I agree with Kant that allowing womens' suffrage was an act of sheer madness). — Dachshund

Yes. There you have it.

Doesn't sound like much of a plan. — Agustino

Well you might well say so, but that is something that deserves it's own thread. I guess your plan is 'get rich, get powerful, then implement a practical plan.' My position is that that plan is what got us here in the first place. But if you want to discuss that let's go somewhere more congenial than this Pinker v pinko thread.

I guess your plan is 'get rich, get powerful, then implement a practical plan.' — unenlightened

Yeeeeeeeeees, how did you guess so well? :smirk:

But if you want to discuss that let's go somewhere more congenial than this Pinker v pinko thread. — unenlightened

Ok, take me there kind Sir.

I have no clue what a night-porter is, but okay. — Agustino

It intended to depict someone who is "ever so 'umble, M'Lud", in the cunning, slippery, disingenuous way that Dicken's immortal character, Uriah Heep, did in the novel "David Copperfield". (Thoroughly reprehensible).

For as long as I've known him unenlightened has played the humble card, I'm used to it already.

Yes, it's a classic (post)-modern era Marxist's sleight of hand; and if the "night-porter" schtick is true, you can throw in a very healthy dose of the invidia that the decalogue TWICE warns us against; in this case, the kind of bitter class envy - or rather, the kind of vicious class jealously the french call ressentiment that always ends in grief.

Yes, it's a classic (post)-modern era Marxist's sleight of hand; and if the "night-porter" schtick is true, you can throw in a very healthy does of the invidia the decalogue TWICE warns us against, i.e. the kind of bitter class envy - or rather, the kind of vicious class jealously the french call ressentiment that always ends in grief. — Dachshund

I very much doubt that unenlightened always was a night-porter. He may have been a night-porter at some time, but my guess is that unenlightened is much better off than he makes it show over here.

I am not remotely humble. I put my life where my ideology is. I am the downwardly mobile son of an architect, and exile from the middle classes. But feel free to resort to ad homs in your attempt to sustain the unsustainable. It's about all you've got.

I am not remotely humble. I put my life where my ideology is. I am the downwardly mobile son of an architect, and exile from the middle classes. But feel free to resort to ad homs in your attempt to sustain the unsustainable. It's about all you've got. — unenlightened

Yeah, but you're too intelligent for what you let on. I'm not using this to attack you in any way, contrary to what you seem to think. I'm just stating what I think. Your intelligence makes me think that either (1) you are a very capable person yourself (much more capable than you let on), and/or (2) you come from a relatively well to do family which gave you access and time to become so educated (not necessarily rich, but you know, at least upper middle class let's say). Granted that you say your father was an architect back in the day (or your grandmother! worked in the bank), I don't think that's far off.

Your ilk, smug left wingers who substitute sarcasm for reasoned debate, outnumbers everyone else by a large margin on this forum. You are typically blind to what is most evident. — Thorongil

Real mature and devoid of an argument again.

I agree with the Peter Harrison review of Pinker’s book, as I think Pinker’s obvious and non-self-critical ‘scientism’ is generally mistaken, and I generally argue along similar lines against ‘scientism’ on the forum.

So it pains me to say that I think many of his criticisms of leftism in political and academic life are quite well-founded. Given that, I also think many of the so-called ‘AltRight’ are equally mendacious and arguably more vicious. The ‘left’ might be hosting up hammer and sickle banners, but at least some of the Alt Right are displaying Hitler memorabilia. I don’t know which is worse, but they’re both pretty awful.

I agree with some elements of traditional conservatism, but I also note that many American conservatives are appalled by Trump and the speakers at the recent CPAC conference (for example). Trump is not actually conservative or even Republican, but a political opportunist who the GOP has fallen cravingly in behind.)

But in respect of the OP, Pinker is depressingly correct in some ways. You can’t voice conservative views of sexuality and gender without being depicted as a reactionary. Legendary Australian tennis player Margaret Court was a vocal critic of ‘gay marrriage’, for which she was pilloried by Fairfax media as ‘a racist and a bigot’.

Margaret Court was a psychiatrically disordered feminist LESBIAN - a thoroughly bitter and twisted, abnormally hateful and spiteful "victim".

