My first red pill was watching white “feminists” in Michigan marching while wearing hijabs, proclaiming them “symbols of female empowerment.” I knew in my guts i couldn’t get behind that. I knew I was looking at empty shells of human beings. I hope women in the Middle East can forgive us for that shit.
As a woman I knew right away that’s not true and when they say the famous argument that: “women are paid less” they leave out the fact that those women are less educated and/or have less experience!
@@arandomperson420 It's not even that. The biggest difference is that they're comparing men and women at all jobs they Do. Just average pay for all full time male work and all full time female work. The "for the same job!" part they tack on at the end is an absolute lie.
it's not about being racist, its about understanding racial differences as an explanation for outcome inequality and rejecting affermative action and and racial and gnender quotas
logical fruit Pinker is actually one of the more down to earth people in academia. He makes a good point here, but it's too late to reverse the trends that dominate the universities. It's been 80 since Gramsci, almost 50 years since Marcuse. Culminating in the most unhinged SJW's we see today, Cultural Marxism ended up being too successful for it's own good and will indeed lead to red-pilling of many across the political spectrum.
@You Can't Debate Me Dumbass > That certainly doesn't sound like Swedish people are going extinct Pew recently published some population projections for Europe. They talk about religion (Islam) rather than races, but it's practically the same thing as their own article shows that Islam grows due to birth rates and migration. Almost none of Islam's growth is due to conversion. They put Sweden up as 8.1% Muslim, which is already a lot higher than most European countries (UK: 6.3, Germany: 6.1, France: 8.8). The US has less than 1% Muslims. Their projections are for 2050 and consider three different scenarios: Zero additional migration, a "medium" amount of migration and a "high" amount of migration. The projected Muslim population in Sweden is then: 11.1% with zero migration, 20.5% with medium migration, and 30.6% with high migration. High birth rates and net migration will eventually lead to ethnic Swedes becoming a minority in their own country, although it will take a few generations. > People in the alt-right seem to be manipulated easily and fail to to see past their own biases. You can say that about pretty much every group (and individual) out there, even and maybe especially academics.
"If the Muslim population is 30.6% and the rest of the other minorities stay at 12%, then this leaves the majority at 57.4%. That would be slightly under what the white population in the US is (~60%). They would still be a majority, the native Swedes." Do you even read what you write? If Sweden is 30.6% Muslim in 2050, that means the percentage is over six and a half times as much as it was in 2010, just 40 years before. Why would you tell yourself it would stop increasing then? Do you expect anyone else to believe that? At that average rate Sweden would be a Muslim majority country by 2080, going from 4.6% to more than 50% in one lifetime. That's ignoring that it would more likely be an exponential increase than linear.
So what? The same argument could be made for Blacks against Whites. DO you think Asians should pay less tax too? I mean, given their kids have LESS access to public resources due to racist discrimination by their so-called publically funded servants. If Asians dominate Universities, then get rid of the regulatory-capture that make Universities into rent-seekers. Eliminate State enforced licensing (which will indeed favor Asians) and return to a free-market.
@@jamesline5103 My family is from a very poor part of singapore, we were very very poor until my father (who is white) got a job working as a mechanic for an airline and left the family to work, I was on my own from 15 years old and had no financial help other than rent living in the UK, so when universities descriminate against asians, they push people like myself away based on nothing other than race, it should be done on an individual basis, not a group one, otherwise its just racism under a different name.
Political correctness first made me read Sam Harris' work in Islam. I had read his work on the "mind" and consciousness and knew that he wasn't bigotted so I knew the leftist narrative that he hates Muslims was wrong. And when I read his book, sure enough, he doesn't hate Muslims, he is just concerned that Islam has some backward ideas that some Muslims WILL follow; and that most Muslims deny that because THEY dont follow the backward part of Islam. Then it was Peterson; they said he was a nazi who hated gays and trans; did some research, that was complete nonsense, he is just against ideological politics being force into everyones lives via law. Then it was Shapiro, he is the nazi alt righter who thinks trans people dont have the right to exist. And again, nonsense, he says you can be trans if you want, just dont force him to call you by a specific gender by law. Everytime the left tries to unfairly malign someone, it strengthens right wing thinking.
Next, go listen to race realists like JF Gariepy or Black Pigeon Speaks and realize how horribly you've been kept in the dark and lied to regarding race. After that, check out actual alt-right speakers like Richard Spencer especially regarding things like alt-right rallies, antifa, Charlottesville and whether or not you agree with their message (personally, I don't) you'll understand the level to which our media will stoop in order to paint a narrative and enforce physical violence on views they don't like.
Political correctness is a fantasy. It doesn't exist apart from in the minds of people who maintain ideas that have been rendered unpopular by open debate focusing on the facts. It's literally right wing butthurt having lost the culture war that they started. Pathetic, really.
What he said was that there was no equivalent to the European wars of religion, which is accurate. The ottoman empire allowed its shia population to live without forcibly converting them. The austrian empire waged the 30 years war to convert germany to Catholicism.
@Crosshair The reformation was an exceptionally bloody war for its time and it changed the way religion worked in the state and the role it had in peoples' lives forever. Islam has never gone through an equivalent event, the closest thing to it was probably the Sunni/Shia split and that was more of an inheritance war than a religious war.
1. More people converted to islam through trade than through conquest. this is how the religion spread to Indonesia and west Africa. 2. Muslims didn't manage and control the slave trade to the new world, the dutch and British did. Thats just basic historical fact. 3. Slavery existed in the European colonial possessions well into the 1920's. 4. the ottomans did oppress Christians when the empire was in a state of collapse, but during the height of the empire they were vastly more tolerant than there European counter parts. When Spain expelled the jews, the turks took them in.
I guess you guys mix up things documented by western historians in Europe and less documented and less well-known history elsewhere. Just because we do not teach about ethnic cleansings in wars outside of Europe, it does not mean that that did not happen. History has unbelievably brutal things that can be discovered. And you ignore the political implications of the reformation. It is not purely religious. A great innovation of Islam is that it is more efficient to spread your dominance by not hunting after all others which takes a lot of effort and time, but rather let strict laws and practices against minority beliefs do their job over time. Very brilliant, but not a humanist motivation. @volingrad: you obviously did not study the Islamic slave trade in Africa and Islamic slavers hunting ships in the meditereanian sea for centuries if not 1000 years.
To enlighten you about reformation history. It happened in the holy roman empire of German nations which was lead by an emperor who was crowned by the pope. So, reformation threatening the foundations and practises of the boss of the emperor (probably Austrian) is not a purely religious thing, but heavy politics.
Islam never had religious wars? Um, which Islam is it you are discussing there Steve? How much of Europe was conquered by Islam? Do you not know who Charles Martel was?
Yeah he was WAY off on that one. The war between Islam and Hindu India made the Crusades look like a circus sideshow...and don't even get started on the Mongol-Muslim conflicts
The James Damore debacle at Google is when I stopped listening to the social justice group. That was such a clear example of a witch hunt, and the Covington Kids debacle only reinforced my decision.
Islam not waging religious wars in the past history? Really Pinker? You might want read a history book some time.... Or maybe you have, and you are just being deliberately dishonest?
the fact that capitalist countries tend to have a social saftey net doesn't mean that that social saftey net has to be coercively provided by a centralized government. It could instead be voluntarily provided by private charities, which are generally more efficient with their funding becasue they know they can't just get more if they say they need it.
Private chairites are not necessarily for profit. There are plenty non-profit private chairities, like churches. And it's up to the donor to determine which ones he want's to give to. You don't get that choice with the government. they take your money and you don't get to decide what they do with it. Even in a democracy it's just you electing one person who ends up deciding for you. Only 30% of the money the government spends on poverty ends up going to the people who need it. ruclips.net/video/YsRH3xHJi1M/видео.html
It's just a natural side affect of being successful the more you have to spare the more you will want to help others. That's why the upper middle class is so into "democratic socialism" which is really just successful capitalism.
Acendiat Media Gee, and here I was thinking that they do it for the tax deduction and the political and institutional power, prestige and influence that comes from being a major donor... Thanks for opening my eyes!
1. It is hard to tell exactly what would happen without those policies. Or even with only some of them. I would be awefully surprised if the world complied politely with a libertarian narrative. 2. You take for GRANTED that the private initiative would be more efficient. Did you know we actually have statistical tools to measure technical efficiency? Here is a shocking fact: state funded hospitals in Quebec are about 27% more efficient than private hospitals in California. The main reason is that the private hospitals seem to compete over availability, hence they always have a lot of empty rooms -- and that is wasteful in the economic sense. 3. Nothing is preventing you or anyone from trying to build private organizations to make your case through examples. However, as an economist, I feel compelled to warn you that markets do not always work correctly, just as governments. 4. And it is true that the comparison he makes doesn't exclude the possibility of prefering fewer government programs. He merely pointed out that the observed difference was a bad proxy for the libertarian heaven advocated on the far right.
Pinker is correct that many of the facts such as the differences between men and women do not advocate discrimination or any other extreme action. However, they do bring one to realise that the policies, laws and institutions built up around the denial of these controversial facts must be abolished. That itself is a radical position that is verboten in public discourse. Also, leave Ancaps alone. They are the least dangerous extremists in America and not part of the Alt-Right ffs.
+rwatertree: he picked the safe target (women) and made it stand in for the hard one (race). Though, he did touch racial crime, didn't he. What did he say about it? "It might not always be so?" Yeah that's not much comfort. It might, also, in fact always be so, like it is in other black areas of the world.
The alt right is concerning in many ways, least of all their desire to make to Western societies into ethnostates or segregated ones. Many alt righters with whom I've spoken are third positionists (i.e. various types of fascists or national socialists) which at least speaks to economic and political illiteracy.
rwatertree I find your use of the term "ethno state" charming. All states and societies are already based on ethnicity unofficially. The Alt Right simply rejects Multiculturalism, which is a new and untested political theory. Ancaps are ridiculous in that they don't understand that capitalism , which we never had, simply buys out any government and has it serve the wealthy. But that's neither here nor there as we have a half state, half corporate system. Which isn't capitalism.
WalkerKlondike >Harvard professor The man is trying to see his life long ideological enemy in a new light, trying to overcome cognitive dissonance. Because the level of cognitive dissonance on campuses(and leftist circles) is so great it can no longer be ignored. What he is doing is very hard to do, its mostly wrong, but it is taking steps in the right direction.
He mentioned it at the beginning. To boil it down: Political Correctness is causing facts not to be addressed on college campuses. The alt-right is a place where these facts are addressed, but not good manner by drawing conclusions that don't necessarily follow.
Jaigarful how do the conclusions of anarcho-capitalism not follow facts? And, the Alt-Right is largely Socialist, anti-free market. The two, Anarcho-Capitalism and the Alt-Right, have nothing to do with each other and are in fact independently logically consistent positions. (Someone may correct me on the Logical consistency of the Alt-Right) That Pinker characterizes the two as related or somehow internally inconsistent, suggests that he doesn't actually understand them in the first place.
3:55 - 4:02 No one suggests they do. It's never a conflict involving an argument that we should. It is a conflict involving the accusation that discrimination is responsible for the differences. The idea that there are not naturally any differences arises logically when reasoning from the accepted fact that the accusation is true. 7:05 - 7:19 Again, the facts don't lead anyone to those conclusions! The problem is the facts can not be discussed without emotional accusations of racism etc being levied in lieu of thoughtful consideration and discussion. That is why Trump won. We got sick of not being able to have a discussion for all the virtue signaling based on forgone conclusions.
It confused me as well, but I think it works this way: He presents sexism and racism as the alt-right response to the stats about men and women, and correspondingly, AnCap and AnLib are presented as alt-right response to capitalist societies generally being better than communist ones
@@balvsmalvs5425 lol couldn't think of a better word than "un-smart?". Also wtf man, it's just a simple question. It sounded like he was saying anarcho libertarianism is inherently racist/sexist. But in reality he was talking about how accepting a set a of facts doesn't have to make us a sexist, racist, OR anarcho libertarian. Which I'm guessing he associates with the right wing libertarian movement in America. So he really wasn't suggesting a connection between the concepts. So actually I'm not "unsmart" you're just being a snarky arrogant jerk for literally no reason.
@@Paradox-dy3ve If I said I used that word on purpose, would your worldview get blown to bits? "Which I'm guessing he associates with the right wing libertarian movement in America." You are truly one of the un-smartest folks I've read in a long, looong time. Truly. I hope that word hasn't triggered you into other un-smartness.
The critique of anarcho-capitalism as the desire to remove regulations and social safety nets is unwarranted. Regulations and social support systems are unanimously seen as beneficial to libertarian thinkers from Molinari to Spooner to Rothbard to Molyneux to Woods, the only thing wrong with the current system is the widespread use of violence perceived as legitimate under the territorial monopoly of a non-voluntary government body. This is not an extreme position objectively, merely having the appearance of extremity due to the cultural context where it is common for people to be put into cages where there is a chance they will be uncared for if they are raped daily for the rest of their life for trading pieces of paper for pieces of plants to consenting adults. Nonaggression is not extreme morally, it is the Golden Rule of civilization.
Tommy Boyle and the Party of One long winded way of saying you don’t think governments should be allowed to tax people and have a police force. Just like how communism can never be properly implemented because the ideal communistic society can only be achieved in a perfect world where human ambition and lust for power doesn’t exist, anarcho-capitalism can never be achieved people will always find ways to take advantage of each other. It might work in theory, but its implementation in the real world would likely be just as disastrous as the failure of communism in China and the Soviet Union.
Aliensinnoh Some take that view and most ancaps are of a skeptical bent anyways so nobody is advocating for anarchy or nothing in the next two years. The proper approach towards and anarcho-capitalist society is by sensibly reducing the size of government till the point where any evil might actually be necessary if such a point exists. Saying that anarcho-capitalism will never exist is a question that only exists ideally currently is fair since a complete elimination of government tomorrow might make things terrible and so from a consequentialist worldview that warrants some suspicion of principle so the proper course is balancing the strict deontology of having principles with the consequentialism of pragmatism, but to say it is an irrational goal is different.
I dont know any Anarcho-Capitalists that are opposed to safety nets and regulated markets. Sounds like the same problem of coming to extreme and hasty conclusions when hearing a new truth his entire argument was predicated on. You absolutely can have those things through voluntary and peaceful means.
The main problem with American politics is many people cannot distinguish political correctness and political awareness To be aware is the real point people need to achieve .
