Decoding the Gurus - Supplementary Material 2: Dissident Dialogues, Bloodbaths, & Genocidal Debates

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

The adventure in formatting continues with the second Supplementary Material episode, in which we:lament we don't command the same level of loyalty as Sam's fanscommend a noted sycophant for warning about idolising herosassess the degree to which the "Dissident Dialogues" conference is anything other than bog-standard right-wing orthodoxy; andreveal the TRUTH about Norman Finkelstein's angry rantingas well as so many more opinionated meanderings, for those decent citizens who are willing to pay us the measly sum of $2 month so Chris doesn't have to do three jobs just to exist in this capitalist societyOn this episode:Sam Harris DevoteesDissident DialoguesLex's important message about not worshipping idolsTrumpian Bloodbath & Media CriticismLex Fridman's Israel-Palestine DebateFinkelstein vs. DestinyGenocidal Debates The full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (1hr 14mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurusLinksLex Fridman Podcast: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny MorrisDissident Dialogues – A PLACE FOR DANGEROUS IDEASGuardian News clips from the 'Bloodbath" speechJoe Rogan & Jonathan Haidt Disagree About Donald Trump BLOODBATH CommentLex's anti-Idol TweetGuardian Article (2015): Israel exonerates itself over Gaza beach killings of four children last yearUN investigation (2015) that covered the beach bombings and reached more critical conclusionsThe Globe and Mail (2015): Account from a reporter

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Music Music Music Music Music Music Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's Supplemental Material, episode two, the second one of that. He is a psychologist. I am an anthropologist. We are not decoding guru long-form content, but we are are looking what gurus have been up to what we're trying to interpret the signs in the guru sphere the orbits and what's happening in the celestial

bodies there so welcome welcome matt to this second inaugural episode yes good afternoon chris and you called it supplementary material or i've been calling it supplemental materials or something like that okay i'm just gonna get the terminology right supplementary material we did ask people for suggestions so we got a whole bunch of good suggestions some might even say better suggestions than supplementary materials but you know once you've done something, Matt, that kind of like sticks in your head, and I get it that, you know, a lot of people don't really understand what that means. For those that don't understand, it is a thing which often comes with

articles in academic journals where people put additional material. Sometimes it has very important material, which is crucial to understand to be an article but they don't have space so they have to put it in supplementary materials and you know our podcast is academically themed we're academics it kind of makes sense i think it makes sense and yeah there were other suggestions and i appreciate everybody offering them but yeah unfortunately it just stuck in my head so we're we're done with it i can't change it can't change it no that's fine and it makes sense because before we essentially put all our supplementary materials at the beginning of a guru decoding episode make the episodes extremely long

and tiring for us to create now they're in their own little dedicated episode so yeah what's been going on chris any updates on gurus um things grinding your gears on the internet let's try not to make it an airing of grievances completely but you you may air one or two number one no yeah no there has been things going on though i do want to say just one aside on a previous episode so you know you know, the interview with Sam Harris is on YouTube and whatever the settings are for our account there, I get email notifications when people comment. Probably should turn that off, but YouTube comments are, you know, there's kind of a unique thing, right? Every social media has its own character flavor and texture yeah yeah you go

to reddit you get a certain kind of thing you go to twitter you get a certain kind of thing and youtube is its own very special kind of thing but you know it's fair to say that you know sam is a bigger figure than us and and has a quite devoted following. And it is interesting to get notifications from his fans who come across the interview that we did with him. So I'll just read two of them because I thought they were quite funny. Well, oh, actually, this is one that I think you needed to hear, Matt. It's an intervention. Thankfully, neither of you will ever have to know what it's like to have a successful popularity campaign go to your head you'll be squealing like a chronic case of envy or hitting a vape on camera as an explicit lack of class instead

