Dave Rubin On The "Regressive Left."

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You don't have to be sorry for anything you express, here. I may not agree with it, but it comes from the heart. You're a passionate, empathetic person. The world needs more of that.

I've not seen you bring anything intelligent to the discussion, just a one sided put down of the left while pretending to be fair minded and reasonable.

Ah, alright. In other words, you have no counter argument. Fair enough. Zero points for you.

In my experience, most self-proclaimed "centrists" are really just right-wingers pretending to be more objective than they actually are.

That's a typical response that is indicative of the problem. If you go against the narrative put forth by the cultural authoritarians on the left, you must be an right-winger, or alt-right, etc. Or at least, you're a "useful tool" for the alt-right. Joe Rogan has been labeled alt-right simply for having right-wing opinions on his show. He generally just laughs it off. I'm glad we have some people on the left who have the balls to stand up to this s**t.

The problem that the regressive left fails to understand is that they are only empowering a fringe element that represent a tiny percentage of Americans. I liken it to governments who play on the fears of the citizenry by over-inflating foreign threats, whether it be the Russians or Islamic terrorists. It's about control, in the end.

Or at least one could say they aren't 'team players'.

I wonder quite often if Eric and Brett Weinstein, Jonathan Haidt, etc. aren't getting some of this same labeling. In their case I think it would demonstrate thoroughly that it's a tribal standing check-in.

edit: as far as teams go I'd add - team human is probably more important than team left or team right. That's something that the IDW has been doing everything they can to get correct and wring out as much blue or red team distortion as they can to get to discuss the salient details. Without that, if it's blue vs. red team everyone's got their shibboleths, dog whistles, and the whole thing is like a British soccer rivalry complete with hooliganism.

I couldn't agree more. In all humility, my approach may be counterproductive, whereas yours is far more conducive to respectful replies.

I did eat a lot of concrete getting here and didn't always have chocolate syrup and Redi-whip to dress it up with first.

Ha!

I suppose if I'm being brutally honest, using terms like "regressive left" is entirely intentional, even though I know that it's only going to incite certain people and get me pushed into the far-right camp. But I never use any term unless I agree 100% with it. Honestly, i couldn't care less whether Rubin is truly what he claims to be. It's irrelevant. What matters is the validity of his opinions, many of which I disagree. Perhaps I'm only throwing fuel on the fire.

I just Wiki'd 'regressive left' to check my memory on who coined the phrase, I thought it might have been Sam Harris but it turns out that Sam may have picked it up from Maajid Nawaz. Those are two more people where I'd like to know, for those who are saying such criticisms of the left can only come from the right, are Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz secret right-wingers?

I think Douglas Murray put it well when he was on Joe Rogan - ie. we might be seeing, in the Durkheimian sense, the birth of the new gods.

That's unfortunately the pernicious quality of the partisan divide and identity politics, which I simply loathe.

See, that's the thing - I don't think you do, any more than anyone else. You show are immensely relaxed about showing tolerance for racists. Now, on one level, that's fine - if you're practising a form of radical tolerance where you deliberately expose yourself to all sorts of ideas and consider them all equally, while still staying true to basic values.

Based on your posts on WrongPlanet, which may in all fairness not be representative of what you are truly like, I do not think you are practising radical tolerance. You are not immensely relaxed about ideas that are to the left of yours, more liberal than yours, or more capitalist than yours. You admit, for example, to not being very familiar with Rubin's content, but as soon as I come in and offer a fair and really rather tame criticism of Rubin's views, you didn't engage with me, but instead insulted me, accused me of not being familiar with Rubin, and accusing me of being part of the "left/right paradigm". And this bares out in your posts generally: you're very receptive to the ideas of right-wing users, you push back on left-wing users, and you are actively hostile to liberal and centrist users.

Now don't get me wrong: I think you are a good guy, and I think you are sincere when you say you think you'd like to hear from a variety of viewpoints. But most people who are in "echo chambers" say that they don't want to be - we don't like to think of ourselves as "narrow minded". I just think you're exhibiting exactly the same behaviour - you're happy to listen to outsiders, and will tolerate highly polarising figures if you can find things that you like about them, but you have been completely turned off from conventional politics and aren't interested in moderation any more.

I think your views are actually very, very similar to, say, Nancy Pelosi's. You both believe, for example, that education should be free, that it is bad to abuse children, and that politics should be less polarised (correct me if I am misrepresenting you on any of those points). But you have completely understandable (if possibly misguided) objections to the effect that moderate politics has had on your life and the lives of people you know. So you're happy to look for the good in Lauren Southern while calling Pelosi a devil and a Nazi. I mean Lauren Southern actively tries to stop people from rescuing drowning people for goodness' sake.