I usually like Pinker. But everything he said in this talk was sooo caricatural. It is like the only alternatives are: either you are a leftist or you are a bigot -- even if you are a bigot who happens to know his facts. He makes it looks like the mission of any sensible person would be to prevent good, but naive, people to be corrupted by right-wing influence. Come on! As the a french president once answered to a leftist adversary in the 60s : "you don't have the monopoly of good intentions." If anything else, in these last decades, the Left seems to have degenerated into a cult blindly followed by people with no qualms about doing actual evil in exchange for the promisse of a future, vague and questionable good. Actually, I feel it is my moral duty to denounce the violence in the modern progressives methods; to denounce the totalitarian tendencies of leftist political goals; to have the courage to hold a stand against diffamation and docxing campaigns in order to denounce racism, sexism and bigotry when it comes disguised as social justice. I understand he is probably talking at an University. Therefore he must adjust his speech to the public. However, it seems to me that he felt himself victim to the political correction he was criticising...
Pollen, this guy does understand what Pinker said. Pinker straw manned all the way through the speech because he wanted to take the PC stance that everything the right does is bigoted. Just one example: he said that there is a higher rate of criminality among blacks and the alt-right does something "racist" with this information. What they actually do is not assume every traffic stop of a black man must be motivated by racism, or that the number of black prisoners is somehow indicative of a systematically racist justice system. It is the left who takes the racist view, blaming whites' "systemic racism" for all problems faced by blacks because they ignore the facts Pinker spoke of, but he can't say that to a bunch of Harvard Liberals, can he?
POLLEN, thanks for the word "Cockamamie". I didn't know it. Thanks to you I leaned something today. By the way, what book would you suggest? (Not a big one, please: I'm still learning English). On a different note, you are right: I shouldn't have talked about the left. It was partisan of me. I should have limited my scope to political correctness. I am sorry if I offended.
EMMA, thanks for the solidarity. And I think you're right: he seems hesitant throughout the talk. It looks like he is taking extra care about his choice of words. However, I am still bothered by the content: all the contextualising effort he talks about seems to be aimed only in avoiding any interpretation that would not be politically correct. Maybe it is just me, but I believe facts just don't care about political correctness. Or am I too naive to believe that not being (primerily) concerned with political correctness does not automatically entails one is a bigot? In his defense, in the beginning, he mentioned something that might have happened in the campus that seems to be an example of a toxic consequences of PC. (The guy by his side seems a little upset about it: he anxiously starts to scribe on his notes). This is Pinker putting things in context to show that PC can also have bad consequences. His overall point is also very valid: people are prisoners of the echo chambers of their own criation. Thus, they are not equipped to process neither facts nor divergent interpretations. And this is causing a great deal of pointless conflict. (Universities seem to behave like big institutional echo chambers though. Which justify his care about his choice of words - I know I wouldn't want to be at odds with dozens of enraged Havard students: they are too competent to not believe they are always brilliantly right about everything...).
Yet he makes crazy hasty generalizations and mis-characterizations of other moral frameworks than his own statetheist ones, which are inherently based in violence and perpetual extortion of everyone. He is bright, but lacks some fundamental understanding of economics and distributed systems, and from his biases and lacking logic rigor he therefore ends up advocating for violent and enslaving solutions for solving complex social issues, and belittle those who do not accept theft and violence as the basis for how we deal with problems in society.
I agree with 90% of his positions. However I'd dispute two of his ideas. Namely that anarchocapitalism is not a viable or tenable option and that islamic history had a golden period in its history that should be reverred. It did have a decent period in its history when Baghdad was its capital but most of its great scholars were non Muslims. In other words, it did well in spite of Islam and when Islam was taken much more seriously by taking Al Ghazhali's ideas very seriously, it was destroyed. And it did relatively well doesn't mean it should be reverred or that it was better than Christendom. Christendom though was intolerant and that was unfortunate.
All Abrahamic religions are rather intolerant and the source of rather uncompromising beliefs, so I really don't see why Christianity should get the shit end while Muslims get the praise. In any case, I suspect the whole thing came from people claiming Christianity was the best, so people had a counter-reaction claiming Christianity wasn't as good, so people are having a counter-reaction and so on. What's interesting is that anything positive that happened in Europe isn't attributed to religion, while anything that happened during the 'Islamic' golden age is attributed to Islam.
ivanlagrossemoule I'm not sure the 'Islamic golden age' is necessarily attributed to the religion itself. I only ever hear it used in the context of when someone claims it is a fundamentally backwards religion (which let's face it, is kinda true for all religions) and people counteract that with the fact they did have an enlightened era that's sadly disintegrated. I guess the point I'm trying to make is is that many people claim Islam is incompatible with modernity which isn't necessarily true, and like Christianity, just needs a bit of watering down to allow progress to flourish as history has shown was possible once before
Funny you say this, as I was trying to explain pretty much that to someone in another thread on another video. People just can't have nuanced and complex opinions, it's either Islam is only bad, or Islam is only good.
Intolerance by Christians is societal, the fundamental tenant is forgiveness. Intolerance by Muslims is doctrine, the fundamental tenant is submission. Can humans be trusted to do God's work? Search for new testament equivalents to taqiyya, tawriya, kitman. If you have some free time make sense of Islam and slavery. When Jesus died his disciples spread his word. When Mohammed died a power struggle ensued that remains today.
@@cowboybob7093 Thank you Bob, Most westerners have opinions on this Religion without any real knowledge. For instance the role of abrogation in interpretation and implementation of the Quran text. If the prophet said or did anything anything at a later date that conflicts with an earlier teaching, the earlier teaching is null and void. It is unfortunately generally agreed that the peaceful get along passages in the book were from a early time when Islam was a minority and so don't apply. That (along with a real fear of reprisal) is why you hear crickets from so much of this Religions leadership on the violence. Bottom line is if you wanted to be just like Jesus you would wander around with your disciples healing people and saying things like "put away your sword, those that live by the sword will die by the sword". If you want to be just like Mohamed you would take that sword and with your army conquer other nations forcing them to "submit" to Islam or die.
lol "the majority of domestic terrorism in this country is committed by right wing extremist groups not by Islamic groups" what a pathetic failure of reasoning. Per capita, Muslims in the United States are incredibly over-represented among terrorist attacks even though there's just a tiny tiny minority. You're better than this Steve.
Xander Patten I noticed that too. I was thinking really is this bullshit argument by a supposedly brilliant professor all he has? Any freshman high schooler could easily destroy that pathetic argument.
Xander Patten so it must be that the liberal Elite, fully knowing their facts lead to undeniable and indisputable truths, have no choice but to cover up those facts rather than let them be talked about. Because letting them be understood will lead any reasonably intelligent person to an uncomfortable truth. (Eg Islam sucks. Race realism, etc)
It's not as if you care about the right wing terrorism in proportion to the per capita rate, it doesn't fit your narrative. Terrorism itself is extremely low on the list of problems if you care about per capita statistics, outside of the scare and frenzy it's an irrelevant number of lives compared to other sources of death, but most people don't view the world in statistics, they see the symbolic invader coming to rape and pillage and that's the perfect narrative, which is why so many of you are obsessed.
Ticallion, he stated that fact as if it's relevant to and somehow in conflict with the idea Muslims do more domestic terrorism per capita; and that's both invalid and factually incorrect.
It's like I'm scrolling down an IQ ladder. Listening to an intelligent view on political correctness, and as I scroll down to the comments section intelligence drops exponentially.
The transcript of what he just said in a five minute video is 43 pages long you dumb dick. A two line comment may actually contain a brilliant argument if you know what the person is trying to say but doesn’t have the patience to type into what would become a wall of text no one would read. Also you read comments in bad faith so what’s otherwise taken for granted becomes an opening for your counter argument.
doubt he could say these things nowadays without getting blacklisted by Harvard and other institutions. Sad state of affairs when rationality is no longer acceptable.
Not sure about many of his statistics, but most of his conclusions are good. I will say, that the notion of doing away with government safety nets isn't an extreme notion. Depending on who's statistics you use, >50% of the nation is on some sort of government handout (including corporations.) Very few people actually need some form of assistance, the rest just have excuses. Voluntary giving to charities can easily support those who absolutely need the help. Forcing the population into mandatory altruism is just theft. Especially when you realize that the majority of the allocated tax money doesn't even go to those who need the help. Worse is the simple fact that government safety nets only promote adding more people into their programs. People need incentives to get out of social programs, not stay in them.
sorry but there is absolutely no proof that voluntary charity would solve these problems. You need to finely tune wellfare systems so that its not just free money. The money they get from wellfare isnt good enough to justify not working in most cases
So, we should remove all state-run social-safety-nets and allow charities to take their place? Charities are notoriously bad at using their money for their indented purpose. Allowing unregulated capitalist charities to fill the "gap in the market" would result in charities that exclusively take advantage of people who donate to them.
Charities also know that some people mostly need a kick in the butt. However, if a government program was to take away someone's entitlements and kick them in the butt, there would be hell to pay.
Notice that he didn't roll back over the communist vs capitalist issue... It's because capitalism is better over all. Even Russia eventually got Mcdonalds... So you can have the two things intermingle, but no one in their right mind thinks the government taking controll of business assets is a good idea. When you're young you should follow your heart and be a socialist, but when you become an adult, and learn about the world, the alternative is impossible to ignore with the weight of evidence that supports capitalism. It's like he said, North or South Korea?
he falsely characterizes Islam as better and more enlightened because it had no inquisition, but the inquisition was a single short event, islam has had non stop genocide since the day it was founded and non stop intolerance of blasphemy since day one. the Islamic version of the inquisition is just every day in islam
John Locke are you not aware of the Islamic Golden Age??? Do you not know why most of our algebraic terms are in Arabic? Or why most of the stars in the sky have Arabic names??? There's so many references to the Arabic language because they were once a great prosperous and diverse group of intellectuals. When Islam was ruled by various caliphates, where science and economic development and cultural works flourished!!! Educate yourself people! You are showing your ignorance bruuhhhh
fabian padilla This 'period of enlightenment' came after they were fat with the riches from conquering and butchering the nations around them by the sword. Islam is anti-science - it states that the words of Mohammed are the end of knowledge.
Vocaloides no.......dude that bad shit came AFTER the enlightenment.......look I agree with you that Islam is fucked up....but Google this shit man!! Every time you reply I have to correct some shit you said lol and I agree with you about Islam.....
I liken the progressive left to a street gang, at least in hierarchy. For those unfamiliar, street gangs deal drugs by having a low level gang member stand on a street corner. This is obviously a task with a high likelihood of being caught by police, so the gang puts layers of intermediaries between the street member and the boss, so when the street member is invariably caught, there is nothing to give the police. As gang members rise within the gang hierarchy, they not only become privy to the gang’s inner workings, but also gain more protection. Naturally, we might wonder what it is that draws a low level gang member to risk so much to enrich the gang boss while they shoulder little of the burden. The ‘street members’ of the left are those you meet in protests, antifa, and so on. They don’t really understand their gang’s inner workings, its goals, or its methods. In this sense, I can’t really hate these leftists. They are being used for the high-level leftists’ goals.
Things do change over time, true. Things are getting harder in the black community. Feminism is getting worse.(ex. metoo) He seems to using omission and half truths to distort reality. Academia is doomed.
It's fascinating to watch Pinker try and denounce PC from within the confines of PC. It's all very toothless, and he still seems nervous, like a flash mob might at any moment decide to tear him limb from limb. And this is what counts as brave truth-telling in academia -- sad!
I personally think that a conservative's primary thoughts would be closer to "eliminate the threat as soon as possible" and maybe even "you're either with us or against us".
That sounds like the far left in a nutshell. Most conservatives trust that their mindset will allow them to thrive without depending on others, so they don't tend to consider the left a huge threat except for when they try to take everyone's money.
I think you could actually make that claim about both. I was actually speaking from personal experience (being extremely Conservative myself) when I view the far left as a threat. I think this is at least part of the reason that right wingers seem to be embracing and even allying with moderate left wingers at the moment. The moderate ones, even in power, aren't a threat like the radicals.
Islam also had loads of inter-religious conflict, for example the Qarmatian fanatics waged a religious war across Arabia for decades and even managed to sack the holy city of Mecca itself, slaughtering all the pilgrims there and desecrating the holy sites, including stealing the sacred Stone. That is not even touching the Banu Hilal invasion of Northern Africa or the Shia Sunni wars of the Fatimids etc.
He is so wrong about Islam being more enlightened than Christianity. He said there was no equivalent to the Inquisition. The entire history of the spread of Islam was advanced through violence. The Shiites, and Sunni's have had many violent clashes, not to mention the persecution of minority Islamic sects, such as the Baha'i.
2:26 - you can't say it. Somebody very famous on this campus did say it and you know what happened to him! You hear laughter and applause for one of the many dark events that is destroying Harvard's reputation for a classic liberal education. The fact that the President of Harvard couldn't say that men and women are different, and LOST HIS JOB OVER IT, is a huge condemnation about the lack of freedom of speech and inquiry on the Harvard campus, and extreme brainwashing of its students. So what do the students do? They laugh and clap! So now I know for sure that Harvard graduates still suck, and it's a good reason that I would not consider any resume from Harvard.
I want to be as free as possable, and the only way I can see to do that is to not deny any one the freedom that I want. That is why I am an Individualist. Aslong as you harm no one you are free.
mastercilander that is not what records of the time, from both christians and muslims, show. You have to belive Inquisitors were forging their own texts with confessions under torture or letters that praise the massacre of heretics - protestants. And vice versa. The Inquisition was created to protect Roman Catholicism from all its foals, including other Christians.
Like Rush always said, conservatives teach that liberals are good people with bad ideas, but liberals teach that conservatives are bad people. Only one of those conclusions leads to further dialog and progression...
They didn't seem to mention the constant Anti-White bigotry and Anti-White Racism Whites are increasingly being subjected to. They may have helped LOL.
I appreciate the intent here but there is so much misinformation that it falls apart factually (at least I hope it's misinformation and not disinformation...).
@ Evan Pellegrini - Watching it again, I may have misspoke when I said "so much," however, I believe some of what he said about sexism, Islam and the claim that most domestic terrorism is committed by right wing extremist groups are at the very least misleading if not just plain wrong. @ Captain Stack - Sorry I wasn't able to respond fast enough for you.
With statistical information context is very important. For example with regard to domestic terrorism he was talking in terms of total number of attacks. If we look post 9/11, from 9/12/01 to 12/31/16 there were 62 from right wing extremists and 23 from Islamic extremists. However the right wing extremists killed less people with 106 people compared to the 119 from Islamist attacks. But these numbers also shift over time. Not to mention there are over a hundred million conservatives in the country compared to only about three million Muslims. So you are probably not in much danger from a guy wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat. Based on a 8/19/17 article by Miriam Valverde in Politifact.
I’m really annoyed with the idea that a person can’t hear these things of which her speaks WITHOUT becoming an “alt-right extremist. All we’d like is for these facts to be a part of the discussion on fixing these issues, as they obviously have to be and are not currently. The solutions will never be correct until that happens
Well this guy is half right on what he's saying. An example of where he's blatantly wrong is "there was no equivalent to the wars of religion" regrading Islam. The fact is war is precisely how Islam spread. The Crusades were a response to it. Pinker needs to take the red pill and not just acknowledge it exists.
