Define PC and SJW!

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I remain unconvinced that you're a sceptic. Were I to apply the standard you're using for Sargon to yourself, on the basis of only reading your posts in this thread, I'd put you in the box marked "uses ad hominem riddled diatribes with no substance" and make a similar declaration regarding the futility of further inquiry. Presumably you would consider that to be an unfair snap judgement on my part.

You haven't provided an example of any of his opinions you disagree with, yet have mentioned his criticism of feminists and/or feminism twice. Is it reasonable for me conclude that your issue with him is his opposition to your in-group?

The lawyer wasted no time in getting to hypotheticals. Before that, he mentioned a common courtroom phenomenon which I learned as hometowned, as in "getting hometowned." You can't really win if you get hometowned, even if you win on the merits. If Canada has a national tribunal that plays by those rules, that's a huge problem. It seems plausible, but also not sustainable. I have a lot of questions about where they derive their authority. Who watches them? I can find out on my own.

I feel tempted to make a poll. Should we legislate Political Correctness? with options for whether you philosophically approve or disapprove of PC, but I'd like to settle on a definition.

I don't think a lot of people will approve of straight up Marxism-Leninism, so defining it that way might skew the results. Can we agree to use practical terms, rather than achieving complete agreement on the specific underlying philosophy and focus on a set of behaviors for wacko PC and wacko SJW? I don't think I ever got an answer from Damrok about specific criteria for "dupes," either.

He's got a wide array of topics - Jungian archetypes and evolution, Jung and alchemy, the Babylonian and Egyptian mysteries and their sociological meanings, the stories of the Bible and their sociological meanings, Nietzsche, Piaget, Dostoevsky, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag Archipelago. He seems to be an intellectual treasure trove if you agree with his ideas and if you don't agree with his ideas you'll rarely find those ideas phrased more clearly.

I didn't watch the video for long enough to hear his opinions, all I heard was him calling her names and saying he wanted to put her on a rocket and shoot her into the sun. The rest of what he was saying was specious nonsense. I don't care enough to go watch it again to take his "arguments" apart piece by piece, I don't find them interesting or worth my time. I can listen to people whom I disagree with--I enjoy Bill Mahr's show for example, and I often disagree with him. While I often disagree with Bill, I find his arguments to be more intelligent than someone like Sargon and also more entertaining. Sargon is neither informed nor entertaining, so I won't waste my time on him. If that causes you to disbelieve that I'm a skeptical person then so be it.

One more thing about Jordan Peterson. In statistics, one can take a frequency of occurrence and translate that into an expectation function. It makes intuitive sense, that one can expect to encounter cases around the mean.

In real life interactions, people really don't like that. No one likes encountering someone with inaccurate preconceptions about them, or even accurate preconceptions with which they disagree. Listening to a compilation of JP's greatest hits, I noticed that he repeatedly seemed to argue that it makes sense to apply statistical measures to individual people that one actually meets in real life. He kept saying men are like this, women are like that, as though everyone would automatically add "on average" for themselves, and he did not need to say it. It looks like a fundamental misunderstanding of people.

He seems to want to reclaim the word identity for psychology. Mmmm, don't think that will happen. I nearly missed that point, and started to wonder why the hostility? Identity as a measurable set of social functions has little relation to the identity of identity politics. If it did, it would have all the problems that he describes. Only an idiot would use that term the way he describes, but for crying out loud, most of the people who use the term identity politics criticize it and some of them exaggerate. He's arguing about a technical definition of polemical term. It's going nowhere.

In both cases, it took careful listening and a little internal editing to hear him out. The clips I watched had no Q&A. I should look for that later to get a better idea of how he interacts with people. I'd sign up for his lectures, but expect to roll my eyes in frustration over some careless generalization or other.

Do you have a link to said video?



The reason I'm dubious has nothing to do with your opinion, it has to do with the manner in which you've told me you formed it. You're not the first person I've encountered who seems to have a genuine loathing for the guy, but so far nobody has been able to provide me with a reasonable justification for that degree of dislike. You admit having little-to-no knowledge of his arguments, yet have formed an opinion that is uniform with that of other detractors of Sargon's who share an ideological bias.

There's a discussion to be had here, and one which is pertinent to the thread topic, but I'd far prefer to have my own supposition proven wrong and see you provide a good justification for your earlier vitriol towards Sargon.