I don't think anyone really thinks that every single thing that Southern or Molyneux or Rogan thinks is automatically wrong. It's just when you say you can look past their huge great flaws, but you don't look past the relatively tame flaws of people like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, that... well, it makes it seem like you're more tolerant of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia than you are of liberalism, progressivism, and capitalism.

Personally, when I think about British politics, I like that Bernard Jenkin supports strong action on climate change. I like that Crispin Blunt supports reforming drug laws, sentencing reform, and secularism. I like that Philip Davies supports action on improving the energy efficiency of homes. I even like that Nigel Farage supports electoral reform (Davies, Jenkin, and Blunt are all deeply conservative, Eurosceptic Conservative MPs - Davies is one of the four most conservative Tory MPs and the highest profile of the four by far). I would happily work with any of these people on the issues we have agreement on. But their downsides are huge, and I'm not going to overlook them just because they have a few upsides, or because I think Chris Williamson and Jared O'Mara and Laura Pidcock (the three most left-wing MPs) are worse.

I'm kind of rambling here, so to summarise and simplify:

1) Echo-chambers come in many forms - there is more than one aspect to politics.
2) Everyone thinks of themselves as an independent thinker. Nobody actually is.
3) If you go easier on far-right figures than you do on liberals and moderates, people will naturally conclude that you are more sympathetic towards the far-right than you are towards liberals and moderates.

Let me tell you something. I was standing up against racism long before you were born. I didn't stand idly by while white friends made racist comments. If I don't spend in ordinate amount of time bashing every racist thing Trump says or does, or jump on the bash the racists" bandwagon because, as I already said, it's only empowering them. As far as Molyneux is concerned, I already stated that I find him "boorish" and I don't really see the value in having the IQ inequality between races discussion.

Whether or not I have viewed much of Rubin's content when I posted the video -- I had watched about five of his of his videos, to be exact -- is completely irrelevant. The content is what IS relevant, which you actually have yet to do in this thread. I don't give a crap if he's not what he says he is. You went on a long diatribe that had absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand. Also irrelevant is whether I spend more time taking the left to task than the right. I don't feel the need to explain why. (I'm up to double digits on Rubin's videos, by the way. Some I enjoyed, some I didn't.)

If you think Nancy Pelosi's and Hillary Clinton's flaws are "tame"...well, I guess you have a favorable view of war mongering politicians who send other people's children off to die in wars for profit. Gosh! To reiterate yet again, we wouldn't have Trump if it weren't for these miserable corporate Dems and eight years of Obama doing virtually NOTHING to reverse the course of the previous administration. If I feel that the Dems are more dangerous than the Pubs, it's probably because they are. Their wolves in sheep's clothing. With the Republican's, there's truth in advertising. We know what they're about.

Sheesh! Another exchange and not one counterpoint from you. It's getting frustrating! I won't indulge you any further, I've done that far too much in this thread.

Last edited by VegetableMan on 26 Jul 2019, 7:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't know if this is a conciliatory note, it may work out that way or it may not, there's a very good argument to be made in the US that both parties have abandoned the working class. The republicans hardly bothered to have claimed them, the republicans did a great job of grabbing moral wedge issues through the 1980's and 90's. John Ralston Saul in his Voltaire's Bastards predicted an even more crass left in reaction to a crass right - and it seems like he was quite correct and it also seems like the democrats were able to drop the working class and do exactly what the republicans did which was substituting just about anything of real substance they offered with identity politics cheer-leading.

The main point here - there's a lot for people left of center to be furious with the establishment democrats about on left-of-center terms. Might some people claiming to be left of center and only criticizing the left simply be pretending to be? Sure. There have to be reasonable criteria for discerning between that and people who are criticizing their own party from the left.

In a way I take heart at this because I have to hope a similar impulse might drift rightward. It's needed.

I think Saul was correct. The differences between the two parties is almost undetectable. All the differences are manufactured to keep people on one team or another. If the Democrats even still slightly looked out for the working class in the early 90s, they most certainly had turned their back on them by the end of the Clinton years. By 2012, during Obama's reelection campaign, I had shed any delusions that the Dems were representing anyone but the corporate interest that backed them.

Whether or not some people are pretending to be "left of center" kind of doesn't really concern me, anymore. I just listen to a variety of voices and opinions and dig deeper into the topics to find out if there is any validity to them. I started with Chomsky some 15 years ago, resisted what he had to say at first, kept digging, and came out the other side more informed -- and quite depressed at what I'd learned.