He discusses domestic "right wing terrorism" as being the most prevalent form of terrorism here but the most egregious cases (Las Vegas, Orlando, etc.) were committed by progressives. But otherwise great presentation.
The Orlando shooter was a Muslim fundamentalist and hated gay people. The Las Vegas shooter's politics were unknown so I don't how you know he was a progressive if his own brother didn't know. I don't know which political wing contributes the most to violence, but the examples you are using aren't true.
+Todd Brown More and more people are accepting Muslims jihad is to help for a theocracy. The Islam religion is political in nature, so it sounds left to me.
+DarthRaider520 Yeah, forgot all about Antifa...but Pulse shooter was definitely a Dem (dailycaller.com/2016/06/14/omar-mateen-was-a-registered-democrat-but/), plus Pulse shooter's father was a Dem btw (www.wptv.com/news/state/orlando-shooters-father-attends-hillary-clinton-rally-in-kissimmee). And [correction] ultimately I agree with much of what +pinochet pilot #666 concludes, so the political beliefs of Paddock are likely irrelevant. But there are other lists of lefties besides Antifa that are rabidly antisocial, including Nidal Hasan - Ft Hood Shooter: Registered Democrat and Muslim; Aaron Alexis, Navy Yard shooter - black liberal/Obama voter; Seung-Hui Cho - Virginia Tech shooter: Wrote hate mail to President Bush and to his staff, registered Democrat. James Holmes - the “Dark Knight”/Colorado shooter: Registered Democrat, staff worker on the Obama campaign, #Occupy guy, progressive liberal, hated Christians; James Hodgkinson - Shot and hit multiple Republicans, including Steve Scalise: Registered Democrat and worked on Bernie Sanders campaign....etc. It just would have been nice for the good speaker in the video today to have listed what kind of far right terrorism he is referring to here in the US that amounts to more than the list provided in this comment reply.
It really is sad that Anarcho-Capitalism is talked about as and considered to be extreme. How is it that "Don't steal from, forcibly coerce, or assault others" became the extreme position? Sad.
That's not an argument, and even if it were, it would be a fallacious appeal to consequence, and a bad one at that. First off, no government can exist without violating property rights in the first place, so you can't defend property rights WITH a government. If a government claims, whether in portion or entirety, the product of my labor, it is asserting that it has more right to my property than I myself do. If you REALLY believe that a government protects property rights, you are deluding yourself; a government only protects the ability of its serfs to continue paying their taxes. Second, Anarcho-Capitalism is not an ideology based around the best pragmatic outcome for myself, or for anybody else, it has to do with what is moral and what is tyrannical. Forcibly stealing another person's property is immoral, and therefor no government can be an ethical institution; hence why anarchy is the only ethical arrangement.
Not to mention that a community will not tolerate a thief; if someone starts getting aggressive in a community that doesn't have a government, people are going to come together to police themselves. Anarchy doesn't mean a complete chaotic free for all, it means no rulers, but that in no way precludes there being punishment for breaching others' property rights. Only in government propoganda can you have the idea that "people are evil and will steal your stuff, so lets give all the power to a group of people we call "government" to control who is allowed to steal and murder."
After having seen the video I agree with his assessment but I’m less impressed with the example of capitalism and communism. He hasn’t given any examples of a communist society in the mentioned media.
A lot of nowadays people reject reality if it does not comply to their wishes and thoughts... Several centuries ago the reality would literally kill such people, due to civilisation and evolution the reality reaction is slower now, much slower, anyway it works as always
I mean, his opening points are correct. However, some of his later statements are either misleading or just plain false. The line he lays down about Islam being more enlightened than Christendom for large portions of history is a particularly stunning falsehood. Islam has always used force and violence to both spread it's ideology, and to keep people within the ideology. Christian time periods of violence such as the Inquisition are both wildly over-vilified by modern educators (the data isn't perfect, but most estimates I've seen have the church responsible for 500-3000 deaths over the course of 200 years - while those deaths are inexcusable, they are hardly the number of deaths one would expect considering how infamous that time period has become in modern academia), and are famous solely because they were abnormal compared to the majority of Christian history. The reason you don't have a specific Islamic time frame to vilify is because it has been murderous and violent throughout its existence. Pick any location in any century where Islam has been the dominant ideology, and you will find murder, rape, and torture all carried out in the name of Islam.
We _SHOULD_ become capitalists and do away with govt-provided safety nets. That's not an extremist perspective--it's a practical one. Keep the safety net--just make sure it is provided (in order) by self, family, fraternity, then community.
If you haven’t studied Mises and Rothbard you don’t understand capitalism. That includes you, Dr. Pinker (who I like very much - a kind eloquent genius)!
The Bandog some economists definitely have. One thing they makes me think many economists haven’t read them is that they say they haven’t. :) Scott Sumner hasn’t even read Hayek. Russ Roberts has read Hayek but not Rothbard or Mises. Paul Krugman hasn’t read relevant material either. And so on, and so on. Some definitely have. But if you haven’t read and comprehended Rothbard et al and can at least argue against it, you don’t understand really capitalism in my opinion. Cheers!
i think whats important is how you frame these facts as well as who's saying them and what their intention is. what I noticed is that every time the right speaks out about pc they do so with the intention to " own the libs" and "trigger lefties" which is also how they try to frame their arguments and phrases while also leaving out important facts and other details as well as mentioning other facts out of context. When they do this, of course it will upset the left who in response will lash out in the name of pc which in turn creates a cycle with the right "triggering" them, the left lashing at them, and the right getting upset before it repeats itself. to an extent, I do believe in some form of pc but one that is encouraged in society and has naturally become a social norm; not one that has been enforced by the government. I think it should be discouraged that using racial slurs, homophobic slurs, etc be used in daily life but that is in my opinion that pc is defined as avoiding offensive slurs and phrases that are meant to dehumanize or target certain groups of people or individuals. however I believe that it is crucial that we keep certain facts that can be deemed "offensive" in context as well as using ALL of the facts and the way we frame them and our intentions behind saying them so that it will not seem "anti-pc" so that we may keep the public informed about these facts while not seemingly trying to upset everyone.
I know this comment is 3 years old, so your thoughts may be different now, but I believe PC to be extremely limiting and downright dangerous in some cases. I am not educated, so my terminology might be a little off. PC culture is what I call an identitarian ideology. Identitarianism by my understanding is the idea that the group identifier is vastly more important than the individual self. All humans, including you and me are identitarian to some degree, we are not omniscient creatures, so we need labels and categories to make sense of the world around us. As such, we settle for less because we cannot achieve more. But an identitarian ideology, especially a culturally accepted one, imposes external beliefs upon a populace, rather than the ability of critical thought and self reflection. When it comes to political correctness in and of itself, it is no more than a tool, or a guideline to help people. A tool is only as good or as bad as the intentions of it's wielder, however, the efficacy of a tool is determined by the knowledge with which it is held. The problem is that PC culture is almost imposed as a social law which must be adhered to lest you get called an istaphobe. We have created a culture in which it is tacitly wrong to treat people like people, now we have to perceive and treat Asian people like Asian, not like people, gay people like gay, not like people. In this case, we are imposing values, beliefs, words, and stereotypes into the mouths of every human being in the entirety of history of existence of ever, because that is what we are told is correct. For example; I was molested as a child, and many people in North America today are taught and even raised with the ideology of getting offended for my sake because it is the kind thing to do. However, when people get offended for me, they are not giving me my voice, they are imposing theirs upon me. They are not giving me freedom of expression or choice, they are imposing theirs upon the rest of society, dictating how everyone else must perceive and treat me, creating an artificial barrier between people, not uniting them. They believe they are lifting me up, when in reality they are pushing me down to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator, and using me as a cudgel to beat people they disagree with over the head. They aren't treating me like a living breathing human being, they treat me like a worthless sack of child fuck flesh that needs them to be my master because they genuinely believe I am incapable of basic human function. The soft bigotry of low expectations. Under political correctness in it's ideological format, we don't matter, we don't exist, we are worthless, we are nothing but sacks of flesh to be segregated and categorized. For the more we perceive and treat people like nothing more than labels, the less human we all become, because we will be too busy treating each other like spreadsheets, rather than treating each other like human beings. All of this in the name of correctness. Just because you're correct, doesn't mean you're right.
@@TheCalmPsycho While I do agree that people are more than labels, what you are saying is not the purpose or intent of PC and your description of those being PC is inaccurate. The entire point of PC is to identify and acknowledge the issues and problems that individual marginalized groups face and then attempting to solve them socially, politically, economically, etc. For example black people constantly deal with systemic racism especially in the justice system, gays still do not have equal protection under the law, there has been an increase of bigotry towards the LGBT in general, Asians had to deal with hate crimes etc. By not acknowledging the identities of these people and just "treating people as people" you are essentially ignoring the unique struggles that each group face and therefore you are ignoring the problem as well as not solving the problem. PC does not stereotype others, it brings awareness and identifies the common struggles, issues, and problems that individual marginalized groups face. Using your example as a child rape victim, people are not taught to be offended in North America. They are taught that molestatation, rape, SA etc. is a terrible thing and that the issue itself is much worse than once was thought. They are taught that victims tend to be silenced and that victims were "asking for it". They were taught that the issue is more than just some mugger preying on a woman in the middle of the night; that it often occurs with people in authority abusing their powers and that the rapists are often someone that the victim knows. They speak out and attempt to speak for ALL victims of sexual assault that again the issue is a lot more serious than previously thought. Not to invalidate what you went through, but there are also countless victims that appreciate those who attempt to raise awareness, speak out for them, and even give them a voice. PC may be annoying to some but mainly towards those who lowkey support if not align themselves with bigotry, prejudice, etc. Under PC, issues of individual marginalized groups face are identified and eventually resolved. And by ignoring the unique labels they have you also ignore the systemic problems faced in a society where people have equal opportunity and protection under the law. Also your use of the word identitarian is horribly misused considering that it refers to far right ethno-nationalist politics.
@@bobjones5370 I appreciate your detailed response, and it is my fault that I wasn't detailed myself. I agree with you on most of what you said. The intention of PC is different than the intentions of a subset of people using PC. PC is a tool, it can be used for good and bad. While I was focusing on the negatives it can produce, I did not acknowledge the good that it can produce like your comment did. And again, that was my fault, I laser focused on things people do with PC that annoy me, rather than the totality of the ideology and its different uses. I do think it is important to discuss the issues specific to different groups, as you stated, but I also find a subset of people doing what I was complaining about, which is reducing everyone into labels in the name of political correctness, and I find it happens very often. One thing that I disagree with you on is your usage of the word identity. In my mind, gay, black, Asian, and white are not identities, but rather identifiers. This is what I meant by imposing values and perspectives upon people. Things that happen to some of these people are external factors, not internal factors. That is why someone like me who was molested as a child, cannot speak for someone else who was molested as a child, it is the difference in external factors *and* internal factors that make our perceptions and beliefs different. As you said, most people who were molested as children appreciate being given a voice, but again, that is the voice of the speakers, not my voice, not the voice of other people who were molested. And because of those talks focusing on the values of the perceived majority, as you said it is most of them, then my voice is being rejected because I am not in the majority, and values are imposed upon me by people believing they are doing good. Maybe I am nitpicking here, and maybe I am still not articulating my point properly, but I do believe there is a subtle, yet very important, distinction between identity, and identifier. As for my misuse of identitarianism, I knew that it was mainly used to label alt-right, but I find the values of identitarianism in the misuse of PC or identity politics. Identitarianism through the alt-right white supremacy lens is the dehumanization, and sometimes even demonization of black people or Jews into nothing more than black/Jew and imposing perspectives and beliefs upon and about them. And that is the exact same value I was describing in the misuse of PC in my first comment. The intentions are different, but the result is the same, black is inherently ___ because black, Asians are inherently ___ because Asian, people who were molested as children are inherently ___ because they were molested as children. These are external factors being imposed upon a demographic or a label because of social/political ideologies saying they are correct. Like I said, I am uneducated, so if there is a better term for what I am describing, I do not know it, but I was not trying to say that people misusing PC in the way I described earlier are evil or stupid, or alt-right supremacists. I do genuinely believe most people are good people trying to do good within the scope of their beliefs, values and experiences. Anyway, I appreciate you taking time out of your day to talk with a random stranger. I always enjoy talking to people with different perspectives even if we may not agree or like what each other believes, and it makes me happy when people give me that chance. Talking on the internet is like screaming into the void, very rarely do I get anything close to a good response like you gave me. Thanks again, and have a nice day!
@@TheCalmPsycho I understand and agree with the subset of people who misuse PC. Yes they are annoying. Yes they can be irritating. Yes they can be at times be counterproductive to their own movement (those people are called wokescolds and SJWs btw, you'll often find them on twitter participating in cancel culture and such; hell even leftists hate them). But they are just that. A subset. Meaning they are a small minority of the group who support PC. The vast majority are not foaming in the mouth SJWs or wokescolds. And the benefits outweigh the cons. The benefits are to put an end to systemic racism, poverty, and other social issues that affect mankind as a whole. That tiny subset who misuse PC matter little in the grand scheme of things. Yes we should try to also give a voice to those who do not feel like as though they are being spoken for, however it is also more practical and more effective in the grand scheme of things to speak out for the vast majority of people who need help. I am sorry that you were hurt, however it is unfair and unpractical to let the entire majority of a group have their futures influenced by a small minority in that same group to move things forward. I believe that the first step is to help the majority of individual marginalized groups before "polishing" those said groups by helping the small minority within them who do not feel represented. Also, concerning identitarians, the results are not the same. Identitarians use labels and categories on groups so they can make a "hit list" of enemies to demonize and eventually wipe out. Identitarians are inherently a harm to society and the world as a whole. PC is inherently not harmful despite annoying ass SJWs and wokescolds. When those idiots misuse PC, it does not create catastrophic events where massive groups of people of certain identities get sent to concentration camps or a firing squad nor does it create a wave of hate crimes sweeping the nation. Identitarianism does however. That said I agree. Wokescolds, SJWs, and cancel culture are annoying and counterproductive asf. But they are not really that much of a harm to society.