i think the grammar again this is one of those cases where the grammar reflects the quality of the inside but you're ma and you're vaping yeah was demonstrating your lack of class sorry lack of class it's well you know it's true i'm not that i'm not that classy so and i probably shouldn't be vaping while we're talking i'll try to be good oh you're fine you're fine you haven't developed the the guru stare you know like where you just stare directly behind the lens of the camera. It's very disconcerting. I just wanted to make fun of you vaping. But these are the two comments which highlight, I think, aspects of, you know, the devotional character that we sometimes notice in the communities that surround guru figures so once i had sam was making an interesting point at the 44th minute and you idiots cut him off how dare you i think i think if you're a sam harris dead like you literally cannot get enough sam harris like he could talk for two hours and you're still going to be hanging and go what's he going to say next he needs to finish yeah this that point was i believe him discussing the you

know nature of self point which he's discussed a lot on other venues and had already discussed a lot with us when you suggested that we wouldn't get to the bottom of these issues right so that's unfortunate but the the second comment comment makes the point that you did, which was just somebody wrote, such a difficult lesson every time it pans to anyone but sound. Yeah. Well, it didn't pan to us very often. They only had to put up with our stupid mugs like 5% of the time.

A bit more than that. But nonetheless, it's interesting because you know there's various other comments and there's you know idiot comments and nice comments and some critical comments about time and stuff as well but it it's just that feeling which you just emphasized about you know they literally cannot get enough of what's on the and whenever one of our stupid you know points interrupts his flow or whatever, physically painful. It's just we're interrupting the master at play.

So I'm not saying that's reflective of everybody that listens to Sam, but I think it is reflective of a particular attitude that develops around people like sam and jordan peterson and you know brett weinstein and whatnot as well yeah yeah and it's on the audience as much like it's the particular character or personalities of the audience as much as the gurus in terms of them like i think wanting someone up there on the pedestal that can speak the you know the unvarnished truth to them yeah why don't we get this one why don't we get people saying no how dare you interrupt we don't have the goods right we do not have the goods unfortunately yeah

if you're fans if you're fans of us go out there terrorizing people that they're saying yeah that you just need more and more monologues and any interruption of it it just makes you upset um don't do that don't do that but um yeah that's that's interesting and a slightly related topic i think matt a sentiment at least which speaks against this kind of attitude was voiced by our friend and ai researcher lex friedman he tweeted out don't idolize anyone we're all just flawed humans a week or so yeah this is from from the oh i just saw that i tried to check his tweets but i'm blocked again i was unblocked for a while, but now I'm blocked again. Yes, Lex, of course, famously not someone who idolizes anyone,

except of course he does. Elon Musk. Yeah, he's the internet's number one sycophant. Voicing their sentiment is what makes it notable. But the sentiment is good right it is correct you shouldn't idolize people you shouldn't put them up on pedestals and even people that are making great achievements or whatever are you know just human with flaws inevitably so sentiment is is valid but it's the source of the sentiment which causes the it's like well it's a good well in that it's

quite similar to the article we just reviewed for decoding academia perfectly good article nodded my head furiously at many of their points but it was just the it's just the authors of it that's made one the raise one eyebrow a little bit yes and for those who are not privy to such discussions, this was an article by Vinay Prasad and John Ioannidis that was talking about obsessive criticism versus legitimate criticism and dec they consider obsessive criticism and the fact that they are responsible for encouraging obsessive criticism of various people that they dislike, it does make the article read slightly differently. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that's okay. What about this conference thing, Chris? Oh, yeah. There was a conference, the Dissident Dialogues, in partnership with UnHerd. You know, UnHerd, the online magazine, kind of Quillette-ish magazine, but sometimes has interesting contrarian articles, but also mad, batshit, crazy stuff on it. And in any case, they have this event, Dissident Dialogues, taking place in New York. And on the poster, you've got a whole bunch of people. The headliners are Richard Dawkins, Ian Hirsialli,

