https://imgur.com/6BtzzZi
From the new book The Dawn of Everything, there is a whole section like this, it's great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlClHbhOR-c
Just a brief thought about the utopia and religion section: Jordan is essentially arguing humans have a pronounced utopian impulse and it's a dangerous impulse indeed. He sees the most murderous movements in history as utopian (communism, Nazism) and suggests the good thing about religion is that it says 'It's impossible to create utopia here on this earth, only in the afterlife.'
Now some people have nothing but contempt for JP. But I happen to like him quite a bit, find him brilliant in fact. Butttt the apologetics are just so bad. Look at the crusades, the religious wars, look at Islamist terrorism... the idea that religious people confine their utopian impulses to the notion of an afterlife is so flagrantly false. It's not as extreme but the Mike Pence brand of Christianity that tries to make America look like the Bible... that's pretty utopian too.
Jordan seems to subscribe to the 'If people don't believe in religion, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything' idea but I would happily contrast stable and prosperous Western European countries that are overwhelmingly secular with any highly religious place whether it's Little Rock Arkansas or Kabul. Just an issue he gets badly wrong I think and Haidt and Pinker do push back some.
I don't wish to give any credence to the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory, which I believe has been quite successfully discredited. I looked at it fairly closely when it was popular, and it was very clear that it involved outlandishly detailed conclusions from a very sparse amount of extremely spurious evidence.
But what I found strange in Stephen Pinker's conversation with Joe was that he seemed to bring up the conspiracy theory as an example of one of the most ludicrous of the current period. I have never really understood this line of thinking. It occurs to me there are far more bizarre conspiracy theories out there than Pizzagate.
Pinker appears to think that the idea of a child sex trafficking organisation using such a seemingly innocuous business as a pizza shop as a front is the height of absurdity. Yet of course many criminal organisations do use fronts, and the whole point of a front is that it seems innocuous.
Child sex trafficking organisations do also exist, and as we have learnt from the Epstein and Dutroux cases, they may involve members of the very highest tiers of the worlds of celebrity and politics.
Of course, these realities only make Pizzagate possible in the same way that the existence of the crime of murder makes it possible that my neighbour is a murderer, with any accusations of him actually being one remaining completely baseless until evidence is produced. But equally, of all the totally bonkers theories out there, it is surely one that is comparatively rather grounded, if only for the fact that it consists entirely of elements that are known to exist.
When you take into account the Jimmy Savile case in the UK, the Dutroux affair in Belgium, and the Epstein scandal in the US (which had already been brewing for a long time before Pizzagate blew up), it doesn't seem particularly surprising that some people became a little monomaniacal and began seeing cases of elite paedophilia where it wasn't. In light of such a context, Pizzagate seems neither extraordinary or inexplicably strange, but a fairly predictable consequence of a moment of cultural shock where people have had to recalibrate their perspective of the world to accommodate the existence of elite paedophile rings. It is not surprising that some people have not quite focused their new lenses correctly, and have made misapprehensions as a result.
Why, then, does Pinker seem to find Pizzagate so ludicrous that he can't even bring himself to believe that people ever sincer
... keep reading on reddit ➡Does anyone experienc this, especially when covering one eye then looking out the other? When comparing ones vision looks green or cooler theories looks pink and warmer, almost like there’s a filter over the vision. I’m not sure how common this is or if it’s completely unrelated to “typical” stuff
https://www.commentary.org/articles/james-meigs/alan-sokal-parody-predicts-dreadful-woke-future/