Pinker is in many ways erudite, posing an interest in areas from cognitive science to linguistics to behavioural genetics to sexual selection. He is in many ways a merchant of 'what', and has much to say about what is. His 'why', of course, leaves much to be questioned. One doesn't *need* to know about group averages or such to be opposed to their abuse, and much of what was said with regards to right wing terrorism being more prevalent in the US - and even with regards to other white groups in the past - is an active part of progressive leftist discourse as is. It's *known* that these facts exist, but there are simply alternative accounts proposed which add more nuance. Perceived censorship of the notions altogether rightfully causes alarm but, we've of yet mostly anecdote to go by. Which begs the question of their salience as well as in turn what the MSM has to say as vectors of this. I also feel as if the continued notion that discussions of brain sex or the prevalence of Islamic terror simply aren't widespread enough let alone this being why the AR is so prevalent (rather than other stressors) is heavily misguided and almost laughable to one who noticed no such popularity of this extremism as tabloid publications had been sensationalising such items ad nauseam up until the AR finally hit their zenith: both notions have rung heavily in American culture and beyond to this very day, or at least these are major cultural contentions beyond what sway campuses pose for the population at large. I also have to seriously doubt that many college campuses actively endorse or normalise communism, even if perhaps not posing a layman's conception of the political theory and historical context at play. I wouldn't even say the mainstream as a whole normalises social democracy let alone anything further left, given the initial hysteria with which Bernie Sanders was covered. Rather it's the sheer and stubborn lack of any Keynesian aspects to 'economics 101' in the public eye that feeds a subculture of ancaps, rather than merely 'not liking communism'. This isn't even a linchpin of the AR's economics, but a side effect of the long standing economic illiteracy of the general public particularly with generations of neoliberal propaganda that blamed government regulations for literally everything. Many are in fact protectionist. While it is true that many ancaps/libertarians hold racist beliefs this is both not universal and also dates back to the likes of Rothbard and Hoppe. Mises iirc was pro-feminist, but also operationalised his ideas under the short lived austrofascist regime.It isn't that people are only recieving these notions from a point of first contact per se as racial animus with regards to crime and welfare were implicit back in the days of Raegan and so are hardly esoteric. The alt right comes as a more overt operationalisation of some of these notions with other factors hitting critical mass. This goes *far* beyond 'universities', which many AR folk haven't attended to begin with.One of the first uses of the term 'alternative right' dates, in fact, to Paul Gottfried's seminal invocation of the term in 2008: an economy in the balance, a populace experiencing fear and existential dread. In the wake of recession neoliberal economic thought faced a major shock and thus by proxy the political mainstream, and this was only to further mature with the passage of time: even now, economic outcomes continue to diverge with the wealthiest and the poorest in the United states for instance. It's material imbalances and shocks etc, rather than there being not enough discussion about 'Islamic terrorism' or 'communism being the biggest bad ever' (again, both notions fairly banal), which define the rise of such a movement in my view. Either of these two notions are honestly banal given the saturation of commentators offering this perspective, but few pose the same enthusiasm as the particular cohort of insecure young men who devote much attention to this line of enquiry. TL;DR: Many notions really are ultimately banal (correctly identified as such to some extent), but other factors drive the 'redpill/alt-right' movement.
Or Rothbard or Mises or Hoppe etc. etc. In pinkers defense when he says "regulation" he might not distinguish between regulation by force and voluntary regulation. So he has a reasonable way forward by accepting voluntary governance/regulation as permissible and rejecting state governance/regulation.
There are about 6+ of the top comments related to his failure to properly address Islamic religious wars. I’m sorry, did anyone hear the other 10,000 things he said that are massively important to human thought? Talk about horse blinders.
Good persuasive argument. I feel like the context thing was kind of off. To assume that everyone in the "group" is just unable to properly decide context is a scary way to think. I agree it is probably caused because of media and this new wave of overly political correctness. I believe that right most groups are overly logical, and left most groups are overly emotional and are unable to compromise with each other because their brains work in different ways.
Love it that he just throws anarcho-capitalism there for no reason and proceeds to "refute" it with one of the weakest fallacies I have ever seen. Ehat was that?
The most successful economy in the history of the world was early 1800s America, when regulations were at their lowest. It's become WORSE as more regulation has been added, and significantly more so once central banking was introduced.
And it bred political extremism. The conditions for ordinary workers during the industrial revolution were truly horrific. This is why people started becoming Communists and Anarchists, why they started assassinating political leaders and businessmen. 19th Century capitalism is not a viable model for a stable society.
That's an untrue characterization of industrialization that is perpetuated by government schools that have a vested interest in making you believe that without government, you would be abused by employers. That's simply impossible when workers have the freedom to choose which jobs to work without government regulation forcing good employers out of the market. Not to mention that the public school system was specifically designed to pump out factory workers, not free thinkers.
V.Lute you describe a period where the country was transitioning from poor to rich. During that time the conditions were better than when it was poor and worse than when it was rich. This is a viable model for a society, but it was a period of change so by definition it wasn't stable.
skylarscaling Except that's just not true. Working conditions in the USA are already bad compared to more regulated countries. Some countries have 35-36 hours weeks, 6-8 weeks mandatory holidays, minimum wages for everyone and STILL run effectively. In the USA you get fucked by employers in all sorts of ways, unless you want to argue that people can just all abandon their jobs at Wallmart and go find something else, because it's pretty clear they would if they could. And yeah, public education doesn't want free thinkers if you consider that it's just people who'll believe anything as long as it's posted on a random crackpot website and isn't the official version.
Yeah, the poor working conditions here are why people are falling over each other to come here, and the "better conditions" are working really well for Europe, with its cascade of failing and bankrupt countries. America has more entrepreneurship than any other country that I'm aware of, and millions of people don't work a 40 hour job and still make a nice living. And most of the rest of the people feeling stuck in jobs are in that position because they have obligations to pay off the debt they've accrued living a life of $600 phones, big screen TVs, Netflix, and a million other luxuries that other countries would kill to have access to. America is still the greatest country in the world, but with the out of control government spending and debt, it's still going to suffer. Regulation and big government is the CAUSE of that, NOT the solution.
He says you don’t necessarily drift toward right wing politics after learning the facts. But many do, perhaps even a majority. Hence the desire to tell “noble lies.”
Pinker speaks well but is ideologically blinded. I have consistently seen this on his Twitter profile. He has also wrongly presented several facts in this presentation.
Stefan Diercks well, [off the top of my head] you could start with - "no wars in the history of islam" my answer to that would be= what is India? (not limited to the present day India) read up material on islamic imperialism in India, even the Sufis were barbarians - "the rw terrorism > islamic terrorism" this myth has been debunked. for starters, it doesn't consider islamic terrorism (religious fundamentalism) as rw. calls Orlando Shooting a rw incident. conveniently ignores 9/11. -
I'm shocked by some of the nonsense being spewed by Steven Pinker in this video. The absolute misconception expressed at 5:33 just blows my mind. Continuing to spread this ignorance is a threat to our future.
Not the most honest piece I've seen. He uses PC Jargon, "African American" and "European American". He ignores the fact that the statistical differences in interest and ability drive the differences in careers and not discrimination. That's why the progressives deny them.
Considering most American blacks have never been to Africa yet alone claim citizenship there, makes that term intrinsically dishonest. Are there some African Americans, sure, not all of them are black though.
+nustada: > using African American: well nothing else is allowed, all other words have become tainted. 'Negro' sounds dated and too much like that other word.
You complain about his wording even though it's standard - in society, not just science - and you perfectly understand what he means? That's the method of social justice warriors. What was he supposed to say? Blacks and Whites? What benefit would that bring to you?
I'd appreciate Mr Pinker addressing homicide rates of certain races within their homeland nations. I suspect they are quite similar to that found in the states.
I'm shocked that this needs to be explained. I always thought it was clear to everyone with a high school diploma, let alone to students on prestigious American universities
The president of Harvard. He expressed the very true statement that women aren't as good at math as men and wondered if that was biological and could not be remedied by any social engineering. The female faculty threw a fit and forced him to resign for stating a biological fact of life.
Pinker shows his limited understanding of economics when he criticizes anarcho-capitalistism. Lumping an-caps with racists, sexists, and other extremists. What is extreme about respecting property rights and condemning theft and violence?
Not necessarily true. The Asian community places a different value on those subjects that are tested to prove a higher IQ. Meaning the Asian communities ideologies and practices (PRACTICES meaning, they do it more than other people and grow in their aptitude of that skill), are what the European community as come up with to test to "prove" people have a higher IQ. If the IQ test included rhythm perhaps people of African descent would score higher? My point is smart is relative to what you value as smart, what one is well versed in re: practiced a lot, and ultimately what you test for.
I have a very weird feeling that most of the people commenting on this video are not the kinds of people that Steven Pinker wants to associate with, and yet this video is titled exactly to appeal to those people instead of necessarily representing Pinker's view.
"Through much of it's history Islam was far more enlightened than Christendom" Lost me there... Completely ignorant and ridiculous statement. As well as lumping anarcho-capitalism in with racism, sexism etc. Laughable.
It was. As also Neil degresse Tyson has pointed out. They were not anti-intellectuals for a long time whilst Europe was in the dark ages. It changed with Islam because one religious leader decided that numbers are the work of the devil. As Tyson points out, Islam has not recovered from that since.
Steven.....ugh. C'mon, I love you bro. Did you have to be so cautious that you went and bit it so hard on Islam? No equivalent to the Inquisition? No religious warfare? Drilling down on these claims is going to get you distinctions, without any qualitative, substantive differences - none relevant to the concern of religious violence, neither in kind, nor in quantity. Dude, you were my favorite. STOP the cowardess. Speak the truth and let the chips fall where they will.
If men and women are on average different, pinker is right that it doesn't mean you should discriminate, however it does mean that you shouldn't be prevented from discriminating if you see fit.
Except we can only make rules for the average case, not the exceptional. So if you're not allowed to discriminate for the exceptional, you won't be allowed to discriminate for the average.
for example hooters only hires female waitresses, an italian restaurant might prefer to only hire italian staff. Both types of discrimination don't imply sexism or racism. Another example is that Disney will discriminate against men and against non-asians for the job of playing Mulan at their parks.
exactly. But I'm saying they should be allowed to do it even if it is racist and sexist. we should not be trying to legislate morality. If nobody is being directly harmed, it shouldn't be illegal. If you don't like it, you can boycott businesses that do it and even encourage others to do so but you don't just get to shut them down.
I agree and I think most people agree with a lot of reasons for discrimination, like the Mulan example, heck people would get offended and talk about whitewashing if Disney hired a white girl and gave her chinese looking makeup hahaha! The problem is that people only think of segregation when they hear about allowing discrimination. Walter Williams gave a funny example in an interview. He talked about how much we discriminate when we look for a spouse. Most people have a really narrow list of criteria, and discriminate against a gender and several ethnicities.
Pinker is eminently thoughtful and rational, and chooses his words very well. Navigating controversy the way he does, and bringing this kind of reason to very emotionally incendiary subjects, is not trivially easy. It's a skill which all academics should seek to master. I disagree with his assessment of pure vs. mixed capitalism, but I have to commend him anyway just for speaking so well, which is incredibly valuable even if it only means that other people I disagree with have an example of what virtue in debate looks like.
My first red pill was finding out that women are not paid less for doing the same work. That rabbit hole was a crazy one.
gantmj read the Rational Male series by Rollo Tomassi. That is the original red pill, thank me later.
My first red pill was watching white “feminists” in Michigan marching while wearing hijabs, proclaiming them “symbols of female empowerment.” I knew in my guts i couldn’t get behind that. I knew I was looking at empty shells of human beings.
I hope women in the Middle East can forgive us for that shit.
That was a redpill for you man? You're not ready for the real world.
As a woman I knew right away that’s not true and when they say the famous argument that: “women are paid less” they leave out the fact that those women are less educated and/or have less experience!
@@arandomperson420 It's not even that. The biggest difference is that they're comparing men and women at all jobs they Do. Just average pay for all full time male work and all full time female work. The "for the same job!" part they tack on at the end is an absolute lie.
In order to defend your view, you must understand your opponents argument as well as they do, and preferably better.
Pinker fails to demonstrate that here
it's not about being racist, its about understanding racial differences as an explanation for outcome inequality and rejecting affermative action and and racial and gnender quotas
logical fruit Pinker is actually one of the more down to earth people in academia. He makes a good point here, but it's too late to reverse the trends that dominate the universities. It's been 80 since Gramsci, almost 50 years since Marcuse. Culminating in the most unhinged SJW's we see today, Cultural Marxism ended up being too successful for it's own good and will indeed lead to red-pilling of many across the political spectrum.
@You Can't Debate Me Dumbass
> That certainly doesn't sound like Swedish people are going extinct
Pew recently published some population projections for Europe. They talk about religion (Islam) rather than races, but it's practically the same thing as their own article shows that Islam grows due to birth rates and migration. Almost none of Islam's growth is due to conversion.
They put Sweden up as 8.1% Muslim, which is already a lot higher than most European countries (UK: 6.3, Germany: 6.1, France: 8.8). The US has less than 1% Muslims.
Their projections are for 2050 and consider three different scenarios: Zero additional migration, a "medium" amount of migration and a "high" amount of migration. The projected Muslim population in Sweden is then: 11.1% with zero migration, 20.5% with medium migration, and 30.6% with high migration.
High birth rates and net migration will eventually lead to ethnic Swedes becoming a minority in their own country, although it will take a few generations.
> People in the alt-right seem to be manipulated easily and fail to to see past their own biases.
You can say that about pretty much every group (and individual) out there, even and maybe especially academics.
"If the Muslim population is 30.6% and the rest of the other minorities stay at 12%, then this leaves the majority at 57.4%. That would be slightly under what the white population in the US is (~60%). They would still be a majority, the native Swedes."
Do you even read what you write? If Sweden is 30.6% Muslim in 2050, that means the percentage is over six and a half times as much as it was in 2010, just 40 years before. Why would you tell yourself it would stop increasing then? Do you expect anyone else to believe that?
At that average rate Sweden would be a Muslim majority country by 2080, going from 4.6% to more than 50% in one lifetime. That's ignoring that it would more likely be an exponential increase than linear.
Doesn't Harvard discriminate against Asian American applicants?
If Asians were not discriminated against they would dominate the universities. Just look at universities in Australia.
So what? The same argument could be made for Blacks against Whites. DO you think Asians should pay less tax too? I mean, given their kids have LESS access to public resources due to racist discrimination by their so-called publically funded servants. If Asians dominate Universities, then get rid of the regulatory-capture that make Universities into rent-seekers. Eliminate State enforced licensing (which will indeed favor Asians) and return to a free-market.
oh yeah, what white mothership said
By "Asian" you mean not black
@@jamesline5103 My family is from a very poor part of singapore, we were very very poor until my father (who is white) got a job working as a mechanic for an airline and left the family to work, I was on my own from 15 years old and had no financial help other than rent living in the UK, so when universities descriminate against asians, they push people like myself away based on nothing other than race, it should be done on an individual basis, not a group one, otherwise its just racism under a different name.
Political correctness first made me read Sam Harris' work in Islam. I had read his work on the "mind" and consciousness and knew that he wasn't bigotted so I knew the leftist narrative that he hates Muslims was wrong. And when I read his book, sure enough, he doesn't hate Muslims, he is just concerned that Islam has some backward ideas that some Muslims WILL follow; and that most Muslims deny that because THEY dont follow the backward part of Islam.
