Define PC and SJW!

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I'm sorry you're having such a hard time with it, but I'm not going to watch more of his videos. Someone like Jordan Peterson I will listen to: an actual intellectual who is properly educated and informed on the issues he discusses, and doesn't just whine and yell insults at people because he doesn't have an actual argument (which is what Sargon does.) I will not waste my time on someone like Sargon. The more you push me to watch more of Sargon in fact, the less inclined I am to do so. Give me the name of someone with a similar view point to Sargon that can express it intelligently without insults and I will consider listening to them instead.

They haven't held the trial yet.



Can you even cite the law you're talking about?

Pardon?



You weren't asked to.



What qualifications does Sargon have? Are you aware of whether or not he has a degree or what he studied if he has? Arguments should be judged on their merits, not on whether or not the arguer has a piece of paper which meets your arbitrary criteria.



Should I quote your earlier diatribe or simply reference it as an example of why you're on flimsy ground there?



You already said as much.



At what point did I "push" you to watch him? I've suggested you challenge your preconceptions. Whether or not you choose to do so is entirely your decision.



How would that possibly fulfil the criteria of convincing you that you should be sceptical of your own biases?

My main bias is that I because of the amount of information out there and the variety of issues I find interesting and want to read about, I must be severely selective of what I take in because my resource of time to read is finite. This causes me to be biased towards those who have spent time studying and working in the issue they are discussing (this is what I mean by educated, I wasn't limiting that term "educated" to formal education only). So yes, I have a bias towards someone like Jordan Peterson and I am more likely to view his material and consider his arguments carefully because he is more informed and better at laying out a substantive argument than someone like Sargon. I am not one of those people who think they are immune to bias; I fight it by being cognizant of it and challenging my biases by reading the material of those informed on perspectives that I don't personally share. But to do that, I have to be very selective of what I take in for purely practical reasons. I can't give full consideration to everyone out there offering an opinion, I have to prejudge at least on the basis of who I think will be able to provide a solid and persuasive argument.

I'll learn more from the application.

adifferentname, if I can already tell from what I have seen of Sargon that he's not the sort of person that's going to be able to persuade me of anything why should I waste my time viewing his videos in detail? Why not find someone else with a similar argument that makes it in a way that I might actually find persuasive and challenging to my own perspective, and consider that fully instead? I can't spell out to you in detail what it is about Sargon that makes me find him not persuasive, that's just not how my mind works. I notice small things and it forms an impression, and it's the overall impression that I am consciously aware of, the small things mostly remain subconscious; I rely on these impressions because I am an observant person and experience has taught me that my impressions can be statistically relied upon. You would probably call this bias, but I consider it a process I have developed that allows me to select informative and persuasive sources of information that also experience has shown me I can rely upon. It is a shortcut, I do admit that, but it is an effective one that gets me access to the best sources of information with which to challenge my perceptions and to learn from. This selectivity and prejudgment is just necessary or I would be perpetually drowning in a sea of questionable information and opinions.

Making the opposition waste time makes some sense. I came to that conclusion a while ago.

It's true, sometimes it is a calculated strategy to bog the opposition down with extraneous information.

The way things have become, where there is literally all the information (and everyone's opinions on youtube and in the "blogosphere" and elsewhere in social media) in the world at your fingertips with the advent of the world wide web, you HAVE to be selective with your sources. If it's a bias, it's a bias that everyone should have or we all would be perpetually bogged down in that extraneous information.

There are three channels of which Sargon is one that I pay attention to. The other two may be more to your liking, and the one that I think you'll like the most is this one:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMIj-w ... iQQ/videos

The guy doesn't get emotional or resort to name calling, etc. at all iirc. The long, weirdly named videos are livestreams where he's mashed up the different topics he discusses into a twisted title. There are timestamps in the descriptions of those videos for the start of each topic along with what the topic is. I've not watched these, and I probably should when it's so easy to break them up rather than have to watch it all. But I've no idea if his quality suffers live or his demeanor changes. So best not to do one of those if your first impression solidifies so quickly.

Here's the second guy:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzxm7b ... YuQ/videos

Bonus: he's autistic. Sadly he doesn't have much content because a few months ago someone hacked into his account and deleted all his videos. So this is a new account, and he's only got about half the subscribers he had before. Though many of his videos have been reuploaded by others who had downloaded them, so they can be sought out if you're ever so inclined. Most of the time he's calm, he sometimes shows emotion, but I've only seen him get properly angry once. He doesn't resort to name calling or calling for people to be shot into the sun, etc, but sometimes does employ his sense of humour on things.

Interestingly, both of these two like to keep a distance between themselves and the "Youtube sceptic community" and have both even uploaded videos criticising it in the past, the latter of the two ended up clashing with Sargon over this for a while and I was against Sargon in that.