There are far too many people to listen to, too much information to sort through, without giving time to the ones who just shriek insults into a camera and post it on Youtube. I have to be selective of where I get my information and who I listen to to challenge my ideas, because I don't know if you noticed but there is a lot of garbage and misinformation on the internet. I saw enough of this guy to know my time is better spent listening to others. I'm not going to point by point list my reasons for not further considering this Sargon's "arguments". Are you like his personal friend or something? You sound really invested in people taking time to listen to him, and I just haven't been presented with enough information to tell me he is worth listening to further than what I have already heard and seen from him. Like I said: life is short and there is so much out there on the internet, I have be to extremely selective of where I direct my attention.

I don't have links to the videos of Sargon's I looked at (this was a couple weeks ago and I can't be arsed to go through my history to find them) but I remember the name of the woman he was shrieking insults at in the form of an "argument" was Franchesca something-or-other, if that helps you find it. She was young and African American and it looked from her video he was "proving wrong" like she probably has her own channel.

I watch tons of Sargon's stuff. Maybe I can help you out with getting value out of him. First, make sure you're on his main channel (Sargon of Akkad). That's where he does the work that his Patreon people pay him to do. Though not everything on there is such a video (his Patreon payout works on a per video basis.) He does suffer considerably in a live setting, so it's best to stick to some video he's put together on his own time rather than his livestream channel or his "shitposting" channel or where he's a guest on someone else's channel. Like a fair bit ago he started trying out doing his "This Week in Stupid" series live instead of the usual format, and the quality dropped massively, it was unwatchable (for me) whereas a lot of his base liked it better that way. Thankfully, he switched back after about three videos. This Week in Stupid probably isn't for you by the sounds of what you're after, the name of it will probably answer that question for you. But I don't really know what you're looking for. But your best bet might be where he sits down and researches something and then tells of his findings. That's where his best work comes out, and the getting emotional is generally cut right down in those videos and he's mostly calm and serious. He has a few playlists, they might be of use to finding something. Right now he's reading up on Islamism, and has been for quite a while now.

I don't believe that's an accurate characterisation of Sargon's videos currently, but would have likely agreed with you 3 years ago.



One would be perfectly adequate. If he's so obviously unworthy of attention, surely that would require very little effort?



If the answer were "yes", what relevance would it have? Does the validity of an argument change based on the associations of the arguer?



I'm invested in encouraging people to think critically rather than allowing themselves to be spoon-fed by ideologues within their chosen echo-chambers. As such, I'm invested in people taking the time to listen to those whom they perceive to be their ideological opponents in accordance with the principle of charity.



That doesn't excuse abandonment of the principle of charity when discussing subjects or individuals about whom you are self-admittedly ignorant. It also reads as an excuse for preferring cognitive bias - which is where this tangent begins to intersect with the subject of the thread.

Agreed, adifferent name.

I also noticed from the comments made in that post that the first thing they did was observe everything except Sargon's actual words. More concerned with who they are speaking about (and what colour skin they have, their gender, their victimhood status), more concerned about his tone of voice, his method of delivery; more concerned about his actual ideology and gender and how that could play into it than his actual words.

His actual message is completely ignored to the point she couldn't even tell us the name of the woman he is criticising. It's Francesca Ramsey, btw. And if you took the time to check out her videos you can understand why she receives such criticism. All he was doing for the most part was reading her comments section to highlight why she is so criticised. It wasn't even that he was attacking her. kate just assumed that because he's speaking about a woman of colour and how bad her channel is attacked in a humorous fashion, he must be some sort of monster that must be ignored at all costs.

I'd like to add that placing a "victim" on a pedestal simply for their identity and not even caring about who they actually are to the point you don't know their name, or even bothering to check out their content, is IMO a demonstration of the farce that is identity politics and political correctness. Don't you think it's funny you care more about who Sargon is than who the victim is, kate?

It's important to consider the viewpoints of those you are opposed to as well as those who confirm your biases IMO. I can't stand Anita Sarkeesian who firmly fits into this line of discussion as she recently attacked Sargon at her own panel. That isn't up for debate btw because it's on film. Sargon said 0 words. He was sat in a chair. But you know, I still watched a few Fem Freq vids in the past. Can't say I agreed with -any- of the opinions the videos shared, but did agree with some of the observations about tropes. And at least I took the time to hear what they had to say. After all, if I'm so right in what I think, what do I stand to lose?