Then it was Peterson; they said he was a nazi who hated gays and trans; did some research, that was complete nonsense, he is just against ideological politics being force into everyones lives via law.
Then it was Shapiro, he is the nazi alt righter who thinks trans people dont have the right to exist. And again, nonsense, he says you can be trans if you want, just dont force him to call you by a specific gender by law.
Everytime the left tries to unfairly malign someone, it strengthens right wing thinking.
Next, go listen to race realists like JF Gariepy or Black Pigeon Speaks and realize how horribly you've been kept in the dark and lied to regarding race. After that, check out actual alt-right speakers like Richard Spencer especially regarding things like alt-right rallies, antifa, Charlottesville and whether or not you agree with their message (personally, I don't) you'll understand the level to which our media will stoop in order to paint a narrative and enforce physical violence on views they don't like.
"strengthens right wing thinking." If only the last word was true.
Political correctness is a fantasy. It doesn't exist apart from in the minds of people who maintain ideas that have been rendered unpopular by open debate focusing on the facts.
It's literally right wing butthurt having lost the culture war that they started. Pathetic, really.
toggle foot Richard Spencer is literally a fascist. The only platform he deserves is the gallows.
Courtshannon listen to Jared taylor
Love this consideration of both sides of the argument. This is on what civil discourse should be modelled.
Your stuff on Islam not having religious wars is brutally wrong. But otherwise a good video.
What he said was that there was no equivalent to the European wars of religion, which is accurate. The ottoman empire allowed its shia population to live without forcibly converting them. The austrian empire waged the 30 years war to convert germany to Catholicism.
@Crosshair
The reformation was an exceptionally bloody war for its time and it changed the way religion worked in the state and the role it had in peoples' lives forever. Islam has never gone through an equivalent event, the closest thing to it was probably the Sunni/Shia split and that was more of an inheritance war than a religious war.
1. More people converted to islam through trade than through conquest. this is how the religion spread to Indonesia and west Africa.
2. Muslims didn't manage and control the slave trade to the new world, the dutch and British did. Thats just basic historical fact.
3. Slavery existed in the European colonial possessions well into the 1920's.
4. the ottomans did oppress Christians when the empire was in a state of collapse, but during the height of the empire they were vastly more tolerant than there European counter parts. When Spain expelled the jews, the turks took them in.
I guess you guys mix up things documented by western historians in Europe and less documented and less well-known history elsewhere. Just because we do not teach about ethnic cleansings in wars outside of Europe, it does not mean that that did not happen. History has unbelievably brutal things that can be discovered. And you ignore the political implications of the reformation. It is not purely religious.
A great innovation of Islam is that it is more efficient to spread your dominance by not hunting after all others which takes a lot of effort and time, but rather let strict laws and practices against minority beliefs do their job over time. Very brilliant, but not a humanist motivation.
@volingrad: you obviously did not study the Islamic slave trade in Africa and Islamic slavers hunting ships in the meditereanian sea for centuries if not 1000 years.
To enlighten you about reformation history. It happened in the holy roman empire of German nations which was lead by an emperor who was crowned by the pope. So, reformation threatening the foundations and practises of the boss of the emperor (probably Austrian) is not a purely religious thing, but heavy politics.
The problem he doesn't address: WHY are such facts controversial in universities and the mainstream?
Benj Houston it’s an 8 minute video, relax
Search yuri bezmenov . You will get the answer
@@gorecassady1632 Yeah, right? He mentions that all the time in other lectures.
@@shshashiekhar useful idiots
Benj Houston Read the book The Coddling of the American Mind to get some insight.
Islam never had religious wars? Um, which Islam is it you are discussing there Steve? How much of Europe was conquered by Islam? Do you not know who Charles Martel was?
Yeah he was WAY off on that one. The war between Islam and Hindu India made the Crusades look like a circus sideshow...and don't even get started on the Mongol-Muslim conflicts
Islam was a war against itself
The James Damore debacle at Google is when I stopped listening to the social justice group. That was such a clear example of a witch hunt, and the Covington Kids debacle only reinforced my decision.
Islam not waging religious wars in the past history? Really Pinker? You might want read a history book some time....
Or maybe you have, and you are just being deliberately dishonest?
Aren't Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates kind of like the crusades, just hundreds of times bigger?
the fact that capitalist countries tend to have a social saftey net doesn't mean that that social saftey net has to be coercively provided by a centralized government. It could instead be voluntarily provided by private charities, which are generally more efficient with their funding becasue they know they can't just get more if they say they need it.
private charities are for-profit, centralized government depending on how it's regulated, is not for profit.
Private chairites are not necessarily for profit. There are plenty non-profit private chairities, like churches. And it's up to the donor to determine which ones he want's to give to. You don't get that choice with the government. they take your money and you don't get to decide what they do with it. Even in a democracy it's just you electing one person who ends up deciding for you.
Only 30% of the money the government spends on poverty ends up going to the people who need it.
ruclips.net/video/YsRH3xHJi1M/видео.html
It's just a natural side affect of being successful the more you have to spare the more you will want to help others. That's why the upper middle class is so into "democratic socialism" which is really just successful capitalism.
Acendiat Media
Gee, and here I was thinking that they do it for the tax deduction and the political and institutional power, prestige and influence that comes from being a major donor...
Thanks for opening my eyes!
1. It is hard to tell exactly what would happen without those policies. Or even with only some of them. I would be awefully surprised if the world complied politely with a libertarian narrative.
2. You take for GRANTED that the private initiative would be more efficient. Did you know we actually have statistical tools to measure technical efficiency? Here is a shocking fact: state funded hospitals in Quebec are about 27% more efficient than private hospitals in California.
The main reason is that the private hospitals seem to compete over availability, hence they always have a lot of empty rooms -- and that is wasteful in the economic sense.
3. Nothing is preventing you or anyone from trying to build private organizations to make your case through examples. However, as an economist, I feel compelled to warn you that markets do not always work correctly, just as governments.
4. And it is true that the comparison he makes doesn't exclude the possibility of prefering fewer government programs. He merely pointed out that the observed difference was a bad proxy for the libertarian heaven advocated on the far right.
The most striking part of this talk is he had to spend 5 minutes protecting himself before talking about the politically correct left.
Pinker is correct that many of the facts such as the differences between men and women do not advocate discrimination or any other extreme action. However, they do bring one to realise that the policies, laws and institutions built up around the denial of these controversial facts must be abolished. That itself is a radical position that is verboten in public discourse.
Also, leave Ancaps alone. They are the least dangerous extremists in America and not part of the Alt-Right ffs.
+rwatertree: he picked the safe target (women) and made it stand in for the hard one (race). Though, he did touch racial crime, didn't he. What did he say about it? "It might not always be so?" Yeah that's not much comfort. It might, also, in fact always be so, like it is in other black areas of the world.
The alt right is concerning in many ways, least of all their desire to make to Western societies into ethnostates or segregated ones. Many alt righters with whom I've spoken are third positionists (i.e. various types of fascists or national socialists) which at least speaks to economic and political illiteracy.
Alt Right is too vague a term to take seriously. Everyone who isn't a SJW type is now considered Alt Right to many.
Alt-Right as used by the broader media is a miasmic term, alt-right in the Richard Spencer sense has more NatSoc tendencies.
rwatertree
I find your use of the term "ethno state" charming. All states and societies are already based on ethnicity unofficially. The Alt Right simply rejects Multiculturalism, which is a new and untested political theory. Ancaps are ridiculous in that they don't understand that capitalism , which we never had, simply buys out any government and has it serve the wealthy. But that's neither here nor there as we have a half state, half corporate system. Which isn't capitalism.
'There was no equivalent of the war of religion in islam' - Not True.
You dropped out the word *Inquisition.*
There. Fixed.
And so goes the saying, "I didn't leave the Democratic party. The Democratic party left me." Which is absolutely true in my case.
How did anarcho-capitalism get lumped in with the Alt Right? Or anything else he mentioned as a negative position?
WalkerKlondike
>Harvard professor
The man is trying to see his life long ideological enemy in a new light, trying to overcome cognitive dissonance. Because the level of cognitive dissonance on campuses(and leftist circles) is so great it can no longer be ignored.
What he is doing is very hard to do, its mostly wrong, but it is taking steps in the right direction.
He mentioned it at the beginning. To boil it down: Political Correctness is causing facts not to be addressed on college campuses. The alt-right is a place where these facts are addressed, but not good manner by drawing conclusions that don't necessarily follow.
Maybe Pinker stumbled upon some misguided Hans-Herman Hoppe fanboys and their snek memes.
Jaigarful how do the conclusions of anarcho-capitalism not follow facts? And, the Alt-Right is largely Socialist, anti-free market. The two, Anarcho-Capitalism and the Alt-Right, have nothing to do with each other and are in fact independently logically consistent positions. (Someone may correct me on the Logical consistency of the Alt-Right) That Pinker characterizes the two as related or somehow internally inconsistent, suggests that he doesn't actually understand them in the first place.
rwatertree those are pretty funny, tho.
3:55 - 4:02 No one suggests they do. It's never a conflict involving an argument that we should. It is a conflict involving the accusation that discrimination is responsible for the differences. The idea that there are not naturally any differences arises logically when reasoning from the accepted fact that the accusation is true.
7:05 - 7:19 Again, the facts don't lead anyone to those conclusions! The problem is the facts can not be discussed without emotional accusations of racism etc being levied in lieu of thoughtful consideration and discussion.
That is why Trump won. We got sick of not being able to have a discussion for all the virtue signaling based on forgone conclusions.
How are sexism, racism, ect related, in any way, to Ararcho-Libertarianism?
It confused me as well, but I think it works this way: He presents sexism and racism as the alt-right response to the stats about men and women, and correspondingly, AnCap and AnLib are presented as alt-right response to capitalist societies generally being better than communist ones
Lolberts should be destroyed.
You are an exceedingly un-smart person.
@@balvsmalvs5425 lol couldn't think of a better word than "un-smart?". Also wtf man, it's just a simple question. It sounded like he was saying anarcho libertarianism is inherently racist/sexist. But in reality he was talking about how accepting a set a of facts doesn't have to make us a sexist, racist, OR anarcho libertarian. Which I'm guessing he associates with the right wing libertarian movement in America. So he really wasn't suggesting a connection between the concepts. So actually I'm not "unsmart" you're just being a snarky arrogant jerk for literally no reason.
@@Paradox-dy3ve If I said I used that word on purpose, would your worldview get blown to bits?
"Which I'm guessing he associates with the right wing libertarian movement in America."
You are truly one of the un-smartest folks I've read in a long, looong time. Truly.
I hope that word hasn't triggered you into other un-smartness.
Every time I start a Stephen Pinker video ready to get offended, I'm nodding my head like a minute into it
Excellent and thoughtful points. A must listen for any teacher, at any level.
The critique of anarcho-capitalism as the desire to remove regulations and social safety nets is unwarranted. Regulations and social support systems are unanimously seen as beneficial to libertarian thinkers from Molinari to Spooner to Rothbard to Molyneux to Woods, the only thing wrong with the current system is the widespread use of violence perceived as legitimate under the territorial monopoly of a non-voluntary government body. This is not an extreme position objectively, merely having the appearance of extremity due to the cultural context where it is common for people to be put into cages where there is a chance they will be uncared for if they are raped daily for the rest of their life for trading pieces of paper for pieces of plants to consenting adults. Nonaggression is not extreme morally, it is the Golden Rule of civilization.
Tommy Boyle and the Party of One
...And in ENGLISH your comment means???
Tommy Boyle and the Party of One long winded way of saying you don’t think governments should be allowed to tax people and have a police force. Just like how communism can never be properly implemented because the ideal communistic society can only be achieved in a perfect world where human ambition and lust for power doesn’t exist, anarcho-capitalism can never be achieved people will always find ways to take advantage of each other. It might work in theory, but its implementation in the real world would likely be just as disastrous as the failure of communism in China and the Soviet Union.
Aliensinnoh Some take that view and most ancaps are of a skeptical bent anyways so nobody is advocating for anarchy or nothing in the next two years. The proper approach towards and anarcho-capitalist society is by sensibly reducing the size of government till the point where any evil might actually be necessary if such a point exists. Saying that anarcho-capitalism will never exist is a question that only exists ideally currently is fair since a complete elimination of government tomorrow might make things terrible and so from a consequentialist worldview that warrants some suspicion of principle so the proper course is balancing the strict deontology of having principles with the consequentialism of pragmatism, but to say it is an irrational goal is different.
Marlon Moncrieffe "Don't hurt people, don't take their stuff" and "Keep your stuff and keep your word" are not extremist positions.
What in god's name is a "non-voluntary government body"?
I dont know any Anarcho-Capitalists that are opposed to safety nets and regulated markets. Sounds like the same problem of coming to extreme and hasty conclusions when hearing a new truth his entire argument was predicated on.
You absolutely can have those things through voluntary and peaceful means.
The main problem with American politics is many people cannot distinguish political correctness and political awareness
To be aware is the real point people need to achieve .
I usually like Pinker. But everything he said in this talk was sooo caricatural. It is like the only alternatives are: either you are a leftist or you are a bigot -- even if you are a bigot who happens to know his facts. He makes it looks like the mission of any sensible person would be to prevent good, but naive, people to be corrupted by right-wing influence.
Come on! As the a french president once answered to a leftist adversary in the 60s : "you don't have the monopoly of good intentions." If anything else, in these last decades, the Left seems to have degenerated into a cult blindly followed by people with no qualms about doing actual evil in exchange for the promisse of a future, vague and questionable good. Actually, I feel it is my moral duty to denounce the violence in the modern progressives methods; to denounce the totalitarian tendencies of leftist political goals; to have the courage to hold a stand against diffamation and docxing campaigns in order to denounce racism, sexism and bigotry when it comes disguised as social justice.
I understand he is probably talking at an University. Therefore he must adjust his speech to the public. However, it seems to me that he felt himself victim to the political correction he was criticising...
Jesus, go read a book. Congratulations on blatantly misunderstanding everything Pinker said and putting your own cockamamie motivations on him.
Pollen, this guy does understand what Pinker said. Pinker straw manned all the way through the speech because he wanted to take the PC stance that everything the right does is bigoted. Just one example: he said that there is a higher rate of criminality among blacks and the alt-right does something "racist" with this information. What they actually do is not assume every traffic stop of a black man must be motivated by racism, or that the number of black prisoners is somehow indicative of a systematically racist justice system. It is the left who takes the racist view, blaming whites' "systemic racism" for all problems faced by blacks because they ignore the facts Pinker spoke of, but he can't say that to a bunch of Harvard Liberals, can he?
