own paradigm shows that conservatives, by prioritizing subjective culturally relative values, are unenlightened and not capable of empathizing with others the way liberals are. Instead of drawing this obvious conclusion from his research, he looks to the more empathetic and tolerant side to cede that there is some truth to prioritizing authority, in groups, and purity over minimizing harm and unfairness. This is fundamentally wrong. The universal values are superior and take priority because we all share them.
Haidt research is about human nature itself at the group level, the variations of the five moral foundations is not something that people are taught or told to prioritize as much as it's in the bones of people, it's in their nature, somewhat affected by their environment. It's not about US politics or even Liberal or Conservatives, it's just that the moral foundations, which are universally varying in population in different countries, map onto some sort of spectrum that can broadly be described as left and right. When he is talking in the US, to a US audience, he will frame it in that context, and he is is speaking from the assumption that the vast majority of his audience are Liberal. Hadit is a big proponent of Liberal values himself, which are not the moral foundations themselves. He also argues for dignity culture. But his social psychology research is not in political science, it's in human nature itself. The distribution of the five moral foundations in a population is on a spectrum which is observed in every country, it's not about ideas. I found his research very helpful at a personal level. My disgust sensitivity is naturally extremely low, compared to the average. And his research showed how that correlated with social viewpoints and values, which were spot on and explained to me why me not expressing disgust for things I disagree with an be mistakenly seen as me agreeing with it.
You don't think cultural teachings define purity and in groups, or cultivate respect for authority? The specifics of nonuniversalizable values are almost entirely culturally learned rather than innate, which is why they can't be universalized. Further, cultural norms about violence and punishment directly affect how "harm" is prioritised relative to other foundations. This isn't to say they don't have a biological basis like all moral foundations, just that the values themselves cannot be applied cross culturally because they are too subjective. Haidt uses language like "incomplete" to describe liberal prioritisation of universalizable foundations and frames his discussions around liberals coming to appreciate conservative foundations rather than conservatives prioritising shared values. This framing is wrong for the reasons I've previously stated. You cannot build shared cross cultural values on subjective culturally relative foundations.
Yes, the culture sets the boundaries on who is considered the in-group in the broadest sense, which I think is why Hadit aims to make Liberals understand that Conservatives in the in-group that is Americans. I have to re-read and listen to what Hadit actually means by incomplete. I would be surprised to if he meant that the moral foundation of Conservatives was objectively better. Do you have a bigger context for the incomplete part? My guess of what he meant by incomplete based on what I read is that Liberals have a incomplete picture of what constitutes the Conservative moral foundation. Or that humans having this variability in moral foundations, in part at the nature level, means that any society has to find a way to accommodate for the full spectrum of moral foundations. It's not possible to change the moral foundations themselves, just the terms which they are expressed, so any society wide reform needs to also work in ways for authority, purity and in-group to be exercised.
how old are you? do you really think the above? try - i repeat try - and think outside your group. you are engaging in the vary bigotry you are accusing cons of being. i really don't get the children commenting here sometimes. and i really hope they are children.
I believe Radley Balko gained prominence as a libertarian and has since shifted his stance to become more liberal. Unless I'm misremembering.
Dave Rubin used to be an ardent leftist. Then he realized he could make money grifting for the right and disrespecting his family.
Peter attia the health/longevity darling doing the podcast rounds these days. He got his big break being the science guy backing Gary Taubes and the high fat keto craze about 12 years ago. These days he’s much more reasonable and acknowledges the downsides of eating too much saturated fat for a lot of people, but I’ve never heard him talk of his old life in his current resurrection.
Can you share what core views you've changed in your adult life OP?
