Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 516513)

Agreed.



To feed his audience what it wants to hear. He's a fabulous brand architect. He gets a 120 IQ set of readers, plays to their sympathies and views, and leaves them thinking they're in the 130-140 range. He pushes well crafted tripe.

Slate's similar. They're both the high end of the HuffPo Continuum.



We're never going to agree on this. Suffice it to say, I hold a 100% opposed view. Let's leave it at that.

Originally Posted by LessinSF (Post 516514)

I was pretty sure that Mueller would not be trial counsel against Manafort, but hadn't seen anything on point, but I just found this:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...rial-who-s-who

Originally Posted by LessinSF (Post 516516)

Even better - live blogging. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...rosecutionopen

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 516513)

To feed his audience what it wants to hear. He's a fabulous brand architect. He gets a 120 IQ set of readers, plays to their sympathies and views, and leaves them thinking they're in the 130-140 range. He pushes well crafted tripe.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 516506)

Klein is absolutely being pro-censorship. He's accusing Harris of failing to view a scientific argument in necessary social context - to work to soften a debate in advance. He's saying Harris is acting dangerously.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 516519)

I have the technological means to censor you, by modifying or deleting your posts. Instead, I am exposing that you are full of shit

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 516512)

I neglected to respond to this.

I can't speak for Harris, but I find Klein particularly offensive because Vox is a stridently biased website that works assiduously to hide its bias and present itself as a neutral arbiter. And arbiter isn't chosen there for lack of a better pronoun. Vox, and Klein particularly, offer themselves as authorities. The writing always holds the undercurrent, "We're the enlightened. We've the last word."

Except the site sucks. It's as predictable as Fox and only differs in extent of effort to cover up its slip. It'll almost always offer some lengthy, seemingly thoughtful assessment of an issue ending with the accepted liberal doctrinaire view.

Charles Murray is a hack. He has an agenda and he dressed it up with science. Much of what he posits can be debunked with science. Klein is a hack. He has an agenda. Much of what he posits can be debunked with economics/political science/basic reasoning.

Except they differ in one regard that makes Klein far more dangerous than Murray. Klein deems himself (particularly in that argument with Harris) a worthy judge of what's within and what's outside the spheres of deviancy. I'm sympathetic to people doing this (I love William Henry's In Defense of Elitism). Sometimes, someone simply has to stand up and say, "Nope. You can't argue flat earth theories. You're wasting our time." Klein, however, is not worthy to shine Henry's shoes. Klein's a predictable and quite dull writer who'll 90% of the time default to an accepted liberal narrative. He has no business judging how or whether the views of Murray or Harris should be considered.

Hearing Klein lecture Harris on how Harris ought to reason (to fit Klein's sensitivities) is mind-bending. Here's a blogger telling a neuroscientist with a staggering resume that he ought to temper his approaches to suit the sensibilities of the blogger's audience. He's completely confused as to who is the elite in the room.

I think this stems from confusion that to hold an empathetic viewpoint somehow makes one more enlightened, "better" than the non-empathetic. Klein and his ilk, who hold views similar to a lot of people here, confuse tolerance and a desire to see fairness as superior, perhaps even smarter, views. That's comforting, of course. But it's also untrue. To desire to help people, as opposed to someone like Charles Murray, does not render one more intelligent or enlightened. It makes one a nicer, kinder person. But it's not proof of some broader intellect that ought to give a blogger gravitas to tell a neuroscientist how he ought to approach scientific matters.

This is why Klein irks me. This is why I'll take the other side of a coin here all the time. Charles Murrays are easy to debunk. Murray's a crank howling into the wind. The Ezra Kleins of the world are officious consensus builders. They have a much more pernicious effect - attempting with some success to craft a narrative of what's acceptable commentary and what's not. These people have no business telling a serious thinker like Harris how or what to think. They are charlatans selling the feel good angle to an often Pavlovian audience, and they should be viewed with intense skepticism at every turn.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 516521)

Did you read my second to last post?

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall (Post 516522)

https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/IO...in=nytimes.com

Article sums up discussion (we're all tired of here*) of tech companies, their cafeterias, and efforts attempting to get them to interact with actual people.

TM

*I know, I know.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 516523)

This sort of thing exposes your sometime conservative sympathies. Murray and Klein are similar but Klein is the more dangerous. Klein doesn't give the proper deference to Harris. Klein defaults to a liberal narrative. Really?

Murray spends his career promoting the idea that blacks are genetically inferior and that the government should not try to help them, and Harris wants to take him seriously, but Klein is the dangerous one with a pernicious effect. If you really think that, that's too bad.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 516525)

There's a transcript. Quote what Klein says that is pro-censorship. Just quote it.



Just quote it.

You can't, because you're mischaracterizing him.



That's not a word I think I used. If you're going to accuse me of lying, you should be a little more careful about what I said. I think I said you and Harris are defending Murray. Here's Harris:



You have described Murray as a hack. Harris is bending over backwards to avoid acknowledging that Murray is a hack, and is striving to pretend there is something worthwhile in the idea that blacks are genetically less intelligent than other people. How did I lie?



You are defending Harris, and Harris is defending Murray.



I think you don't know what that word means.

Go ahead, quote where Klein is pro censorship. Just quote him.



None of this has anything to do with what Klein said, which is that experts in their fields have rejected Murray's work. As you said, Murray is a hack, not an academic. He puts out work with an academic veneer to try to influence politics. Pointing that out is not censorship.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 516528)

To tell someone how he may examine something, and that he must apply certain sensitivities where he does, is censoring him. Klein is not merely rejecting Murray. He states numerous times that he believes Harris must treat Murray, or any other controversial theorist, a certain way.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 516527)

Ah, yes, now you paint me out as admiring hierarchies. Offering another liberal bromide.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 516527)

Murray can debunked on the science. He’s weak in this regard.