POLLEN, thanks for the word "Cockamamie". I didn't know it. Thanks to you I leaned something today. By the way, what book would you suggest? (Not a big one, please: I'm still learning English).
On a different note, you are right: I shouldn't have talked about the left. It was partisan of me. I should have limited my scope to political correctness. I am sorry if I offended.
EMMA, thanks for the solidarity.
And I think you're right: he seems hesitant throughout the talk. It looks like he is taking extra care about his choice of words.
However, I am still bothered by the content: all the contextualising effort he talks about seems to be aimed only in avoiding any interpretation that would not be politically correct. Maybe it is just me, but I believe facts just don't care about political correctness. Or am I too naive to believe that not being (primerily) concerned with political correctness does not automatically entails one is a bigot?
In his defense, in the beginning, he mentioned something that might have happened in the campus that seems to be an example of a toxic consequences of PC. (The guy by his side seems a little upset about it: he anxiously starts to scribe on his notes). This is Pinker putting things in context to show that PC can also have bad consequences.
His overall point is also very valid: people are prisoners of the echo chambers of their own criation. Thus, they are not equipped to process neither facts nor divergent interpretations. And this is causing a great deal of pointless conflict.
(Universities seem to behave like big institutional echo chambers though. Which justify his care about his choice of words - I know I wouldn't want to be at odds with dozens of enraged Havard students: they are too competent to not believe they are always brilliantly right about everything...).
WELL put.
Wait... did he say at 5:40 that there is no history of wars of religion within the classical history of Islam? Which part is the classical part?
I love Steven Pinker! He usually has some very rational, well balanced arguments.
Yet he makes crazy hasty generalizations and mis-characterizations of other moral frameworks than his own statetheist ones, which are inherently based in violence and perpetual extortion of everyone. He is bright, but lacks some fundamental understanding of economics and distributed systems, and from his biases and lacking logic rigor he therefore ends up advocating for violent and enslaving solutions for solving complex social issues, and belittle those who do not accept theft and violence as the basis for how we deal with problems in society.
I agree with 90% of his positions. However I'd dispute two of his ideas. Namely that anarchocapitalism is not a viable or tenable option and that islamic history had a golden period in its history that should be reverred. It did have a decent period in its history when Baghdad was its capital but most of its great scholars were non Muslims. In other words, it did well in spite of Islam and when Islam was taken much more seriously by taking Al Ghazhali's ideas very seriously, it was destroyed. And it did relatively well doesn't mean it should be reverred or that it was better than Christendom. Christendom though was intolerant and that was unfortunate.
All Abrahamic religions are rather intolerant and the source of rather uncompromising beliefs, so I really don't see why Christianity should get the shit end while Muslims get the praise. In any case, I suspect the whole thing came from people claiming Christianity was the best, so people had a counter-reaction claiming Christianity wasn't as good, so people are having a counter-reaction and so on.
What's interesting is that anything positive that happened in Europe isn't attributed to religion, while anything that happened during the 'Islamic' golden age is attributed to Islam.
ivanlagrossemoule I'm not sure the 'Islamic golden age' is necessarily attributed to the religion itself. I only ever hear it used in the context of when someone claims it is a fundamentally backwards religion (which let's face it, is kinda true for all religions) and people counteract that with the fact they did have an enlightened era that's sadly disintegrated. I guess the point I'm trying to make is is that many people claim Islam is incompatible with modernity which isn't necessarily true, and like Christianity, just needs a bit of watering down to allow progress to flourish as history has shown was possible once before
Funny you say this, as I was trying to explain pretty much that to someone in another thread on another video.
People just can't have nuanced and complex opinions, it's either Islam is only bad, or Islam is only good.
Intolerance by Christians is societal, the fundamental tenant is forgiveness.
Intolerance by Muslims is doctrine, the fundamental tenant is submission. Can humans be trusted to do God's work?
Search for new testament equivalents to taqiyya, tawriya, kitman. If you have some free time make sense of Islam and slavery.
When Jesus died his disciples spread his word. When Mohammed died a power struggle ensued that remains today.
@@cowboybob7093 Thank you Bob, Most westerners have opinions on this Religion without any real knowledge. For instance the role of abrogation in interpretation and implementation of the Quran text. If the prophet said or did anything anything at a later date that conflicts with an earlier teaching, the earlier teaching is null and void. It is unfortunately generally agreed that the peaceful get along passages in the book were from a early time when Islam was a minority and so don't apply. That (along with a real fear of reprisal) is why you hear crickets from so much of this Religions leadership on the violence. Bottom line is if you wanted to be just like Jesus you would wander around with your disciples healing people and saying things like "put away your sword, those that live by the sword will die by the sword". If you want to be just like Mohamed you would take that sword and with your army conquer other nations forcing them to "submit" to Islam or die.
lol "the majority of domestic terrorism in this country is committed by right wing extremist groups not by Islamic groups"
what a pathetic failure of reasoning. Per capita, Muslims in the United States are incredibly over-represented among terrorist attacks even though there's just a tiny tiny minority. You're better than this Steve.
Xander Patten I noticed that too. I was thinking really is this bullshit argument by a supposedly brilliant professor all he has? Any freshman high schooler could easily destroy that pathetic argument.
Xander Patten so it must be that the liberal Elite, fully knowing their facts lead to undeniable and indisputable truths, have no choice but to cover up those facts rather than let them be talked about. Because letting them be understood will lead any reasonably intelligent person to an uncomfortable truth. (Eg Islam sucks. Race realism, etc)
It's not as if you care about the right wing terrorism in proportion to the per capita rate, it doesn't fit your narrative. Terrorism itself is extremely low on the list of problems if you care about per capita statistics, outside of the scare and frenzy it's an irrelevant number of lives compared to other sources of death, but most people don't view the world in statistics, they see the symbolic invader coming to rape and pillage and that's the perfect narrative, which is why so many of you are obsessed.
There's no reasoning going on, he just stated a fact.
Ticallion, he stated that fact as if it's relevant to and somehow in conflict with the idea Muslims do more domestic terrorism per capita; and that's both invalid and factually incorrect.
"...people whose affiliation might be up for grabs..." Poetry.
It's like I'm scrolling down an IQ ladder. Listening to an intelligent view on political correctness, and as I scroll down to the comments section intelligence drops exponentially.
The transcript of what he just said in a five minute video is 43 pages long you dumb dick. A two line comment may actually contain a brilliant argument if you know what the person is trying to say but doesn’t have the patience to type into what would become a wall of text no one would read.
Also you read comments in bad faith so what’s otherwise taken for granted becomes an opening for your counter argument.
Pinker is very much worth listening to, and probably one of the clearest and most rational voices on the internet.
This dude deserves a badge of honor for bravery.
doubt he could say these things nowadays without getting blacklisted by Harvard and other institutions. Sad state of affairs when rationality is no longer acceptable.
Who is the famous person he is talking about at 2:30 who talked about gender?
Maybe this guy? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_between_the_sexes
Not sure about many of his statistics, but most of his conclusions are good. I will say, that the notion of doing away with government safety nets isn't an extreme notion. Depending on who's statistics you use, >50% of the nation is on some sort of government handout (including corporations.) Very few people actually need some form of assistance, the rest just have excuses. Voluntary giving to charities can easily support those who absolutely need the help. Forcing the population into mandatory altruism is just theft. Especially when you realize that the majority of the allocated tax money doesn't even go to those who need the help. Worse is the simple fact that government safety nets only promote adding more people into their programs. People need incentives to get out of social programs, not stay in them.
sorry but there is absolutely no proof that voluntary charity would solve these problems. You need to finely tune wellfare systems so that its not just free money. The money they get from wellfare isnt good enough to justify not working in most cases
So, we should remove all state-run social-safety-nets and allow charities to take their place? Charities are notoriously bad at using their money for their indented purpose. Allowing unregulated capitalist charities to fill the "gap in the market" would result in charities that exclusively take advantage of people who donate to them.
Charities also know that some people mostly need a kick in the butt. However, if a government program was to take away someone's entitlements and kick them in the butt, there would be hell to pay.
Notice that he didn't roll back over the communist vs capitalist issue... It's because capitalism is better over all. Even Russia eventually got Mcdonalds... So you can have the two things intermingle, but no one in their right mind thinks the government taking controll of business assets is a good idea. When you're young you should follow your heart and be a socialist, but when you become an adult, and learn about the world, the alternative is impossible to ignore with the weight of evidence that supports capitalism. It's like he said, North or South Korea?
I liked this video but Pinker was wrong about social safety nets and ignores the fact that Islam was rapidly spread by the sword
he falsely characterizes Islam as better and more enlightened because it had no inquisition, but the inquisition was a single short event, islam has had non stop genocide since the day it was founded and non stop intolerance of blasphemy since day one. the Islamic version of the inquisition is just every day in islam
John Locke are you not aware of the Islamic Golden Age??? Do you not know why most of our algebraic terms are in Arabic? Or why most of the stars in the sky have Arabic names??? There's so many references to the Arabic language because they were once a great prosperous and diverse group of intellectuals. When Islam was ruled by various caliphates, where science and economic development and cultural works flourished!!! Educate yourself people! You are showing your ignorance bruuhhhh
because the arabs stole that knoledge to the indians?
fabian padilla
This 'period of enlightenment' came after they were fat with the riches from conquering and butchering the nations around them by the sword. Islam is anti-science - it states that the words of Mohammed are the end of knowledge.
Vocaloides no.......dude that bad shit came AFTER the enlightenment.......look I agree with you that Islam is fucked up....but Google this shit man!! Every time you reply I have to correct some shit you said lol and I agree with you about Islam.....
Which facts counter Anarchocapitalism? I'm open to hear them, but i'm searching for them since years.
I liken the progressive left to a street gang, at least in hierarchy. For those unfamiliar, street gangs deal drugs by having a low level gang member stand on a street corner. This is obviously a task with a high likelihood of being caught by police, so the gang puts layers of intermediaries between the street member and the boss, so when the street member is invariably caught, there is nothing to give the police. As gang members rise within the gang hierarchy, they not only become privy to the gang’s inner workings, but also gain more protection. Naturally, we might wonder what it is that draws a low level gang member to risk so much to enrich the gang boss while they shoulder little of the burden.
The ‘street members’ of the left are those you meet in protests, antifa, and so on. They don’t really understand their gang’s inner workings, its goals, or its methods. In this sense, I can’t really hate these leftists. They are being used for the high-level leftists’ goals.
Things do change over time, true. Things are getting harder in the black community. Feminism is getting worse.(ex. metoo)
He seems to using omission and half truths to distort reality. Academia is doomed.
Animal farm is unfortunately being introduced literally all around us, and it will lead to a combination of 1984 and a brave new world.
Brilliantly-eloquent and as polite as anyone I’ve ever heard speak a word. Well said.
It's fascinating to watch Pinker try and denounce PC from within the confines of PC. It's all very toothless, and he still seems nervous, like a flash mob might at any moment decide to tear him limb from limb. And this is what counts as brave truth-telling in academia -- sad!
As a conservative, you should empathize with his necessity to move slowly but surely, rather than in one large swoop.
I personally think that a conservative's primary thoughts would be closer to "eliminate the threat as soon as possible" and maybe even "you're either with us or against us".
That sounds like the far left in a nutshell. Most conservatives trust that their mindset will allow them to thrive without depending on others, so they don't tend to consider the left a huge threat except for when they try to take everyone's money.
I think you could actually make that claim about both. I was actually speaking from personal experience (being extremely Conservative myself) when I view the far left as a threat. I think this is at least part of the reason that right wingers seem to be embracing and even allying with moderate left wingers at the moment. The moderate ones, even in power, aren't a threat like the radicals.
Islam also had loads of inter-religious conflict, for example the Qarmatian fanatics waged a religious war across Arabia for decades and even managed to sack the holy city of Mecca itself, slaughtering all the pilgrims there and desecrating the holy sites, including stealing the sacred Stone. That is not even touching the Banu Hilal invasion of Northern Africa or the Shia Sunni wars of the Fatimids etc.
He is so wrong about Islam being more enlightened than Christianity. He said there was no equivalent to the Inquisition. The entire history of the spread of Islam was advanced through violence. The Shiites, and Sunni's have had many violent clashes, not to mention the persecution of minority Islamic sects, such as the Baha'i.
2:26 - you can't say it. Somebody very famous on this campus did say it and you know what happened to him!
You hear laughter and applause for one of the many dark events that is destroying Harvard's reputation for a classic liberal education. The fact that the President of Harvard couldn't say that men and women are different, and LOST HIS JOB OVER IT, is a huge condemnation about the lack of freedom of speech and inquiry on the Harvard campus, and extreme brainwashing of its students. So what do the students do? They laugh and clap! So now I know for sure that Harvard graduates still suck, and it's a good reason that I would not consider any resume from Harvard.
I want to be as free as possable, and the only way I can see to do that is to not deny any one the freedom that I want. That is why I am an Individualist. Aslong as you harm no one you are free.
Do you live on an island?
No. I try to live my values as best I can, but neather I or life is perfect.
Most indiviulists favor abortion bans, banning transgenderism, gay marriage, etc.
I wouldn't say that "taking the red pill" is the same as "joining the Alt Right," but other than that, all very solid points.
Some of his facts are historically inaccurate. I still agree with the conclusion for the most part.
Which ones?
Thanks for that, I too was fairly taken back when he made the claims that he did about Islam vs. Christendom
he claims there were no great religious wars in Islam compared to Christianity. That's pretty dishonest to say
haha I have that book sitting on my desk waiting to be read
mastercilander that is not what records of the time, from both christians and muslims, show.
You have to belive Inquisitors were forging their own texts with confessions under torture or letters that praise the massacre of heretics - protestants.
And vice versa.
The Inquisition was created to protect Roman Catholicism from all its foals, including other Christians.
Like Rush always said, conservatives teach that liberals are good people with bad ideas, but liberals teach that conservatives are bad people. Only one of those conclusions leads to further dialog and progression...
They didn't seem to mention the constant Anti-White bigotry and Anti-White Racism Whites are increasingly being subjected to. They may have helped LOL.
You can’t be racist towards whites, my friend. Reverse racism isn’t a thing.
tnanks! where can we watch the full video please??
I appreciate the intent here but there is so much misinformation that it falls apart factually (at least I hope it's misinformation and not disinformation...).
He doesn't have an answer.
@ Evan Pellegrini - Watching it again, I may have misspoke when I said "so much," however, I believe some of what he said about sexism, Islam and the claim that most domestic terrorism is committed by right wing extremist groups are at the very least misleading if not just plain wrong.