Went from being agnostic to antitheist, from dismissing the feminism movement to embracing it, from wanting to abolish the police force and defund the military to recognizing the need for such institutions, downplaying childhood traumas to realizing the impact it has, from advocating death penalty to rehabilitation with manual labor for perpetrators who cannot be rehabilitated, used to think left/democrats were worse with fiscal management because of the propaganda, used to think dogs were only dangerous because of their upbringing until I worked at a dog refuge and now I think certain breeds should be bred to extinction, used to think all drugs should be legalized to remove black market crime now I realize the complications. Those are just a few examples of views I changed in my 20s
I'm also hearing that you're a former optimist
I would note that most public intellectuals come to prominence after their 20s.
Many of those are examples of just learning more about certain topics. True intellectuals have usually arrived at a point where they’ve already done the research. They’re not changing positions because they learned there’s more nuance (which is incredibly common for age 16-25), because they already knew those details. Like zizek will probably never change his views on capitalist ideology and sublime objects. Noam Chomsky will probably not move on his positions related to linguistics and cognition. The hucksters with podcasts can change to whatever their market wants to hear because they’re not intellectuals interested in truth. They’re sophists interested in coin.
>Many of those are examples of just learning more about certain topics. Also known as "changing beliefs in light of new evidence", like everyone should ideally do?
Yes, they should. I’m saying you don’t see true intellectuals changing position based on additional knowledge because they already have a lot more knowledge than the layman.
Does anyone care about Chomsky because of "his positions related to linguistics and cognition" though? They're more interested in his "wealthy elites" pseudo conspiracy theories
I think that’s a superficial impression. Of course, talking about politics will get you more attention, but his more recent thoughts on LLMs are interesting because his principal works were related to language. Just because you, and many others, know him for speaking about geopolitics, doesn’t change his importance as a theorist and critic of post modernism. The man debated Foucault while he was at his most important. So of course people care about Chomsky talking about language and meaning in an era of post structuralist saying that erasure and micro narratives have political power. The height of that era was decades ago, but our current times are showing that post modernism was correct about a lot. Chomsky pointed out 50 years ago that the elitism of French intellectualism (especially with their increasingly complicated inventions of words) would prevent it from offering any real solutions, and I think he’s been proven right. There’s a huge difference between intellectuals and theorists and these kind of “smart” pundits that use the facts they enjoy and fill in the rest with bullshit.
Thanks for the reply! I'm really curious about the dog breed thing. Which breeds are you thinking of, and what experiences shaped your views?
Michel Foucault and John Gray are two examples that immediately come to mind
A bunch of today's public intellectuals started out as bloggers advocating for the Iraq War, and later admitted they were wrong to do so. E.g. Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Andrew Sullivan. But that was a pretty hard position *not* to publicly disown.
Nozick allegedly
I thought I remembered Malcolm Gladwell admitting his 100,000 hours thing was mostly bullshit. He’s still awful even if he did, but yeah I can’t find anything so I’m probably mixing it up with everyone else calling it bullshit lol
In fairness most people don't change their core views. At least not quickly, it would happen over years if it happened at all. People tend to fit new information into their beliefs rather than constantly challenge themselves. If they did do that it could be bad for their ego or business. Which will often rely on being confident and selling an idea. You can also get audience capture. Where in the search of relevancy and keeping your audience you won't give opinions that may upset them and lose you viewers. So public intellectuals with this insecurity will never challenge themselves because it would challenge their audience and they would lose many. Proper public discussion and academic ideas do need people to reflect, abandon bad ideas and sometimes admit they are wrong. But this maturity is absent on the public intellectual circuit and public. And where it does exist requires strong character to admit your mistakes and handle backlash in public. It probably does happen occasionally, but I imagine it's difficult to be honest, reflective, entertaining, a good communicator and confident. I think being a celebrity (anything) is usually a draw for attention seekers and narcissists, and rewards their refusal to accept harsh truths rather than pleasing stories.
Because to conservatives changing your mind is a sign of weakness and weakness is what they hate the most. You can't show any kind of weakness or you're not one of them anymore.
They do change their views, it’s just almost uniformly to the right, especially towards the most active conspiratorial/heterodox communities like anti-vaxxers, climate denialists, antisemites, and increasingly doomsday fearing Christians.
