We do need to challenge his rhetoric (or at the very least question it), or he will likely continue to win followers. — VagabondSpectre

No need to challenge his views directly if he's not invited or discussed on a public, wide-reaching platform further amplifying his voice. No one owes Ben a conversation, any more than they owe me a conversation. He has his own website (funded by billionaire brothers, of course) so he's free to publish his views there (insofar as he is profitable).

And some of us are keeping an eye on this.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Sokal-Squared-Is-Huge/244714 — pomophobe

lol the whole sokal squared thing was a dud.

I think the left can actually gain from earnestly engaging with him — VagabondSpectre

Don't think there is much point in an earnest debate with a guy who sells "Leftist Tears" branded tumblers.

Cioran

Holy shit, the New York Times literally just published a Bret Stephens op-ed where he yet again complains about college students.

Short of declaring Spencer an enemy of the state, how to we defeat fascism, and does protesting Shapiro contribute to that fight?

I'm willing to accept (culture) war in principle, but I think you might be escalating things rather quickly, especially you think if Shapiro's followers are beyond persuasion. — VagabondSpectre

While there are undeniably ideological overlaps between Shapiro and Spencer, the latter is an outright ethno-nationalist fascist, while the former isn't. To combat Shapiro, he should not be invited to cable news to speak, he should be protested when giving lectures at college campuses, and he shouldn't be coddled in major publications because he says nothing of value and has no journalistic merit. He shouldn't be violently confronted because I'm not convinced he's anything other than two five-year-olds stacked on top of each other in a suit.

Ben Shapiro does not have a right to lecture at college campuses. Alex Jones does not have a right to a Twitter account. Steve Bannon does not have a right to speak at events put on by the New Yorker or The Economist. Deplatforming these people is not censorship nor a violation of free speech, and if you think otherwise I have a bridge to sell you. More to the point, as I've repeated numerous times, this shouldn't even be considered an important issue.

And I don't see how anyone can be faulted in protesting Shapiro who has said that a majority of Muslims are extremists, or that Jews who vote democrat are "bad Jews who undermine Judaism", and more, among a number of things that any level-headed person would find deplorable and outright pseudo-intellectual.

EDIT: and regarding Ben Shapiro and violence, it's important to note that the Quebec mosque shooter, who murdered six Muslims, viewed Ben Shapiro's twitter 93 times in the month leading up to the killing. Even more than he viewed Alex Jones, David Duke, Richard Spencer, and Tucker Carlson.

Thus the Left is suicidal in abandoning the defence of free speech to the Right. — jamalrob

It's exasperating to have this bromide blindly repeated unceasingly. Outside of anecdotal examples (primarily at elite schools which make up a fraction of the total student population) in which left-wing students protest, or are able to shut down highly controversial speakers, which the right-wing students also do, there is no quantitative proof showing Leftists are "abandoning free speech", across campus or beyond. If free speech is having a speaking opportunity at a University then it goes without saying that all of us are without such freedom.

Curiously, accusations around abandoning free speech are never thrown at the right, despite anti-BDS legislation that's been adopted by over a dozen states, Trump and his administrations's condemnation of news media, or when right-wing figures such as Ben Shapiro, Milo Yiannopoulos, or Jordan Peterson hypocritically threaten to sue people.

Unfortunately liberals and self-described centrists often internalize the bad faith arguments put forward by right wingers, because the latter have, to @StreetlightX's point, amplified and propounded this narrative in the 'marketplace of ideas' despite how groundless and false it is.

Fascism is not an idea to be debated. It is a set of actions to fight. Given this, antifa is useful and effective. Fascism will not be defeated through civil debate.

This is just vindictive. No abortion even in case of invest and rape. — Benkei

Yeah pretty I'm fucking angry today.

Hey Benkei, a very obvious solution for one who is uninformed on a subject is to read and learn more about it, as I have suggested to ssu multiple times, which he decidedly ignores. What's actually more insulting is to suggest otherwise.

Several ominous things have occurred in the past 24 hours.

1. Alabama Lawmakers Vote to Effectively Ban Abortion in the State
2. White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War
3. Trump Opposes Federal LGBTQ Nondiscrimination Bill

others are born brilliant and driven with a tremendous amount of empathy — Dusty of Sky

Yeah the film Baby Geniuses was actually a documentary.