You can’t voice conservative views of sexuality and gender without being depicted as a reactionary. — Wayfarer

Fate worse than death?

Or worse than being depicted as "a psychiatrically disordered feminist LESBIAN - a thoroughly bitter and twisted, abnormal individual."?

Your ability to read people alone already puts you in top 1%. Combine that with your ability & handle over language, and your ability to reframe situations so that they appear in your favor, and you certainly have a potentially very capable person. And again, this isn't an ad hom, because it's not an insult. It's praise, I admire you. That doesn't mean I agree with you though.

The fact that he is such an extremely popular public intellectual in the US tends to contract your view of him as "jejune" and "uninteresting", Darth ? — Dachshund

The fact that he is a popular public intellectual in the United States already qualifies him as a suspect jejune, in my opinion. Popularity in a (failing) country that elected Donald Trump isn't a good standard.

Indeed, I am a fairly smart and articulate cookie who has chosen to spend his life doing odd things like working to teach children excluded from schools for no pay, living in a experimental commune, working for a homeless charity, working for a disability charity. Just like Uriah Heap. :roll:

What irks and frustrates me so much about the postmodern left ( or whatever you label you apply to that Confederacy of Dunces, be it neo- Marxist or post - Marxist or whatever) is that it wasthey who were directly responsible for creating the ultra-conservative backlash - the "Alt-Right"spring - that is happening right now in America. It's not rocket science, it's simply what happens when YOU LIE to people about basic human facts; when, for example, you shove absurd madness like "2nd and 3rd wave" gender feminism down the throat of the public, or say that there is no problem at all with the rates of violent black crime across the United States relative to white European crime rates.

Sooner or later people see through the lies of the mass media and the mouthpieces of the liberal political establishment and then it doesn't take much - just a gentle a nudge or two - to get them REALLY pissed off and up[ in arms;THEN you've got trouble - real trouble on your hands ! It's always been the same old story with radical "Enlightenment" egalitarian political theories and ideologies, be the Jacobin reign of Terror during the French Revolution 1783-84 when 40,000 last their heads to Madam Guillotine in the Place de la Concorde, or the death of untold millions of Russian citizens in Stalin's Gulag Archipelago, or in Mao's Red China or Pol Pot's killing fields of Cambodia - these projects to create social/communist "heavens on Earth" always go "pear-shaped" and history shows that they do so relatively rapidly; and, when the S**T does hit the fan on a big scale there is always a dreadful piper to pay in the form of devastation and human suffering along the way and in the clean -up that must take place in the aftermath.

When will people ever learn that ideologies like Unenlightened's "neo-Marxism" ( neo - BU*LSH*T) are simply unworkable - and not just unworkable, but absolutely unnatural, decadent and innatelyevil? These grand egalitarian utopist ideologies always fail, and when they do there is, as we have seen in the UK and the US in 2016/ 2017 always a ferocious, reactionary right-wing backlash after the fall !

Just like Uriah Heap. :roll: — unenlightened

I did not say just like Uriah lol :lol: But it was a funny remark.

who has chosen — unenlightened

Who has chosen and could afford to make that choice too, no? What was your reason for choosing that? Was it something that came to you instinctually so to speak, or was it consciously planned?

Thanks for the projection.

Would I be correct in presuming that your political sympathies lie towards the "socialist " Left of centre ? If so, I declare that you are a [redacted]

:rofl:

Yes, @Thorongil is the number 1 socialist of TPF. :rofl:

And he actually ADMITS this ??!! :gasp:

:brow:

My God- you're right, he does !! :yikes: I ... I simply don't know what to say ?! I've never been confronted with this degree of idiocy before !

*sits back with popcorn*

You're an odd one.

Even if I wanted to agree with you, too much vitriol. There's a difference between debating and brawling.

Let me get this right, Thorongil, you, a socialist, ( which is synonymous with communist for all reasonable intents and purposes) are saying that I a ( conservative in the mould of Edmund Burke) who, like Burke himself, was a gentleman who never hurt a fly and who firmly believes in leaving people free to live their own lives in peace without the intervention of oppressive, psychopathic, totalitarian big governmentsis odd, but Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Castro and Kruschev were not odd, just nice, normal, everyday, run- of -the -mill , Marxist torturers , mass murderers and evil tyrants?