If the “Intellectual Dark Web” is being silenced, why must w

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"If you had struggled to come up with a collective noun for that disparate group of people that ranges from Milo Yiannopoulos to Sam Harris and includes Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and every other random guy with a social media profile pic that is a photoshopped character out of an Ayn Rand novel, the New York Times has baptised them.

They now have a name. The “Intellectual Dark Web” or “IDW” (which does not sound as sexy or as dangerous as I am sure its members would like, sounding less like a group of dangerous truth-tellers and more a minor United Nations organisation). They are “vanguards” according to the profile’s author, Bari Weiss. “Heretics”, venturing into “There Be Dragons territory”.

“Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web”, the piece starts. “There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered ‘dark’.” "


https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/m ... about-them

For a group that whines so much about being silenced, they sure do seem to have a lot bigger platform and louder voices than most human beings.

The majority of the crap they're talking about is old news anyway. It's like a "Who's Dreamier: David Cassidy or Donny Osmond" poll. The lack of interest isn't them being silenced, it's that most of us got over that particular conversation decades ago.

Conspiracy theorists love to pretend to be persecuted, it adds to the whole 'we're the only ones who know the dangerous truth' image they wish to project.

The irony is that if they were right they would quickly be censored, and maybe even killed, by the "one world order" for saying the 'true", but as they are wrong they are free to post some crazy Youtube videos that everyone can see.

Unless, it's just the NWO's plot to discredit them.

I'd have to put Bret and Eric Weinstein as my favorites in this department. I liked a lot of Peterson's popularizing of Jung and Nietzsche and Sam Harris of course tends to have excellent guests on a whole range of secular, scientific, ethical, political, etc. topics.

I don't think what's said above is a boo-hoo sniffle about themselves, and particularly with Bret there's credible experience of seeing a college administration play politics with the student body and use them as a wedge. You might have to throw Jonathan Haidt into the mix here, and Steven Pinker as also technically fitting into this category increasingly with what they say. Their concerns range from Haidt's worry that an academia falling off the left (or right) end destroys self-criticism and the quality of their offerings, Pinker's concern echoed by the rest as well that if you bury hot-button issues and forbid their discussion you decrease the immunity of the students to bad actors who'd have at the information their way, and over all the concern is seeing cult-like reaction turn itself against reason and critical thought; something we've unfortunately seen a lot of in the past few years.

Eric Weinstein I think said it best in his four quadrant model that there are official team/tribe narratives, and then there are accurate narratives that break ties and get mischaracterized, ignored, and he calls this zone 'stigmatized narratives' if I'm remembering correctly. Mostly the people who are in what one might call the IDW are people who are slamming into what have been collective blind spots in our culture and criticizing people's quality of thought - ie. trying to get people to up their game a bit on the thinking and reasoning front.

The key problem is people aren't educated or clever enough. A little bit of knowledge is dangerous. It can be misapplied. If everyone was as educated as a savant autistic there wouldn't be any need for hand wrinnging and fretting. Where society has crumbled is in seeing ignorance as an acceptable state. Ignorant people can be manipulated into buying stuff they don't need and therein lies the reason capitalist systems tolerate a poor state of education. On the other hand the far left people do not tolerate interest in literature and art or individual perspective because they see everything as an attempt to equalise.

In all instances the answer is education. Broaden your mind and things become more clear. Everyone needs to become more educated. Everyone!

Since no one knows who anyone is this will probably just be more name-salad but, Rationality Rules (youtube skeptic) discussing Bret Weinstein as well as Brendan O'Neil at a recent Spiked debate and picking apart their points.



Styx trying to broaden the context considerably:

Given the very limited intellectual ability of the IDW set it ill behoves them to be criticising people's quality of thought. These are not the smartest people out there.

How many of these people have you ever heard of? Of that subset how many of them can you express the views of and where they fall down into sophistry or pseudo-intellectualism?

Where I first heard the term used, Sam Harris's Waking Up 112:

It might be wise to read the New Statesman article he has linked and see if that's even a credible description of the people mentioned, as well as appraising the journalistic integrity of the piece.

I'd like to add that none of these is in any way a systemic threat to what British writer Mark Fisher calls "Capitalist Realism" - the neoliberal worldview, if you will.
None of the IDW actually challenges much more than social issues, which are panem et circenses for derivatives traders and derivatives speculators and the billionaires of the world. No reason to silence that, really.

I'll stand by my comment, thanks.

That's you're right, just that I really wouldn't recommend it unless you're not worried at all about the veracity of the article or what's being claimed.

I feel like have an obligation to be a bit strident about this one because I know one or two things is absolutely certain a) somehow no one in this thread knows who Sam Harris is (maybe there is a generational gap on that) or b) they do know who he is and they're taking a likening of him to Alex Jones without so much as blinking. I'd have to hope it's former because in the later case leveling the charge that Sam Harris is a conspiracy nut is so demonstrably false to be completely laughable. At that rate add Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and maybe Christopher Hitchens post-mortem to your 'conspiracy theorist idiots' list.

It's fine , as long as you just want to listen to a calm voiced podcast, or to join a community after escaping some religious cult.
They should not be treated as political influencers, it's a disservice to themselves first and foremost.