@ Captain Stack - Sorry I wasn't able to respond fast enough for you.
this is exactly how I feel! It's great to hear someone share my exact views :)
With statistical information context is very important. For example with regard to domestic terrorism he was talking in terms of total number of attacks. If we look post 9/11, from 9/12/01 to 12/31/16 there were 62 from right wing extremists and 23 from Islamic extremists. However the right wing extremists killed less people with 106 people compared to the 119 from Islamist attacks. But these numbers also shift over time. Not to mention there are over a hundred million conservatives in the country compared to only about three million Muslims. So you are probably not in much danger from a guy wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat. Based on a 8/19/17 article by Miriam Valverde in Politifact.
Imagine that, a world we people dont live in fear a facts, but face them courageously and honestly.
We had that, it was called the age of enlightenment or age of reason.
I’m really annoyed with the idea that a person can’t hear these things of which her speaks WITHOUT becoming an “alt-right extremist. All we’d like is for these facts to be a part of the discussion on fixing these issues, as they obviously have to be and are not currently. The solutions will never be correct until that happens
Five years later, just expressing these facts of life will get you branded an alt-right extremist.
Well this guy is half right on what he's saying. An example of where he's blatantly wrong is "there was no equivalent to the wars of religion" regrading Islam. The fact is war is precisely how Islam spread. The Crusades were a response to it. Pinker needs to take the red pill and not just acknowledge it exists.
Pinker and his brain, brain, brain, brain
Hahaha!
Lmao. Thanks!
Too bad he is so monumentally uninformed about who is committing the terrorist acts.
He's a coward; he won't speak the truth about race and IQ.
Lol, he's got a whole talk just about that: ruclips.net/video/K2sUW8q7uWI/видео.html
Finally i found a balanced channel! Subscribed!
He discusses domestic "right wing terrorism" as being the most prevalent form of terrorism here but the most egregious cases (Las Vegas, Orlando, etc.) were committed by progressives. But otherwise great presentation.
The Orlando shooter was a Muslim fundamentalist and hated gay people. The Las Vegas shooter's politics were unknown so I don't how you know he was a progressive if his own brother didn't know. I don't know which political wing contributes the most to violence, but the examples you are using aren't true.
the disappointed koala furthermore the Vegas shooter profile for terrorism is so far from and not even know to be even declared such.
+Todd Brown
More and more people are accepting Muslims jihad is to help for a theocracy. The Islam religion is political in nature, so it sounds left to me.
That is indeed how people like the Southern Poverty Law Center classify it.
+DarthRaider520 Yeah, forgot all about Antifa...but Pulse shooter was definitely a Dem (dailycaller.com/2016/06/14/omar-mateen-was-a-registered-democrat-but/), plus Pulse shooter's father was a Dem btw (www.wptv.com/news/state/orlando-shooters-father-attends-hillary-clinton-rally-in-kissimmee). And [correction] ultimately I agree with much of what +pinochet pilot #666 concludes, so the political beliefs of Paddock are likely irrelevant. But there are other lists of lefties besides Antifa that are rabidly antisocial, including Nidal Hasan - Ft Hood Shooter: Registered Democrat and Muslim; Aaron Alexis, Navy Yard shooter - black liberal/Obama voter; Seung-Hui Cho - Virginia Tech shooter: Wrote hate mail to President Bush and to his staff, registered Democrat. James Holmes - the “Dark Knight”/Colorado shooter: Registered Democrat, staff worker on the Obama campaign, #Occupy guy, progressive liberal, hated Christians; James Hodgkinson - Shot and hit multiple Republicans, including Steve Scalise: Registered Democrat and worked on Bernie Sanders campaign....etc. It just would have been nice for the good speaker in the video today to have listed what kind of far right terrorism he is referring to here in the US that amounts to more than the list provided in this comment reply.
that sucks, when I share there is no preview and you can't view the video
It really is sad that Anarcho-Capitalism is talked about as and considered to be extreme. How is it that "Don't steal from, forcibly coerce, or assault others" became the extreme position? Sad.
Anarcho capitalism is retarded, you cant defend proporty rights without the govorment
That's not an argument, and even if it were, it would be a fallacious appeal to consequence, and a bad one at that.
First off, no government can exist without violating property rights in the first place, so you can't defend property rights WITH a government. If a government claims, whether in portion or entirety, the product of my labor, it is asserting that it has more right to my property than I myself do. If you REALLY believe that a government protects property rights, you are deluding yourself; a government only protects the ability of its serfs to continue paying their taxes.
Second, Anarcho-Capitalism is not an ideology based around the best pragmatic outcome for myself, or for anybody else, it has to do with what is moral and what is tyrannical. Forcibly stealing another person's property is immoral, and therefor no government can be an ethical institution; hence why anarchy is the only ethical arrangement.
How do you stop people from stealing your stuff without the govorment?
you'd have to defend it your self
Not to mention that a community will not tolerate a thief; if someone starts getting aggressive in a community that doesn't have a government, people are going to come together to police themselves. Anarchy doesn't mean a complete chaotic free for all, it means no rulers, but that in no way precludes there being punishment for breaching others' property rights.
Only in government propoganda can you have the idea that "people are evil and will steal your stuff, so lets give all the power to a group of people we call "government" to control who is allowed to steal and murder."
After having seen the video I agree with his assessment but I’m less impressed with the example of capitalism and communism. He hasn’t given any examples of a communist society in the mentioned media.
A lot of nowadays people reject reality if it does not comply to their wishes and thoughts... Several centuries ago the reality would literally kill such people, due to civilisation and evolution the reality reaction is slower now, much slower, anyway it works as always
I mean, his opening points are correct. However, some of his later statements are either misleading or just plain false. The line he lays down about Islam being more enlightened than Christendom for large portions of history is a particularly stunning falsehood. Islam has always used force and violence to both spread it's ideology, and to keep people within the ideology. Christian time periods of violence such as the Inquisition are both wildly over-vilified by modern educators (the data isn't perfect, but most estimates I've seen have the church responsible for 500-3000 deaths over the course of 200 years - while those deaths are inexcusable, they are hardly the number of deaths one would expect considering how infamous that time period has become in modern academia), and are famous solely because they were abnormal compared to the majority of Christian history. The reason you don't have a specific Islamic time frame to vilify is because it has been murderous and violent throughout its existence. Pick any location in any century where Islam has been the dominant ideology, and you will find murder, rape, and torture all carried out in the name of Islam.
We _SHOULD_ become capitalists and do away with govt-provided safety nets. That's not an extremist perspective--it's a practical one.
Keep the safety net--just make sure it is provided (in order) by self, family, fraternity, then community.
It all started with Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas. After that case everybody had to be PC at work. Sexual harassment training was mandated etc.
If you haven’t studied Mises and Rothbard you don’t understand capitalism. That includes you, Dr. Pinker (who I like very much - a kind eloquent genius)!
I guess that's why he made the naive statement "that's why they don't license anarcho-capitalism"...he really doesn't get it.
Miserably marketing, quite stupid to even try to implement.
The Bandog some economists definitely have. One thing they makes me think many economists haven’t read them is that they say they haven’t. :) Scott Sumner hasn’t even read Hayek. Russ Roberts has read Hayek but not Rothbard or Mises. Paul Krugman hasn’t read relevant material either. And so on, and so on. Some definitely have. But if you haven’t read and comprehended Rothbard et al and can at least argue against it, you don’t understand really capitalism in my opinion. Cheers!
hey can you send me a link for the full show please?
I could nitpick but he seemed pretty chill. Agreed with much of viewpoint about freedom of speech.
Where is the link to the original video?
i think whats important is how you frame these facts as well as who's saying them and what their intention is. what I noticed is that every time the right speaks out about pc they do so with the intention to " own the libs" and "trigger lefties" which is also how they try to frame their arguments and phrases while also leaving out important facts and other details as well as mentioning other facts out of context. When they do this, of course it will upset the left who in response will lash out in the name of pc which in turn creates a cycle with the right "triggering" them, the left lashing at them, and the right getting upset before it repeats itself.
to an extent, I do believe in some form of pc but one that is encouraged in society and has naturally become a social norm; not one that has been enforced by the government. I think it should be discouraged that using racial slurs, homophobic slurs, etc be used in daily life but that is in my opinion that pc is defined as avoiding offensive slurs and phrases that are meant to dehumanize or target certain groups of people or individuals. however I believe that it is crucial that we keep certain facts that can be deemed "offensive" in context as well as using ALL of the facts and the way we frame them and our intentions behind saying them so that it will not seem "anti-pc" so that we may keep the public informed about these facts while not seemingly trying to upset everyone.
I know this comment is 3 years old, so your thoughts may be different now, but I believe PC to be extremely limiting and downright dangerous in some cases. I am not educated, so my terminology might be a little off. PC culture is what I call an identitarian ideology. Identitarianism by my understanding is the idea that the group identifier is vastly more important than the individual self. All humans, including you and me are identitarian to some degree, we are not omniscient creatures, so we need labels and categories to make sense of the world around us. As such, we settle for less because we cannot achieve more. But an identitarian ideology, especially a culturally accepted one, imposes external beliefs upon a populace, rather than the ability of critical thought and self reflection.
When it comes to political correctness in and of itself, it is no more than a tool, or a guideline to help people. A tool is only as good or as bad as the intentions of it's wielder, however, the efficacy of a tool is determined by the knowledge with which it is held. The problem is that PC culture is almost imposed as a social law which must be adhered to lest you get called an istaphobe. We have created a culture in which it is tacitly wrong to treat people like people, now we have to perceive and treat Asian people like Asian, not like people, gay people like gay, not like people. In this case, we are imposing values, beliefs, words, and stereotypes into the mouths of every human being in the entirety of history of existence of ever, because that is what we are told is correct.
For example; I was molested as a child, and many people in North America today are taught and even raised with the ideology of getting offended for my sake because it is the kind thing to do. However, when people get offended for me, they are not giving me my voice, they are imposing theirs upon me. They are not giving me freedom of expression or choice, they are imposing theirs upon the rest of society, dictating how everyone else must perceive and treat me, creating an artificial barrier between people, not uniting them. They believe they are lifting me up, when in reality they are pushing me down to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator, and using me as a cudgel to beat people they disagree with over the head. They aren't treating me like a living breathing human being, they treat me like a worthless sack of child fuck flesh that needs them to be my master because they genuinely believe I am incapable of basic human function. The soft bigotry of low expectations.
Under political correctness in it's ideological format, we don't matter, we don't exist, we are worthless, we are nothing but sacks of flesh to be segregated and categorized. For the more we perceive and treat people like nothing more than labels, the less human we all become, because we will be too busy treating each other like spreadsheets, rather than treating each other like human beings.
All of this in the name of correctness. Just because you're correct, doesn't mean you're right.
@@TheCalmPsycho While I do agree that people are more than labels, what you are saying is not the purpose or intent of PC and your description of those being PC is inaccurate. The entire point of PC is to identify and acknowledge the issues and problems that individual marginalized groups face and then attempting to solve them socially, politically, economically, etc.
For example black people constantly deal with systemic racism especially in the justice system, gays still do not have equal protection under the law, there has been an increase of bigotry towards the LGBT in general, Asians had to deal with hate crimes etc.
By not acknowledging the identities of these people and just "treating people as people" you are essentially ignoring the unique struggles that each group face and therefore you are ignoring the problem as well as not solving the problem. PC does not stereotype others, it brings awareness and identifies the common struggles, issues, and problems that individual marginalized groups face.
Using your example as a child rape victim, people are not taught to be offended in North America. They are taught that molestatation, rape, SA etc. is a terrible thing and that the issue itself is much worse than once was thought. They are taught that victims tend to be silenced and that victims were "asking for it". They were taught that the issue is more than just some mugger preying on a woman in the middle of the night; that it often occurs with people in authority abusing their powers and that the rapists are often someone that the victim knows. They speak out and attempt to speak for ALL victims of sexual assault that again the issue is a lot more serious than previously thought. Not to invalidate what you went through, but there are also countless victims that appreciate those who attempt to raise awareness, speak out for them, and even give them a voice.
PC may be annoying to some but mainly towards those who lowkey support if not align themselves with bigotry, prejudice, etc. Under PC, issues of individual marginalized groups face are identified and eventually resolved.
And by ignoring the unique labels they have you also ignore the systemic problems faced in a society where people have equal opportunity and protection under the law.
Also your use of the word identitarian is horribly misused considering that it refers to far right ethno-nationalist politics.
@@bobjones5370 I appreciate your detailed response, and it is my fault that I wasn't detailed myself. I agree with you on most of what you said. The intention of PC is different than the intentions of a subset of people using PC.
PC is a tool, it can be used for good and bad. While I was focusing on the negatives it can produce, I did not acknowledge the good that it can produce like your comment did. And again, that was my fault, I laser focused on things people do with PC that annoy me, rather than the totality of the ideology and its different uses.
I do think it is important to discuss the issues specific to different groups, as you stated, but I also find a subset of people doing what I was complaining about, which is reducing everyone into labels in the name of political correctness, and I find it happens very often.
One thing that I disagree with you on is your usage of the word identity. In my mind, gay, black, Asian, and white are not identities, but rather identifiers. This is what I meant by imposing values and perspectives upon people. Things that happen to some of these people are external factors, not internal factors. That is why someone like me who was molested as a child, cannot speak for someone else who was molested as a child, it is the difference in external factors *and* internal factors that make our perceptions and beliefs different. As you said, most people who were molested as children appreciate being given a voice, but again, that is the voice of the speakers, not my voice, not the voice of other people who were molested. And because of those talks focusing on the values of the perceived majority, as you said it is most of them, then my voice is being rejected because I am not in the majority, and values are imposed upon me by people believing they are doing good. Maybe I am nitpicking here, and maybe I am still not articulating my point properly, but I do believe there is a subtle, yet very important, distinction between identity, and identifier.
As for my misuse of identitarianism, I knew that it was mainly used to label alt-right, but I find the values of identitarianism in the misuse of PC or identity politics. Identitarianism through the alt-right white supremacy lens is the dehumanization, and sometimes even demonization of black people or Jews into nothing more than black/Jew and imposing perspectives and beliefs upon and about them. And that is the exact same value I was describing in the misuse of PC in my first comment. The intentions are different, but the result is the same, black is inherently ___ because black, Asians are inherently ___ because Asian, people who were molested as children are inherently ___ because they were molested as children. These are external factors being imposed upon a demographic or a label because of social/political ideologies saying they are correct.
Like I said, I am uneducated, so if there is a better term for what I am describing, I do not know it, but I was not trying to say that people misusing PC in the way I described earlier are evil or stupid, or alt-right supremacists. I do genuinely believe most people are good people trying to do good within the scope of their beliefs, values and experiences.
Anyway, I appreciate you taking time out of your day to talk with a random stranger. I always enjoy talking to people with different perspectives even if we may not agree or like what each other believes, and it makes me happy when people give me that chance. Talking on the internet is like screaming into the void, very rarely do I get anything close to a good response like you gave me. Thanks again, and have a nice day!