John McWhorter, and Steven Pinker. But then slightly smaller font, Constantine Kissin, Francis Foster, John Vervacchi, Michael Schellenberger, Chris Williamson, Brianna Joy Gray. And then the font continues to get smaller and you end up with people like Freddie Sowers from Unheard, Bridget Phetasy, Andrew Gold, Alex O'Connor, Cosmic Skeptic, Michael Moynihan from the fifth column, Nathan Robinson from Current Affairs. So I made the reference online. I posted this poster and said, somehow the IDW has returned. Do you get that reference, uh i'm not sure is it the return

what's the reference no not really oh god yeah see well because in the new star wars movies they brought back emperor palpitating right but they just explained it in the opening crawl oh that's right that's somehow the emperor has returned so okay that's on you chris that's on you i think that's a well-known online reference i think that's a format that people get usually i'm not saying it's a classic movie or anything i just mean people are making fun of that you know lack of explanation now in this case the issue is i invoke the specter of the idw right so i immediately get responses from people saying well it's not the exact people in the id there's no weinsteins and and i know i know i'm just making a kind of you know it is a group of renegade intellectuals

very much yeah dissident dialogues come on and the idw it's kind of a still i think remains a useful fuzzy category label right because exactly this kind of thing is like it's it doesn't matter if the cast is rotating and what they call themselves but there is always this role for i don't know how to describe them but they're like idw type people independent commenters you know discussing the big ideas you know having the fierce debates that that you're not going to hear on the mainstream media um well, you will, though. This part of the issue is that, yes, so the way that they are characterized is often like this. And I agree that the IDW was an interesting instantiation

of that. But it's basically what people refer to as heterodox. Yeah, sure. That kind of perspective. But the issue now and then is that often the diversity is overstated and that there are various issues that you can predict very consistent takes on like how many people on this lineup are what you would define as pro-woke. Yeah, look, I mean, there are a couple, like Nathan J. Robinson's on the billing, right at the very bottom. At the very bottom. He is an interesting exception in some ways,

but how many other people fit like non-critical of wokeness being one of their primary things? It's very theory. I think my issue with this is not that they're heterodox or not even that they're predominantly anti-work liberals perhaps centrists maybe i don't know some yeah a mixture yeah but anyway the point is is not the political valence it's it's more that all of these people are currently like professional influencers like these are people that just spend all day every week influencing in some way shape or form you know like recording conversations

like this like it's a full-time job it doesn't feel like there's a great deal i mean yes you know richard dawkins is at least in a prior life, a substantial figure. John Wawacki is an academic. I mean, like people do have day jobs, I suppose. But like they're all grinding. You know what I mean? Like they're all interested in capturing, I don't know, online attention. Yeah, I mean, I think so. But I don't know that that's primarily, I mean, there are people

on that list that I would definitely highlight. I mean, Konstantin Kitson, we've documented his fixation and Francis Foster made the list. He's actually in the second biggest font category. So good on Francis. But yeah, no, I would describe them in that way. know, Francis. But yeah, no, I would describe them in that way. You can see Andrew Gold, who is somebody who presented as critical of cults and that kind of things, but is very much, you know, trying to rise up the commentosphere ranking. And people would say, you know, Alex O'Connor and whatnot are similar to that. But I also think, you know, Richard Dawkins, popular science writer,

John McWhorter, columnist for the New York Times and academic, Steven Pinker, writer, John Vervaeke, academic, Chris Williamson, forecaster. You know, there are plenty of people there that have other mean outputs as opposed to just being pundits. But there's a lot of pundity types there as well. It's pundit heavy, I would say. Even someone like Richard Dawkins is currently, I think, mainly involved in punditry, it seems. He's not writing books at the moment. I agree. But so the punditry thing is just, you know, when you have a conference that is billing itself as a big idea conference,

you're going to get. You're going to get pundits. I get your pundits. But that's the thing. I was looking through this website, Chris, and it's a place for dangerous ideas. We know that. There's going to be debate and discussion and creativity disagreement and

discovery it's all very vague like there is no agenda what's the topic well it is kind of a it looks like a music festival lineup right that's that's kind of the way it's laid out where you know people don't put their set lists and whatnot on so it's just gonna be an evening or a couple of days i guess given the amount of people there that of just conversations it's like the the challenging heterodox conversations one half of red scare is there and the full trigonometry together with the editor of Current Affairs, the wildcard, David Robinson. What fireworks could happen?

What happens if you put a Steven Pinker in conversation with a, I'm trying to look at the list, with a Winston Marshall of the Mumford and Sons or whatever band he was in? Like, sparks will fly, Matt. Yeah, he knows what exciting ideas will come out of those conversations i see the tickets for general admission are about 350 bucks but there are vip passes a bargain but there are vip passes where you get access to the the green room you get to be in the same space as some of these women. I bet you Eric Weinstein is going to be there. Yes. In the background, introducing people. Have you met this interesting fellow?