Correct, Hume never stated that acausal events were possible. The OP is conflating acausality with Hume's actual Problem, viz., that there is no logical a priori justification to assume that a sequence of events will occur (under ceteris paribus conditions) simply because they occurred countless times before (Hume offers an example of billiard balls being struck), as there is no a priori justification establishing a causal connection. Which is, to your point, a conflation of ontology with epistemology.

When it comes to billionaires giving money to political movements, parties and outright individual politicians, one naturally has to make the difference between propagation of political and economic ideology and what is simply lobbying for personal gain. For some like the Koch brothers to hold power in the GOP it's more about the latter. Yet typically things are promoted as ideological choices. — ssu

Except if you had actually read anything I recommended, you'd know that the Koch Brothers don't exclusively lobby or donate money to politicians and campaigns, but also set up and direct multiple think tanks and university departments to propagate libertarian ideology, as I've already stated multiple times now. Not going to further waste my time with a tried and true know-nothing like yourself who constantly pedals in vapid speculation.

Lol what the fuck is this

Confusing rhetoric with policy. I get that you don't like Trump's style. Obama deported record numbers of undocumented immigrants. You could look it up. Perfect illustration of why I won't participate in these insipid political discussions. Obama's actual record on border issues was awful. He always had great rhetoric. And a jump shot. — fishfry

You show your hand there by cutting out the remainder of my post which shows how Trump's rhetoric has produced tangible consequences. In that respect, his dehumanizing rhetoric cannot be so casually divorced from his policies which stem from the same white supremacist ideology that his rhetoric is predicated upon. You also straight ignore the fact that Trump is separating families at the border and Obama didn't.

Orange Man Bad. Not conducive to thought. — fishfry

Yeah, you're telling me.

The main difference is the way the MSM ignored Obama's 2014 humanitarian disaster on the border — fishfry

Obama's immigration policies, from border control to deportation were widely covered across the media. A simple google search would show that. However unlike Trump, Obama never called Latin Americans "rapists", "vermin", or that they were "invading" or "pouring in the country", "diseased" or other de-humanizing rhetoric that have lead to increased anti-immigrant sentiment to the point now where citizen-formed militia have been detaining immigrant families along the borders by the hundreds, and which a member of the militia suggested that they should just "shoot them up" or that "we have to go back to Hitler days and put them all in a gas chamber." Obama also never entertained the possibility that George Soros was funding a migrant caravan, driving white supremacists to fear that whites were being replaced by non-whites and that the Jews were to blame, ultimately leading to the most violent antisemitic attack on US soil. Additionally, while Obama did split families within the nation through policies that increased deportation, Obama did not split families who were crossing the border (they were detained together, then deported together). The Trump administration introduced the zero-tolerance policy of deporting immigrating parents back to their home countries while detaining the children in concentration camps, with shoddy means to return them. In fact, it's very likely that many of these families will never be reunited since there weren't systematic means to track families.

Political conversations are only impossible when the other interlocutor, such as yourself, is completely clueless.

I'm pretty sure this has been explained to you multiple times Fishfry, so I have to ask: are you an actual fish? Does your memory last for five seconds?

@ssu consider actually reading the book on the Koch Brothers that I recommended instead of just blithely waving aside accusations on how they propagate their political and economic ideology. I will note that the author of the book Jane Mayer, wrote about how George Soros spent millions on the 2004 election. But I'm fairly tired of how you consider your clear ignorance on the subject matter as equivocal to my engagement with it.

It ain't gonna get amended Maw, can we get over that already and seek alternatives to the issue? — Wallows

Ah damn, you're right. No other countries have done this.

Guns are for the cowardly and faithless. Gun bans are for the cowardly and faithless. — Merkwurdichliebe

Fuck yeah dude, legislation that will ultimately decrease homicides, suicides, and obviously school shootings etc. is super cowardly. Instead, let's train students to fight school shooters, even if it costs them their lives. That's the definition of brave!

Hi! Anyone in favor of the 2nd Amendment please kindly take a gun and shoot yourself! Thanks!