@@TheCalmPsycho
I understand and agree with the subset of people who misuse PC. Yes they are annoying. Yes they can be irritating. Yes they can be at times be counterproductive to their own movement (those people are called wokescolds and SJWs btw, you'll often find them on twitter participating in cancel culture and such; hell even leftists hate them). But they are just that. A subset. Meaning they are a small minority of the group who support PC. The vast majority are not foaming in the mouth SJWs or wokescolds.
And the benefits outweigh the cons. The benefits are to put an end to systemic racism, poverty, and other social issues that affect mankind as a whole. That tiny subset who misuse PC matter little in the grand scheme of things. Yes we should try to also give a voice to those who do not feel like as though they are being spoken for, however it is also more practical and more effective in the grand scheme of things to speak out for the vast majority of people who need help. I am sorry that you were hurt, however it is unfair and unpractical to let the entire majority of a group have their futures influenced by a small minority in that same group to move things forward. I believe that the first step is to help the majority of individual marginalized groups before "polishing" those said groups by helping the small minority within them who do not feel represented.
Also, concerning identitarians, the results are not the same. Identitarians use labels and categories on groups so they can make a "hit list" of enemies to demonize and eventually wipe out. Identitarians are inherently a harm to society and the world as a whole. PC is inherently not harmful despite annoying ass SJWs and wokescolds. When those idiots misuse PC, it does not create catastrophic events where massive groups of people of certain identities get sent to concentration camps or a firing squad nor does it create a wave of hate crimes sweeping the nation. Identitarianism does however.
That said I agree. Wokescolds, SJWs, and cancel culture are annoying and counterproductive asf. But they are not really that much of a harm to society.
Pinker is in many ways erudite, posing an interest in areas from cognitive science to linguistics to behavioural genetics to sexual selection. He is in many ways a merchant of 'what', and has much to say about what is.
His 'why', of course, leaves much to be questioned. One doesn't *need* to know about group averages or such to be opposed to their abuse, and much of what was said with regards to right wing terrorism being more prevalent in the US - and even with regards to other white groups in the past - is an active part of progressive leftist discourse as is. It's *known* that these facts exist, but there are simply alternative accounts proposed which add more nuance.
Perceived censorship of the notions altogether rightfully causes alarm but, we've of yet mostly anecdote to go by. Which begs the question of their salience as well as in turn what the MSM has to say as vectors of this.
I also feel as if the continued notion that discussions of brain sex or the prevalence of Islamic terror simply aren't widespread enough let alone this being why the AR is so prevalent (rather than other stressors) is heavily misguided and almost laughable to one who noticed no such popularity of this extremism as tabloid publications had been sensationalising such items ad nauseam up until the AR finally hit their zenith: both notions have rung heavily in American culture and beyond to this very day, or at least these are major cultural contentions beyond what sway campuses pose for the population at large.
I also have to seriously doubt that many college campuses actively endorse or normalise communism, even if perhaps not posing a layman's conception of the political theory and historical context at play. I wouldn't even say the mainstream as a whole normalises social democracy let alone anything further left, given the initial hysteria with which Bernie Sanders was covered.
Rather it's the sheer and stubborn lack of any Keynesian aspects to 'economics 101' in the public eye that feeds a subculture of ancaps, rather than merely 'not liking communism'. This isn't even a linchpin of the AR's economics, but a side effect of the long standing economic illiteracy of the general public particularly with generations of neoliberal propaganda that blamed government regulations for literally everything. Many are in fact protectionist.
While it is true that many ancaps/libertarians hold racist beliefs this is both not universal and also dates back to the likes of Rothbard and Hoppe. Mises iirc was pro-feminist, but also operationalised his ideas under the short lived austrofascist regime.It isn't that people are only recieving these notions from a point of first contact per se as racial animus with regards to crime and welfare were implicit back in the days of Raegan and so are hardly esoteric. The alt right comes as a more overt operationalisation of some of these notions with other factors hitting critical mass.
This goes *far* beyond 'universities', which many AR folk haven't attended to begin with.One of the first uses of the term 'alternative right' dates, in fact, to Paul Gottfried's seminal invocation of the term in 2008: an economy in the balance, a populace experiencing fear and existential dread.
In the wake of recession neoliberal economic thought faced a major shock and thus by proxy the political mainstream, and this was only to further mature with the passage of time: even now, economic outcomes continue to diverge with the wealthiest and the poorest in the United states for instance.
It's material imbalances and shocks etc, rather than there being not enough discussion about 'Islamic terrorism' or 'communism being the biggest bad ever' (again, both notions fairly banal), which define the rise of such a movement in my view.
Either of these two notions are honestly banal given the saturation of commentators offering this perspective, but few pose the same enthusiasm as the particular cohort of insecure young men who devote much attention to this line of enquiry.
TL;DR: Many notions really are ultimately banal (correctly identified as such to some extent), but other factors drive the 'redpill/alt-right' movement.
He should read some Michael Huemer or David Friedman before commenting on anarcho-capitalism.
shadyparadox yup
shadyparadox he compares it to racism and sexism, so he clearly has no idea what it is.
Or Rothbard or Mises or Hoppe etc. etc.
In pinkers defense when he says "regulation" he might not distinguish between regulation by force and voluntary regulation. So he has a reasonable way forward by accepting voluntary governance/regulation as permissible and rejecting state governance/regulation.
Hi There I like those guys too, I just find Huemer and Friedman to be the most rigorous in their logic.
>falling for the anarcho-capitalism meme
There are about 6+ of the top comments related to his failure to properly address Islamic religious wars. I’m sorry, did anyone hear the other 10,000 things he said that are massively important to human thought? Talk about horse blinders.
Good persuasive argument. I feel like the context thing was kind of off.
To assume that everyone in the "group" is just unable to properly decide context is a scary way to think. I agree it is probably caused because of media and this new wave of overly political correctness.
I believe that right most groups are overly logical, and left most groups are overly emotional and are unable to compromise with each other because their brains work in different ways.
Love it that he just throws anarcho-capitalism there for no reason and proceeds to "refute" it with one of the weakest fallacies I have ever seen. Ehat was that?
0:25 I'm shocked to hear him admit that the alt-right is highly intelligent.
send him to the quillotine
Who is this "person at this campus" that he is referring to?
The most successful economy in the history of the world was early 1800s America, when regulations were at their lowest. It's become WORSE as more regulation has been added, and significantly more so once central banking was introduced.
And it bred political extremism. The conditions for ordinary workers during the industrial revolution were truly horrific. This is why people started becoming Communists and Anarchists, why they started assassinating political leaders and businessmen. 19th Century capitalism is not a viable model for a stable society.
That's an untrue characterization of industrialization that is perpetuated by government schools that have a vested interest in making you believe that without government, you would be abused by employers. That's simply impossible when workers have the freedom to choose which jobs to work without government regulation forcing good employers out of the market.
Not to mention that the public school system was specifically designed to pump out factory workers, not free thinkers.
V.Lute you describe a period where the country was transitioning from poor to rich. During that time the conditions were better than when it was poor and worse than when it was rich. This is a viable model for a society, but it was a period of change so by definition it wasn't stable.
skylarscaling
Except that's just not true. Working conditions in the USA are already bad compared to more regulated countries. Some countries have 35-36 hours weeks, 6-8 weeks mandatory holidays, minimum wages for everyone and STILL run effectively. In the USA you get fucked by employers in all sorts of ways, unless you want to argue that people can just all abandon their jobs at Wallmart and go find something else, because it's pretty clear they would if they could.
And yeah, public education doesn't want free thinkers if you consider that it's just people who'll believe anything as long as it's posted on a random crackpot website and isn't the official version.
Yeah, the poor working conditions here are why people are falling over each other to come here, and the "better conditions" are working really well for Europe, with its cascade of failing and bankrupt countries. America has more entrepreneurship than any other country that I'm aware of, and millions of people don't work a 40 hour job and still make a nice living. And most of the rest of the people feeling stuck in jobs are in that position because they have obligations to pay off the debt they've accrued living a life of $600 phones, big screen TVs, Netflix, and a million other luxuries that other countries would kill to have access to.
America is still the greatest country in the world, but with the out of control government spending and debt, it's still going to suffer. Regulation and big government is the CAUSE of that, NOT the solution.
He says you don’t necessarily drift toward right wing politics after learning the facts. But many do, perhaps even a majority. Hence the desire to tell “noble lies.”
The leftists are probably right. Their best strategy is to keep lying.
Pinker speaks well but is ideologically blinded. I have consistently seen this on his Twitter profile. He has also wrongly presented several facts in this presentation.
Yet You dont enlighten the Rest of us with the right facts?
Stefan Diercks
well, [off the top of my head] you could start with
- "no wars in the history of islam" my answer to that would be= what is India? (not limited to the present day India) read up material on islamic imperialism in India, even the Sufis were barbarians
- "the rw terrorism > islamic terrorism"
this myth has been debunked. for starters, it doesn't consider islamic terrorism (religious fundamentalism) as rw. calls Orlando Shooting a rw incident. conveniently ignores 9/11.
-
I am going to have to listen to it again
No religeous wars in Islam? In what parralell universe is this true?
No kidding, the guy is a full on Islamic apologist.
By his own argument he is fomenting the rise of the alt-right (the Richard Spencer alt-right).
I'm shocked by some of the nonsense being spewed by Steven Pinker in this video. The absolute misconception expressed at 5:33 just blows my mind. Continuing to spread this ignorance is a threat to our future.
Not the most honest piece I've seen. He uses PC Jargon, "African American" and "European American". He ignores the fact that the statistical differences in interest and ability drive the differences in careers and not discrimination. That's why the progressives deny them.
Considering most American blacks have never been to Africa yet alone claim citizenship there, makes that term intrinsically dishonest. Are there some African Americans, sure, not all of them are black though.
I think the point is that there is significant overlap in the statistics that you can't come to conclusions about the individual.
"Americans of African descent" and "Americans of European descent" are too much of a mouthful.
+nustada: > using African American: well nothing else is allowed, all other words have become tainted. 'Negro' sounds dated and too much like that other word.
You complain about his wording even though it's standard - in society, not just science - and you perfectly understand what he means? That's the method of social justice warriors.
What was he supposed to say? Blacks and Whites? What benefit would that bring to you?
I'd appreciate Mr Pinker addressing homicide rates of certain races within their homeland nations. I suspect they are quite similar to that found in the states.
I'm shocked that this needs to be explained. I always thought it was clear to everyone with a high school diploma, let alone to students on prestigious American universities
Correct.
Who was he talking about at the start who got fired?
The president of Harvard. He expressed the very true statement that women aren't as good at math as men and wondered if that was biological and could not be remedied by any social engineering. The female faculty threw a fit and forced him to resign for stating a biological fact of life.
Pinker shows his limited understanding of economics when he criticizes anarcho-capitalistism. Lumping an-caps with racists, sexists, and other extremists. What is extreme about respecting property rights and condemning theft and violence?
Yep it seems lately even Common Law is a tool of oppressors. "What do ya mean, 'do no harm'??"
who is he talking about at the 2:20 mark?
Pinker forgets to mention race and IQ. I wonder why?
Like how people of Asian descent have higher IQ on average than people of European descent?
@Slaws Mcslaws
Yes, for example.
ChrissyG Talking about controversial facts doesn't mean he has to mention all of them
Race and IQ...?
Not necessarily true. The Asian community places a different value on those subjects that are tested to prove a higher IQ. Meaning the Asian communities ideologies and practices (PRACTICES meaning, they do it more than other people and grow in their aptitude of that skill), are what the European community as come up with to test to "prove" people have a higher IQ. If the IQ test included rhythm perhaps people of African descent would score higher? My point is smart is relative to what you value as smart, what one is well versed in re: practiced a lot, and ultimately what you test for.
Who is Pinker talking about at 2:26?
To sum up his argument, you know the facts but you’re not thinking how we want you too.
I have a very weird feeling that most of the people commenting on this video are not the kinds of people that Steven Pinker wants to associate with, and yet this video is titled exactly to appeal to those people instead of necessarily representing Pinker's view.
"Through much of it's history Islam was far more enlightened than Christendom"
Lost me there... Completely ignorant and ridiculous statement. As well as lumping anarcho-capitalism in with racism, sexism etc. Laughable.
It was. As also Neil degresse Tyson has pointed out. They were not anti-intellectuals for a long time whilst Europe was in the dark ages. It changed with Islam because one religious leader decided that numbers are the work of the devil. As Tyson points out, Islam has not recovered from that since.
No.
Steven.....ugh. C'mon, I love you bro. Did you have to be so cautious that you went and bit it so hard on Islam? No equivalent to the Inquisition? No religious warfare? Drilling down on these claims is going to get you distinctions, without any qualitative, substantive differences - none relevant to the concern of religious violence, neither in kind, nor in quantity. Dude, you were my favorite. STOP the cowardess. Speak the truth and let the chips fall where they will.
If men and women are on average different, pinker is right that it doesn't mean you should discriminate, however it does mean that you shouldn't be prevented from discriminating if you see fit.
"you shouldn't be prevented from discriminating if you see fit." you should because " men and women are on average different" on average but not all.
Except we can only make rules for the average case, not the exceptional. So if you're not allowed to discriminate for the exceptional, you won't be allowed to discriminate for the average.
for example hooters only hires female waitresses, an italian restaurant might prefer to only hire italian staff. Both types of discrimination don't imply sexism or racism. Another example is that Disney will discriminate against men and against non-asians for the job of playing Mulan at their parks.
exactly. But I'm saying they should be allowed to do it even if it is racist and sexist. we should not be trying to legislate morality. If nobody is being directly harmed, it shouldn't be illegal. If you don't like it, you can boycott businesses that do it and even encourage others to do so but you don't just get to shut them down.
I agree and I think most people agree with a lot of reasons for discrimination, like the Mulan example, heck people would get offended and talk about whitewashing if Disney hired a white girl and gave her chinese looking makeup hahaha!
The problem is that people only think of segregation when they hear about allowing discrimination.
Walter Williams gave a funny example in an interview. He talked about how much we discriminate when we look for a spouse. Most people have a really narrow list of criteria, and discriminate against a gender and several ethnicities.
Hate facts are not allowed.
The alt right does possess the truth
Since when? The alt right is more prone to read actual fake news for instance.
Hirnlego999 ok, whatever
5:06 the tenasity of the Irish Americans is now channeled through joining the military and police :)
OMG an actual truth seeker!!! It won’t be long before someone destroys him I’m sure
Pinker is eminently thoughtful and rational, and chooses his words very well. Navigating controversy the way he does, and bringing this kind of reason to very emotionally incendiary subjects, is not trivially easy. It's a skill which all academics should seek to master.
I disagree with his assessment of pure vs. mixed capitalism, but I have to commend him anyway just for speaking so well, which is incredibly valuable even if it only means that other people I disagree with have an example of what virtue in debate looks like.