So, yeah, but it is that whole archetype of renegade intellectuals getting together to say the things that the mainstream won't allow them to. And I want to emphasize that this shtick intellectuals getting together to say the things that the mainstream won't allow them to and i want to emphasize that this shtick never seems to get old because like you can say these there's outlets there's popular podcasts the right-wing ecosystem in particular is often rather welcoming to people that want to have heterodox takes on particular liberal ideas, right? But still, people are constantly able to present themselves as the besieged minority that need to

have these special conferences where dangerous ideas are floated. I don't know. It does seem rather indulgent. But I bet there's a huge audience for this. These kind of events, they do attract people. But notable people missing. No Jordan Peterson. No. Well, Brett and Eric are not there. Brett and Eric are not there. No Sam Harris.

I'm sure Sam Harris was invited. I'm not so sure about the Weinstein brothers yeah well I mean when you say that but I mean they've got Michael Schellenberger they're you know the conspiracy prone journalists so I'm not Francis Foster is high up on the billing so I don't know that they wouldn't have invited an Eric or Brett if they would have agreed by them. Yeah. So anyway, IDW, somehow it has returned. The cast of characters, this is a point that I made plenty of times, especially when talking to Aaron Rabinowitz, whenever we were discussing IDW things, that the cast of characters can change.

Like there are people who spin off into overt polemical partisan discourse, right? You know, Dave Rubin, but that category of renegade intellectuals having difficult conversations, that is always an appealing thing. And IDW was a particular instantiation of it and there will be other names given to it all of them cringe inducing but that's that's the way like

dissident dialogues matt dissident dialogues that's fine that's fine well we won't be going but if somebody does go be interesting to get a just a quick synopsis of what the general topics were. I mean, we think we can guess, but be quick to confirm. Yeah, I'm sure they'll put talks online. And somebody in our Patreon described it as a guru petting zoo, which is slightly okay, slightly okay. And I don't think all of the people on the list, one point I'd make here is like I don't expect that everybody will say just stupid idiot

things no no i i don't mean to imply that i hate all of these people and anything no you know i know people don't like pinker for various reasons but i tend to find his books interesting and like various parts of his academic work and so on and so it's not that it's just, you know, the whole collective vibe of the thing is what we're discussing. And I think there are notable figures on that list who are wetting themselves about being presented as intellectual dissidents. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Especially the ones that are neither intellectual nor dissidents. Yeah dissidents. Yeah, that's true. That's true. So, well, for your services to the logos,

we salute you all, you dissidents. And speaking of intellectual dissidents, Matt, I was going to veer towards the debate which occurred on Lex Friedman's show recently with Destiny and norman finkelstein and some other academics around israel and gaza but before that trump now trump we haven't covered him we we actually did discuss covering them because there are aspects of what he does which fit very much into a guru template but he's more of a polemical partisan political politician yeah like straight up politicians we tend to avoid even though in

many ways he is an archetypal guru but you know politicians are their own breed so yes we have avoided him but you know he's in the news. He manages to be on the news pretty regular. Are you referring to something specific there, Chris? Yeah. So Trump often serves, especially in the guru sphere, as a kind of catalyst for takes or responses. What you will find in that heterodox sphere that we were just talking about, is you will often find criticism and condemnation of Trump, particularly some extreme thing that he's done or, you know, that they don't like. But what you will also find is strong defenses on the claim that he's constantly being unfairly treated by the

liberal media, that he's being taken out of constant, he's being presented as Orange Hitler, and that these are, you know, unwarranted, hyperventilating due to the woke mind virus, right? This is the kind of way that he's presented. And the heterodox view likes to flatter itself that it is approaching him without those biases. So it's able to recognize when he's saying things that are reasonable, when he's being treated unfairly, as well as, you know, harshly criticizing him when he needs it. And we'll see how reasonable that is.

But the particular thing which happened recently was he gave a campaign speech for his presidential campaign in America. And during one part of the speech, he referenced a potential bloodbath. Right now, here's the clip. Let me tell you something to China. If you're listening, President Xi, and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal. And you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal. Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now. And you think you're going to get that?