I don't deny that he believes in what he says. What I'm trying to say is that how his message propagates isn't really to do with its truth, it's to do with aesthetic appeal and a comforting narrative. If someone's going to deny the Holocaust, for example, you can't do much to shift their denial through reasoned argument most of the time; and how people come to believe it is not through reasoned argument using reliable sources. — fdrake

But the seductiveness of white supremacy is precisely through its "aesthetic appeal" or a "comforting narrative", i.e., there is a racial hierarchy and whites are at the top, and if a (typically young) white person is struggling economically (which of course many are), it is arguably more comforting to blame that downward social mobility towards Blacks, or Jews, or Immigrants, etc. than on yourself, or on this abstract notion of Capitalism that many people are frankly unfamiliar with, so it's unsurprising that that's the lens through which Spencer articulates the veracity of white supremacy while at the clear expense of actual reliable science or reasoned arguments, or what have you.

I've listened to everything Spencer has to say, and it turned out that he just reads crowds (live-stream chat-rooms mostly) in order to maximize his number of cheers and subsequent donations. I've heard him say, and then have to recant, the most absolutely ridiculous shit because he was just reflecting the mass lunacy of the live-chat attached to the event. He may hold run-of-the-mill conservative views or typical far-right views, but his current career and business model is entirely based around maximizing the donations he gets through inlets like Youtube "super-chats" (a built in donation function), PayPal, cryptocurrency, Patreon, Hate-reon (now defunct), StreamLabs, merchandise sales, sales for his white-nationalist publishing house, and any other source of monetization that he still has access to. In short, he is a human crowdfunding algorithm catering to a niche and gullible market segment for the sake of maximizing his personal wealth.

Demonstrating his own intellectual dishonesty is actually a great way to undermine the influence he has over his followers, and even if he doesn't believe many of the things he says, the things he says still need to be debunked and rebuked (because his followers DO believe it). What makes it a mistake? — VagabondSpectre

But this is no different than saying that demonstrating over and over how Trump is a liar, a shit business man, or a hypocrite etc. is a great way to undermine the influence he has over his followers. It's demonstrably untrue. I also don't see why being a white supremacist means you can't simultaneous grift. I mean people like Richard Spencer still want to make a living and if you can squeeze money out of people who would gladly give it to you, you probably would. And it goes without saying that Hitler was masterful at reading and then manipulating crowds while also believing in what he was saying.

Big mistake to assume that Richard Spencer doesn't believe in what he says. What is that even based on?

At a Trump rally today, Trump states that we have "thousands of people marching up" and "hundreds and hundreds" immigrants trying to come in, with only "two or three border security patrol" and that we "don't let them use weapons...other countries do...we can't" and asks "how do we stop these people?" to which, an attendee shouts "shoot them!" Trump, along with other attendees laugh.

This is several days after it was reported that member of a border militia who were stopping and rounding up immigrants asked a fellow militia member, "why are we just apprehending them and not lining them up and shooting them?" and that "We have to go back to Hitler days and put them all in a gas chamber." — Maw

"Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?!"

New album is dope

AS A WHITE MAN I AM OPPRESSED BECAUSE I CANNOT FREELY SAY THE N-WORD, THIS IS WHAT ORWELL DESCRIBED IN THE ONLY BOOK I HAVE READ (ONE NINE EIGHT FOUR)

Thankfully we Americans can read article after article on how influential political commentators are getting heat for saying dumb things about rape, or transpeople, or "invading muslims" in serialized form on a national publication. This is way more vital than stories about Americans struggling to pay for healthcare, or 40+ year depressed wages, economic inequality or stories about high school students who survived a shooting (we have a fresh batch of survivors from just yesterday!), climate change, how reproductive rights are being scaled back and how that has been effecting women. No. Please give us more articles on Camille Paglia.

Mmm, the best part! Watching cherub-faced liberal dupes then vomit out defenses of free-speech in response (oh so enlightened, oh so sophisticated), while playing right into the hands of those happy to watch them safeguard their dirty work. And you don't even have to pay them. They'll do it out of the sanctity their own rightous good-guy soooo-not-mainstream convictions. An unpaid force of mercenary enablers. It's a maddeningly effective cycle. — StreetlightX

Absolutely! As demonstrated by David Frum and Hilary Clinton. If we liberals don't do the fascism then the fascists will do the fascism!

Don't forget sending emails like 'urging Yale University students to think critically about an official set of guidelines on costumes to avoid at Halloween'. Oh those devious ways the evil alt-right gets innocent students to play along and get that angry response they have planned for!