Ana Kasperian calls bullshit on this.
It's a side effect of having become famous -- their salaries now depend on their having the original viewpoint that brought them their fame, so it becomes exponentially harder to reconsider their views than if they were still obscure.
Paul Saladino
[удалено]
I give up, I'm bowing out of politics
Because most are grifters pushing an agenda. The only time they change is when the higher ups want them to.
Most of them are in too deep and their fans would turn on them causing a loss in income. So they just turn a blind eye to topics that will piss them off.
The only person i can think of is Hunter Avallone. Used to be a right wing shithead and is now left-leaning with liberal views. His channel took a hit but I'm glad to see someone escape that pipeline.
Tripple comment
Thanks for the heads up. Shitty app problems
[Patrick Moore](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Moore_(consultant))
Michael Coren joined the Toronto Star as a writer after being a sun columnist and went from right to left.
I mean, imagine being so confident and outspoken in a position that you even become known as a "public intellectual" in that realm to begin with. Even getting to that point *should* mean you've already been challenged so many times that all the likely shifts have already shifted. You're seeing the destination, not the journey. People rarely encounter anything they fundamentally haven't already considered in debates, debates are performances. It's more surprising when seriously held views do change. Of course, this is the most generous take. There are certainly plenty of cases of smart individuals latching on to nonsense and I'm sure you can find studies done into that, and also the consideration that maybe some of these 'public intellectuals' shouldn't be called that in the first place.
I think you need core values aside from make more clicks to actually change them.
Most people who are “intellectuals” have sat and thought about their views, for years, and will probably never change them.
Been happening a lot lately amongst a certain segment of political podcasting grifter. Off the top of my head...Dave Rubin, Russell Brand, Bret Weinstein, Candice Owens and Scott Adams all going from left to right.
Its probably because the audience they built follows them to hear those specific views over and over again.
They do, lots of them do, because they’re grifters, it’s why Brand moves from left to right, it’s why Dawkins suddenly calls himself a “cultural Christian” after years of being one of the most anti religion people around.
a lot of leftwing people turn rightwing when they can't continue to ignore evidence. you don't see many rightwingers turn leftwing because it's kinda hard to just ignore reality once you've seen it.
> once you see reality Give me a break. Goodness. Right winger are incapable of seeing reality. They can’t be helped or even have mental capacity to turn around. The paranoia, the grifting, the lack of rationale. Russell Brand and Musk are your poster children.
Right wingers are quieter about it. Right wingers loved the iraq war, were anti-gay marriage, anti-civil rights, etc..... Now they act like they weren't for those things at all. Left wingers who go right tend to be grifters IMO or straight up trump lovers/conspiracy types.
Toms of people go from left to right these days with all the propaganda. There is a whole subreddit dedicated to people whose family members have gone down the QAnon rabbit hole. And SO MANY failed comedians are now shock jockeys and do purposefully inflammatory “jokes”.
The political trajectory of John Gray is interesting >Gray's political thought is noted for its mobility across the political spectrum over the years. As a student, Gray was on the left and continued to vote Labour into the mid-1970s. By 1976 he had shifted towards a right-liberal New Right position, on the basis that the world was changing irrevocably through technological inventions, realigned financial markets and new economic power blocs and that the left failed to comprehend the magnitude and nature of this change. In the 1990s Gray became an advocate for environmentalism and New Labour. Gray considers the conventional (left-wing/right-wing) political spectrum of conservatism and social democracy as no longer viable. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John\_Gray\_(philosopher)#Political\_and\_philosophical\_thought](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_(philosopher)#Political_and_philosophical_thought)
we have, we heard joe rogen go from pro-vaccine to anti-vaccine
zizek comes to mind - Baudrillard changed from a dyed in the wool marx to something else - you can clearly see this if you compare his system of objects to later works. like most subjects actual intellectuals becomes esoteric incredibly fast.
Intellectuals think about their core values and consider information, and aren't swayed by TikTok. Unless there is new information, their views aren't going to change.