Sargon was a tribal chief of the Akkadians that conquered parts of the Levant and Mesopotamia. His empire wasn't even as large as the Egyptian empire in it's day and it lasted less than 200 years. The Akkadian civilization is known for one thing: destabilizing and then destroying Mesopotamia. They replaced it with a joke of a civilization. Why anyone would use the leader of a completely failed society as their internet moniker is beyond me. It's kind of like Adolf: after the Akkadians fell I'm pretty sure no one named their kid Sargon lest they be stoned to death, yet here we are 4000 years later and someone's trying to rehabilitate his name through homage. Humans really are stupid.

I've never actually watched this, but here is Sargon talking about Sargon:

Sargon largely allowed all of the Great cities of Sumeria to thrive. The only thing he did do was to destroy city walls, in order to avert rebellion. Other than that he largely was a benevolent conqueror.

Oh and the Mesopotamia afterwards was far from a joke of a civilization. Ur and Uruk became powerful cities with swathes of influence, and Ur Namu is documented as having created the first known legal code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu

Aha! I've found Sargon's bigotry!

He's interviewing Majid Nawaz, a muslim whose on the Southern Poverty Law Center list as an anti-muslim extremist!

https://www.splcenter.org/20161025/jour ... ists#nawaz

You're confusing Mesopotamia proper with the Akkadian occupation, the legal code you're citing was written 150 years after the Akkadian empire had already withered to dust.

This is good. You're asking questions now rather than making unqualified statements about his character.

First of all, I don't believe it would be a waste of your time. That premise is yet another shortcut and something of a flimsy self-justification. I'm of the opinion that you're not familiar enough with his arguments to judge whether or not he's a waste of your time, thus rendering this whole line of thought circular. You're effectively saying that you're not familiar because you've taken a shortcut based on initial impressions, therefore you shouldn't become familiar because not using your shortcut would inconvenience your snap judgement. It's self-defeating.

Secondly, you took the time to state your opinion of who and what Sargon is, despite later admitting you're almost entirely ignorant of his body of work on youtube. You effectively presented yourself as an authority on a subject about which you know virtually nothing. If you wish to actually speak with some authority on a subject, I suggest it's necessary to be in possession of at least a modicum of the facts.

Thirdly, as suggested by techstep, if you're ideologically opposed to Sargon then it's in your best interests to be able to convince other people why they should agree with your ideology rather than his. He's clearly got a great deal more reach than either of us has, but his platform is not unassailable. A better question would be "why should I waste my time listening to people I mostly agree with?", because you're sure as shizzle not going to get anything out of that other than the warm, fuzzy glow of confirmation bias.



You didn't present arguments against someone else. You presented your arguments against Sargon. I have no vested interest in you adopting his ideological positions, but I do have a vested interest in you understanding my own - which you presently appear not to.



I suggest you might find it easier if you had a grasp of his position on, well, anything.



I'd call that justification in defence of bias, based on observations to date. I'm entirely willing to re-evaluate should new data contradict the existing evidence.



All information and opinions should be questioned, especially those which are preconceived. You're presenting a rhetorical argument which casts you as the victim of information overload, but I'm unwilling to accept that you're so fragile as to be unable to psychologically withstand the controlled bombardment of information available via your computer screen and speakers when you click play on a youtube video.

kara, you might like Sam Harris's arguments on these things more or, possibly to some extent, Computing Forever.

I remember back when I had a kick of listening to AM talk radio - my friends were conservatives, I thought I was as well, and while I liked people like Dennis Prager who while I don't agree on his core precepts much anymore I'd still say that he pressured the right levers of thought - ie. analyze, try to unveil disagreements, and where they're irreconcilable such as in the case of beliefs leave them alone, stop the debate, but make sure the dirt and mud that's been obscuring those beliefs and the nature of those beliefs gets cleared away so that people can see what they're dealing with. My other guy friends thought he was terribly boring, were themselves the kinda out-crowd kids in highschool who were trying to make it up in their mid-20's by living fast, loud, and alpha so they found Dennis Prager's lack of combativeness terribly boring and they vastly preferred Michael Savage or Mark Levin, even to this day only one sort of knows who Jordan Peterson is (he'd bore the heck out of them) but - they're quite well familiar with Ben Shapiro!

I do think it takes all types and that you'll tend to gravitate toward the commentators who, perhaps, are on the other side of the political fence but are people whose style of thinking and style of constructing arguments reminds you more of your own. The good news is that there are a ton of them out there. Sam Harris is very incisive and I think both Computing Forever and Blaire White (albeit in different ways) have a manner of sort of splitting the difference with being somewhat incisive and somewhat sarcastic to a balance that's more palatable to a lot of people.