Of course the campus nonsense hasn't been picked up in mainstream news as it hasn't become Trump's trump card like the kneeling NFL players or flag burning at the time of Bush senior (if I remember correctly), but that doesn't apparently matter. — ssu

If you took five seconds to Google it, you would see that articles about the Yale Halloween costume controversy were published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Time Magazine, Slate, etc.. That a minor concern affecting no more than 6,000 students was discussed numerous times in a variety of well-respected publications demonstrates how absurdly perverted The Discourse is.

Your utter inability to see how exactly similar your argumentation is to the right-wing hysterical outrage against Soros, even with similar figures of speech like reference to an octopus with it's tentacles everywhere and 'covert operations', is so telling that it's funny. Just change the names and change it from libertarian talking points to liberal/leftist talking points and it's exactly what you find among Breitbart following Trump fans. — ssu

ssu, you demonstrably have severe reading difficulties and prefer to resort to crass 'both siderism' in lieu of anything beyond a nine-year-old level of intelligence. Thanks to this enlightened centrism ideology your brain keeps churning out, like a rusting meat grinder, you seem to be utterly unable to comprehend that there is a big distinction between the network operations as exposed by a "Breitbart following Trump fan" and by an actual investigative journalist who has worked at the New Yorker for over 20 years and who has received a wide array of awards for her work, including the George Polk Prize, the John Chancellor Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Goldsmith Book Prize; the Edward Weintal Prize, the Ridenhour Prize, two Helen Bernstein Book Awards for Excellence in Journalism, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, the Sidney Hillman Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the James Aronson Award for social justice journalism, the Toner Prize for political reporting, the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, and the Frances Perkins Prize for Courage, and whose critically acclaimed 500+ page book, Dark Money, which was a finalist for numerous awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Shortlisted for the Lukas Prize, reveals how the Koch Brothers have spent 40+ years pouring money into organizations, think tanks, universities, politicians, and now serialized articles on The Atlantic covering topics that have profound and immediate effect on the average American...Camille Paglia getting fired because she said a University shouldn't tolerate a rape accusation from a women if occurred over six months ago, in order to, in David Koch's own words, "bring about social change" through a "vertically and horizontally integrated" strategy, starting "from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action".

No, instead your extremely broken brain has decided that these two are actually equivocal, because apparently any issue the Left brings up automatically requires an ersatz right-wing counterpart in a shit-brained attempt to negate it.

At a Trump rally today, Trump states that we have "thousands of people marching up" and "hundreds and hundreds" immigrants trying to come in, with only "two or three border security patrol" and that we "don't let them use weapons...other countries do...we can't" and asks "how do we stop these people?" to which, an attendee shouts "shoot them!" Trump, along with other attendees laugh.

This is several days after it was reported that member of a border militia who were stopping and rounding up immigrants asked a fellow militia member, "why are we just apprehending them and not lining them up and shooting them?" and that "We have to go back to Hitler days and put them all in a gas chamber."

Quite a few outrageously uncharitable (mis)readings from my comment on a Koch Foundation funding a series of articles on campus free speech in a national publication. I said this was "incredible" for two reasons. The first is that The Atlantic, over the course of several years, have published multiple articles on campus speech and protests, or how college students are pussies or whatever. Not only has this subject been routinely discussed and debated for decades, but more relevantly, is widely overblown today, so it's wondrous that despite being perennially topical, it is constantly treated as an emerging crisis that should the upmost concern for the well-being of America.

Second, encapsulated by @StreetlightX's point, is that the Koch Foundation is funding projects that magnify issues that are ultimately exaggerated in order to shape what is debated in the public sphere. Issues that are discussed on a national, well-respected publication is necessarily a zero-sum game. One conversation regarding a societal problem is platformed at the expense of another. It is given prerogative over other issues that plague society. This is even more true when issue is serialized. And the debate over campus speech is typically positioned as a problem generated by "regressive" Leftist students. Despite @ssu 's continued spurning of the Koch Brother's extremely well-documented influence in politics via "covert operations" the objective of which is to "bring about social change" through a "vertically and horizontally integrated" strategy, starting "from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action". Often known as the "Kochtopus", the ultimate end goal has been to deregulate their industry and maximize their profits by promoting libertarian talking points. There's no conspiracy, it's merely capitalists using their capital to ensure they can continue to generate more capital by shifting what the public is discussing (viz. that it is not focused on progressive taxation, universal healthcare, regulation, worker rights, etc.), funding think tanks to promote libertarian political philosophy, donating money, dark or overt, to Republican politicians and their campaigns, while also, as @csalisbury noted here, hoping that continuously promoting conversation around campus protest moves centrists closer to the right.

