Thread by @Katja_Thieme

Below thread are my notes in #PeterBoghossian's words (marked with em-dash, sans commentary) from listening to this interview. I'll add only some comments (in square brackets) for issues pertinent to my work. 1/

-- Cognitive liberty is better than left, right dichotomies. Traditional categories don't apply. Two things:

-- 1) The cognitively liberal speak clearly & bluntly about evidence, discuss, converse without negative implication for truth-seeking. No reputational cost attached. 2/

-- 2) Correspondence theory of truth, there are truth and facts. There are better ways to move towards truth. 3/

-- Religious conservatives and liberals/atheists align because they want to preserve Western civilization. If people want to take down statues, great, you go through a democratic process. It's how we approach those problems as opposed to mob violence and people in the streets. 4/

-- Great realignment is a bizarre phenom: anti-woke Christians & atheists against woke leftists & atheists. Cons vs. liberals, religious vs. atheists, right vs. left are not the right way to look at it.

-- More accurate to think in terms woke--it has taken over everything. 5/

-- Not only do they not accept criticism but every criticism is harassment: imagine you come to my house and drink motor oil for breakfast. If I ask why you're drinking motor oil, it's not harassing to ask why you're doing something so dangerous.

[Utterly bizarre example] 6/

-- If people think they have the truth, they don't seek it out. Our academic systems are ideological echo chambers.

-- Everyone who doesn't join is not only wrong, they are horrible people--bigots, homophobes--and you try to get rid of them.

[Homophobia is not horrible?]

7/

-- Any time an institution deviates from a search for the truth, it's ideology. I've never voted Republican but if a Republican says something that's true, I'll stand by them.

[Counterpoint: every system of thought is ideology.]

8/

-- There's a particular problem on the left with guilt by association. I will not be told whose show I can go on by people who won't even have me on their show.

[OK, Peter.]

9/

-- The behaviour is not to listen to the argument and look at the evidence but to start screaming. They think the truth is only what's in the orbit of CRT. It's heckler's veto. 10/

-- That's why current systems must fail. Current systems must fall.

[Says only argument & reason should change things--definitely not street protest--but also calls for "current systems must fall" style revolution. This shit doesn't add up. Unless. . .]

11/

-- Imagine the whole system is gearing up on phrenology. Awards given by bumps on your head. What if I criticize phrenology, ask where is the evidence, and they say no? Wouldn't a sane person say this is out of control? It's make-belief land. It's not harassment to say that. 12/

[#PeterBoghossian has this habit of, on the one hand, calling for evidence from others and then, in the same breath, supporting his own arguments not by any evidence but by bizarre analogies. Phrenology is fucking wrong. That's why we don't use it.]

13/

-- The problem is they say that even evidence is a product of white people. Every conceivable way we have of solving problems has been thrown out. Now people rip down statues, assault police, and defecate in the middle of the street, which I actually saw in Portland. 14/

-- Let's use reason & evidence to make people's lives better. We know that science works and that it works when you make objective claims about reality. That doesn't disappear when those are about race, gender, sexual orientation.

[Where's YOUR science, Peter?]

15/

-- In Hungary, Victor Orbán has successfully defunded a lot of these departments. I think he should have done that.

[H.O.L.Y.F.U.C.K.]

-- We need to study race, gender, sexual orientation, but we need to not make stuff up. 16/

-- We need to do peer-reviewed study, we need to do double-blinds.

[Please, show us the evidence that researchers in Hungary didn't publish peer-reviewed work, Peterboy.]

17/

-- Debra Soh and Abigail Shrier's books on gender and transition are fantastic for that.

[Neither is peer-reviewed or scientific research, my dear Peter.]

-- The correct response is let's take a look at that evidence.

[Re: Soh and Shrier--people have done that, you know.]

18/

[He didn't mean we should scrutinize Soh and Shrier and their use of evidence, just to make that clear. Of course that's not what he meant. I'm just being clever. I'm being clever, but with *actual* examples. In stark contrast to Peterdreamer here.]

19/

-- I see no other alternative. The correct response is let's take a look at the evidence. But, oh, well, how convenient, I don't value evidence in the formation of my beliefs. OK then, what do you value? Personal testimony; lived experience.

20/

[Beautiful to watch him make up his dream imagined dialogue. We don't call this evidence, Peterbunny.]

21/

-- How do we adjudicate between the lived experiences of two people? Well, you go with the one with the most oppression variables. So how do we adjudicate between those two people? Well, you're using reason again, you've microaggressed me.

[LOL.]

22/

-- If a law said there should be half women on boards, people would always be saying in the back of their mind, is that person there because of merit or because they fulfilled a quota?

-- There will be a crisis of legitimacy. What about the women who are actually qualified? 23/

-- It's possible to correct this by appropriate defunding measures.

-- "We can't just be funding people who are playing in make-belief land cranking out information to inform public policy that's completely divorced from reality." . . .

24/

-- "It's a recipe for cultural suicide."

[Well, well, well. Isn't that an interesting claim. "Cultural suicide," my my. Petercrusader hasn't brought much evidence, here or elsewhere, that proves his view of things. But he wants defunding measures. A policy, if you will.]

25/

-- We don't need to make new stuff up to solve these problems. The homeless problem, who is helping these folks?

-- All of the solutions, not a single one runs along racial lines. There's simply no reason for that to be the case.

26/

-- The whole game has been rigged to prevent any solution.

-- There are still "vestiges of racism" that we need to address those. But the way to address those problems is not by critical race theory. Not through segregation.

27/

-- "What do you do if you're from the Midwest or what have you and your kid comes home and you've never talked about race or anything and all of sudden your son or daughter is screaming at you about the patriarchy and tells you you're a racist Nazi pig."

[👀👀👀]

28/

-- We need to defund programs. We need to develop a list of the universities who push this madness, and then those are the institutions we ought to talk about defunding.

-- We build new institutions. Stephen Blackwood has proposed Ralston College.

29/

-- It's not cancel culture. You can produce all the woke material you want. Without funding. That's not cancelling.

-- You can publish all the articles about fat studies you want. Without government funding. And if you get students without funding, great, that's fantastic. 30/

-- Good for you. Keep going. Keep driving society into a cesspool.

-- You have a small group of lunatics pushing an agenda that's completely deranged and nobody is standing up to these people. Show up. The problem is, nobody goes. 31/

-- "It doesn't matter if someone is on the right or left, we have a very serious cultural pollution....The plastic that's coming in are the policy decisions that are drowning us all in madness. They're making us identify each other on the basis of immutable characteristics." 32/

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