A lot of the really pungent opinions out there, anywhere, seem to be generated by the de-integration of information and ultimately of reality. It's part of why I'd agree with ADN that people who have a particularly short-fuse on certain topics need to face, listen to, and analyze what irks them. People pay psychologists hundreds of dollars sometimes to help them face spiders, heights, whatever else and this really falls under the same umbrella - ie. reintegrating and right-sizing information. It's not to say that there aren't ideas and ideologies so odious that the more you understand them the worse your opinion becomes of them, just that when you both hate an ideology and also have to plead ignorance to what the clearer voices behind that ideology you're also stuck with two problems: a) you're not equipped to have a constructive effect in moving people away from that ideology if it is as you perceive it and b) to only know one side of an argument one's stuck wondering deep down whether they're really on the right side, if they don't move to remedy that it becomes an article of something like religious faith. To that last point Jonathan Haidt's an excellent person to listen to also because he had a pretty vivid experience of coming out from under that and was impressed enough by the value of his experience to study tribalism and write 'The Righteous Mind'.

That methodology best defines the youtube-centric "Progressive" vs "Anti-SJW" "debate", with both sides over-represented by tribalists for whom mere association with their foe is sufficient justification to denigrate. It's a mutually-dependent circle jerk with only a minority of voices on either side of the divide capable of forming a cogent argument (which the rest invariably parrot whilst dog-piling and counter-dog-piling all over each other).

The only contention I have with your post is regarding kate's assumptions. Whilst I agree there's a clear (self-proclaimed) preconception about him, I'm open to the possibility that he's said something that justifies kate's apparent vehemence. As with any point raised that piques my interest, I'd like to explore what that is and, perhaps in doing so, challenge my own perceptions.

I'm concerned by the increasingly common idea that conflicts of opinion are somehow unhealthy, to the point where contentious words are being described by many self-identifying "Progressives" as "violent". Then there's the actual cases of people being scrutinised, raided and charged by police for speech considered "hateful" in Western nations. Not only is this antithetical to the common law principle of mens rea, it's completely incompatible with the Age of Enlightenment principles of freedom and the rights of the individual.

Those who argue the case for Political Correctness should familiarise themselves with the case of Markus Meechan, aka "Count Dankula" or "Nazi Pug Man". Were he to be found guilty, it would set a precedent which would make broadcasting Fawlty Towers on the internet (or a TV station) a "hate crime" in Britain. The very fact he's facing a trial is sufficient to support the argument that PC is a method by which liberty is suppressed, as pointed out by Darmok in the third post of this thread.

@techstep

That's an excellent summary of what motivates me to challenge those ideologies I encounter which embody blind faith instead of sceptical questioning. The same criticisms applied to many religious groups - magical thinking, faith not reason, cognitive bias, confirmation bias, statistical misrepresentation, original sin, dichotomous pure good vs pure evil mythos, etc - can be applied to all manner of tribes, not excluding those which operate primarily on social media (and don't get me started on Marxism). A person's identity is none of my concern, nor is it anyone but the individual's responsibility to grant their identity esteem.

I advocate self-actualisation, not self-suppression and - like virtually everyone else - would prefer my own ideology be dominant rather than a minority.

The key line in his video which appears to have broken the law were his repeated exhortations to "gas the Jews." I must have missed where they crossed that boundary in The Germans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Germans

Exhortations to "gas the Jews"?

The video in question is called "M8 Yer Dugs A Nazi", and will be the first hit on any decent search engine. If you can find a single example of an "exhortation" to "gas the Jews", by all means report back here and tell us the timestamp. The video is 2 minutes and 23 seconds long, so I doubt you'll have too much trouble finding it.

Or you can save yourself less than 3 minutes and accept that you're simply wrong. What you'll actually find is a man trolling his girlfriend by training her "cute" dog to act like "the least cute thing he could think of" and to respond to the question "do you want to gas the Jews?".

I'll save myself the three minutes. Exhortation was too strong a word. However the prosecution characterized it, it seems he broke the law, and the repetition of that phrase played a big part in it.

I can't say for sure if I agree with the law or not. The poster initially defended himself by saying he had like eight followers. He failed to take into account the context in which he made his terrible joke. As Scalzi put it, the failure mode of clever is a**hole. He could have trolled his gf in the privacy of his own home without consequences. Instead, he did it on YouTube. The context makes a difference.