As per my further comment on how campus speech issues have become a way to enhance one's public profile, this is true for both individuals ( and even Universities). The steps are fairly simple. Call yourself a provocateur and tour college campuses with lectures titled "Why Do Lesbians Fake So Many Hate Crimes", or "The Dangerous Faggot". Then, when you inevitably face backlash because students aren't thrilled their college has decided to waste money on you visiting to discuss things like why "Muslims shouldn't be allowed in the USA" or that "feminism is worse than cancer", you can write about your traumatic experience, or have others write about you, on how the Left is so deeply intolerant and totalitarian.

Ma'am I do not agree with your views but I will gladly give my life for you to publish them on a national magazine

The Atlantic published another article on Camille Paglia paid for by the Koch Brothers. Just incredible.

This illustrates a subtle strategy for some right wingers who have counted on being protested and/or uninvited at college campus and leveraging that by writing articles (or being the subject of them) about how the Left is silencing them, and the articles of course receive many more clicks and public discussion than some measly campus speech. Milo Yiannopoulos did this frequently.

I think it goes without saying that working this issue out is better suited with a professional therapist and not the internet regardless if it's an internet community like this or online pornography, which just provides an exceptionally warped view of sex and sexual relationships.

The first time I dropped acid I was basically like postmodernism is 100% accurate

Sex really isn't that big of a deal and I think you are just putting it on a pedestal

Latest privileged white academic in the firing line for having incorrect views is Camille Paglia. It was only a matter of time I guess.

Art students are trying to get the social critic fired from a job she has held for three decades — jamalrob

This reason this is garbage is being discussed at all reveals itself clearly at the bottom of the article, namely: This article is part of “The Speech Wars,” a project supported by the Charles Koch Foundation, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute.

"The girls have been coached now to imagine that the world is a dangerous place, but not one that they can control on their own … They expect the omnipresence of authority figures … They’re college students and they expect that a mistake that they might make at a fraternity party and that they may regret six months later or a year later, that somehow this isn’t ridiculous? To me, it is ridiculous that any university ever tolerated a complaint of a girl coming in six months or a year after an event. If a real rape was committed go frigging report it …"

lol "incorrect" view. That's certainly a way to put it. Can't talk about victim blaming women after they've been raped and are hesitant to come forward? A true disaster for the marketplace of ideas.

This is William F. Buckley in 2007 on Muslims:

Western Europe has a Muslim problem, and it is particularly acute in Great Britain, which is more intimately linked to constitutional traditions and procedures. The French are quietly aghast at the presence of five million Muslims in their midst and are endeavoring to cope.

But the threat to it is not, this time around, in the shape of a continental army threatening invasion, or Nazi bombers darkening the sky. The threat now is the Muslim immigration. There are fewer Muslims in Britain than in France — two million — but that’s still a lot.

There are many interpreters of the true meaning of the commandments of the Koran. But among them are men and women who are prepared to end their own lives for the satisfaction of defying the British way of life.

What's interesting about Buckley is that he's illustrative of how normal conservatism and the alt-right cannot be so neatly separated. Mainstream conservatism has routinely platformed and turned a blind eye towards white supremacy until it is no longer because tenable to do so (e.g. when the language because too explicit). Buckley spent his life attempting to demarcate his mainstream conservatism with what we would call the alt-right today, including, but not limited to, antisemitism, white ethno-nationalism, Islamophobia, etc. (can't include anti-Black racism since it was a major talking point within the National Review) Yet he frequently hired and platformed radical right-wingers only to fire them when they said the quiet parts out-loud. Of course, this continues to this day.

You forget to mention that she has had success in her lawsuit (or the pressure group Council on American-Islamic Relations, which filed the lawsuit on her behalf), so maybe the legal system is still working in Texas. See Texas speech pathologist celebrates temporary free-speech win, hopes it inspires. Amawi, an US citizen and a person of Palestinian origin, has stated in her lawsuit that she has “seen and experienced the brutality of the Israeli government against Palestinians.” So obviously she takes it seriously. — ssu

Well this is certainly good news, I was not aware of this recent update. Unfortunately, this legislation has been introduced in multiple states.

Hopefully we'll get that Gadsden flag pic off you in no time