You're going to not hire Americans and you're going to sell the cars to us. Now, we're going to put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across the line. And you're not going to be able to sell those cars. If I get elected. Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole. That's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country. That'll be the least of it. But they're not going to sell those cars. They're building massive factories. A friend of mine, all he does is build car manufacturing plants. He's the biggest in the world. I mean, honestly, I joke about it. He can't walk across the street in that way. He's like Biden. But for building a plant, he can do the greatest plants in the world. Right. That's all he cares about. I said, I'd like to see one of

your plants recently. I said, I'd like to see where can we go? Well, we have to travel to Mexico. I said, why Mexico? He said, because that's where the big plants are building. China's building really big plants in Mexico. Yes. I don't listen to much Trump. I tend to avoid it. But I did listen to that online because of the discourse, Chris. So that reference to a bloodbath.

Yeah. So there was consternation and a bit of a tizzy around that. And it's fair to say in like liberal media sources, the emphasis about the reference to a bloodbath, if he doesn't win, right? Now, in that speech, like some people complained that the clip was shown. So we played like quite an extended clip there where you can you know hear him waffle on i i would say that the straightforward interpretation of that is that he's he's waffling on about manufacturing going outside the u.s and how he's going to do protective tariffs and whatnot to bring manufacturing back is kind of protectionist nationalist stuff and then he starts talking about

what will happen if he doesn't win and that it's going to be a blubber and it's not clear is he talking about the broader consequences or specifically for manufacturing but i think the general interpretation would be that it it's mostly related to what he was just talking about with manufacturing. Right. Yeah. Well, what he says immediately before it is that, you know, if he's elected, he's going to put a stop to this American jobs going overseas and so on. And if he's not elected, there's going to be a bloodbath. So I think a reasonable interpretation is that he's referring to a bloodbath for American jobs or the American economy, that kind of thing. Now,

I think, you know, obviously Trump is terrible generally, and he almost certainly is deliberately ambiguous a lot of the time where there's an okay interpretation, but there's also a sort of, you know, a red meat insightful interpretation as well. And, you know know he's certainly guilty of using that kind of language like like whatever the context right it's it's not ideal to be talking about blood baths and stuff if you're not elected even even if it's in reference to you know the economy yeah like a blood bath in the economy but still i mean the way you know i think a lot of people on the left side of things interpreted this which is he's calling for an insurrection if he's not elected then he's saying that there's going to be you know a bloody insurrection to to make him a dictator which i

think is just not not a reasonable interpretation given that context yeah and so you see constantine kissin for example tweeted out i see the mainstream media are lying about trump and clipping him out of context again it's amazing how used they are to having a monopoly on information that even now when their lives are guaranteed to be immediately debunked they carry on anyway pure arrogance right so that's the thing that it kills me to be arrogance right so that's the thing that it kills me to be on the same side of an issue with constant tickets and but actually this is why i think i i personally kind of object to getting ahead of your skis and and something like even if there is some interpretation that he's calling for an insurrection that is valid you have to understand that to everyone on the right side of politics,

it sounds like crazy talk. And it fits into what their stereotypes and the kind of propaganda you see in MAGA circles, that all liberals are basically delusional, right? That they're just inventing things about Trump and they're living in an alternative fantasy land, getting all upset about things that literally didn't happen. Now, lots of terrible and bad things associated with Trump did happen. But when these sorts of issues crop up, they can ignore all of that and just focus on these particular issues. I remember the Covington kids issue that was a couple of years ago now, probably, was a similar kind of thing. It got so much airplay. People like Const kissin they dined down that's

out on that stuff for months or years and it just gets referred to all the time about how you can't trust um right and it is true that you know the coverage was bad in some respects right usually when you go back and look the coverage isn't as extreme as is presented. The actual articles that are highlighted are not as bad, but some of the material around it, like the tweets or secondary articles, quoting things, are bad, but still could be avoided by just not immediately leaping. There was another recent example where there was a fan, a young kid, who was photographed from one side with like black paint on their face.

And this was presented for some reason as a kid engaging in blackface. I think it was red skin. It was like a red face paint, right? But a slightly different angle showed that the other half of his face was painted a different color and it was like the colors of the team playing right so it's an absolute insane thing to try and make into a racist issue and as it turned out that person's family were also of Native American background and stuff, right? So, but it doesn't matter, but just why

that even needs to be highlighted, some kid having face paint at an event, but those issues become hyper fixated on to the point that they're taken as emblematic of everything, all media. That's why you can't trust them. They're always constantly lying and trying to twist everything in those directions. And from that same speech, Matt, right, so this is the same speech that Trump was giving, a different section of it. Just listen to this. If this election, if this election isn't won, I'm not sure that you'll ever have another election in this country. Does that make sense? I don't think you're going to have another election in this country if we don't win this election.

I don't think you're going to have another election in this country. If we don't win this election, I don't think you're going to have another election or certainly not an election that's meaningful. And we better get out or we better. I actually say that the date, remember this, November 5th, I believe it's going to be the most important date in the history of our country. I believe it. Yeah. So that's much worse. That's, I mean... Yeah, and you can, even if you interpret that charitably, right, that he's just trying to encourage people to get out to vote on that date. And he's saying, you know, the democracy hangs in the balance or whatever, which is something that, you know, you do here. But given the history of what has happened when he has called for that kind of action to be taken, you know, there are reasons to be concerned about what he's stoking up when he uses that kind of rhetoric, right?

So this, if he doesn't win, this will be the last election in America. Like, hmm. It's not clear to me what he's implying that though like just could you make it explicit for a dummy but pretend i'm an idiot i think he's saying that essentially you know that that would be like he can't like he doesn't even think he lost the last election so if he is not elected it shows that the democracy has been subverted twice well because he has been sort of claiming that the election is going to be rigged right um right so if it's rigged again and they can't win when they're obviously going to win because you know sleepy joe is the opponent and whatnot it just means that the democracy isn't functioning the

democrats have completely took the machine but that you know so that's that's what i would interpret him yeah as as saying but yeah yeah yeah so that's that's bad that is bad see and that is worse because you know this is something that he's been doing a lot which is doing his best to undermine confidence in the United States in their pre and fair elections. Like really doing his best to convince everybody that democracy doesn't work in the United States. And, you know, any result where he doesn't win is an illegitimate one.

I mean, that's what he's been doing for years. And yeah, that should be the clip that's doing the rounds. Yeah. But unfortunately it's not. And, you know, and instead it all gets caught up about this bloodbath thing. And the funny thing is that I became aware of this section because Joe Rogan on his podcast, he was talking about this with Jonathan Haidt and And he played this clip, I think it's from The Guardian originally, which had both sections. It played the first bit about the bloodbath, but then it cut off and it played this part connected to it. And Joe was prepared to say, look, they're taking them all out of context. And then it got the second bit,

which sounds much worse. And he was then having know, then having to say, yeah, but, you know, he means that. And then they find the clip where, you know, it's the longer part that we played the first time. And that's obviously what he wanted to play. But it just goes to show that the beat around it is very much just as a preset narrative, which is, oh, people are misrepresenting him. They're trying to make him worse than he is. And it is true that on the liberal side, there's a fixation on that because he used the word bloodbath. They can immediately focus on that. But what he said outside of that is perhaps more damning than just a reference to bloodbath, which might have been related to economic things.

But all of it now is just swirling around the discourse sphere, debating what he meant by bloodbath. That's it. And it's going to be referenced probably for years, at least up to the election. Another example where the liberal media lied about what donald trump said and not the fact that he's still in every one of his speeches and every one of his campaigns essentially saying the election is illegitimate unless he wins yeah i know yeah um yeah the

things that go viral it's depressing yes the discourse is not good. It's not good. So, Chris, you mentioned something about a debate involving destiny. Right. Yes, I did. So this was also the talk of the time. And let me just let Lex do my work for me and introduce what this is in reference to. The following is a debate on the topic of Israel and Palestine with Norman Finkelstein, Benny Morris, Muin Rabbani, and Stephen Bunnell, also known online as Destiny. Norm and Benny are historians. Muin is a... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

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