In this bumper edition, we begin a projected trilogy of episodes on James Lindsay, Twitter's favourite anti-Critical Race Theory obsessive and bullying prick. This time, we track the earlier part of James' career as a professional reactionary, leading up to the embarassing 'Conceptual Penis hoax' of which James still seems inexplicably proud. Daniel demonstrates (to a Jack still groggy from all the AstraZeneca nanobots coursing through his brain) that James was pretty much always the obnoxious douchebag he is now, but simply needed to learn through experience (of being called on his bullshit) how to successfully present his obnoxious douchebaggery as a profound quest to save Western civilisation from standpoint epistemology or something. Content Warnings. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Show Notes: James Lindsay [Twitter] https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames James Lindsay [Wikipedia] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Lindsay James Lindsay's PhD Dissertation, [Combinatorial Unification of Binomial-Like Arrays] https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/723/ Joe Rogan - Exposing Social Justice with Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlqU_JMTzd4 CPAC 2021: James Lindsay on How Critical Theories Work to 'Tear Apart' the Values of America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad5ldf8jXI8 Serious Inquiries Only (formerly Atheistically Speaking) https://seriouspod.com/ AS83, Category 5 Shitstorms, with James Lindsay http://atheisticallyspeaking.com/as83-category-5-shitstorms-james-lindsay/ AS84, James LIndsay Part Two http://atheisticallyspeaking.com/as84-james-lindsay-part-2/ Peter Boghossian "Proud of Being Gay" [Tweet] https://web.archive.org/web/20150501060350if_/https://twitter.com/peterboghossian/status/527862167152758784 James Lindsay, [Not Pride and Not Prejudice: Is "Pride" Right for Uses Like "Gay Pride?"] https://web.archive.org/web/20170717143654/http://goddoesnt.blogspot.com/2014/10/not-pride-and-not-prejudice-is-pride.html "Knowing him, and having bothered to discuss it with him more thoroughly, Peter's point is that the term "pride" carries certain meanings (here: in reference to achievement, in particular) that may make it somewhat inappropriate to apply to a concept like "gay pride." As he has done in the past--controversially with groups wedded to certain other terms and ideas connected with them--he has asked for a disambiguation of the term "pride" in this context. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though for some legitimate reasons, there was a rather substantial blowback to his request to carefully consider the terminology being employed as dispassionately as possible." Greta Christina, [Peter Boghossian, and What Gay Pride Actually Means] https://the-orbit.net/greta/2014/11/01/peter-boghossian-and-what-gay-pride-actually-means/ "Okay. Fine. As a fully licensed and registered LGBT person, I will spell out to Peter Boghossian what, exactly, “gay pride” means. (Actually, to be precise, I will point out what “LGBT pride” means.) "LGBT pride does not mean being proud of having been born lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans. "It means being proud of having survived. "It means being proud of living in a homophobic, biphobic, transphobic society — a society that commonly treats us with contempt at best and violent hatred at worst — and still getting on with our lives. It means being proud of flourishing, in a society that commonly thinks we’re broken. It means being proud of being happy, in a society that commonly thinks we should be miserable. It means being proud of being good and compassionate, in a society that commonly thinks we’re wicked. It means being proud of fighting for our rights and the rights of others like us, in a society that commonly thinks we should lie down and let ourselves get walked on — or that thinks we should be grateful for crumbs and not ask for more. It means being proud of retaining our dignity, in a society that commonly treats us as laughing-stocks. It means being proud of loving our sexuality and our bodies, in a society that commonly thinks our sexuality and our bodies are disgusting. It means being proud of staying alive, in a society that commonly beats us down and wants us dead." AS191: Everybody Is Wrong About God, with James Lindsay http://atheisticallyspeaking.com/as/ AS192: Everybody Is Wrong About God, Part 2 http://atheisticallyspeaking.com/as192-everybody-is-wrong-about-god-part-2/ David Chivers, ["Book Review: James A. Lindsay's Everybody is Wrong About God"] https://thehumanist.com/arts_entertainment/books/book-review-james-lindsays-everybody-wrong-god/ "Given that Lindsay feels most people don’t intellectually believe in God anymore, his next main inquiry is an exploration of what people do mean when they say they “believe” in God. He argues that most of these people are actually articulating a more subtle need for community, comfort, and a set of morals, which they then equate with God. God is the embodiment of their ideas on what makes a good life. But once personified, they confuse their ideas of what makes for a good life with the actual individual they have created and then stubbornly argue for the existence of the said character, i.e. “God.” "Lindsay calls on atheists to recognize this phenomenon and change their arguments accordingly, addressing the needs that God personifies for the person rather than the actual belief in God. This is the next step of “post-theism.” Society must find ways to fulfill those needs in a secular way. Once those needs are addressed and met in those other ways, the need for “God” will quickly and naturally fall away." AS237: James Lindsay and Eli Bosnick on Social Justice http://atheisticallyspeaking.com/as237-james-lindsay-eli-bosnick-social-justice/) AS238: Eli and James, Part 2 http://atheisticallyspeaking.com/as238-eli-james-part-2/ AS239: Eli and James on Trigger Warnings http://atheisticallyspeaking.com/as239-eli-james-trigger-warnings/ Crisis and Trigger Warnings: Reflections on Legal Education and the Social Value of the Law https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4076&context=cklawreview "Abstract: In the same moment that law schools are embracing neoliberal strategies in response to the economic crisis caused by declining admissions, students in the classroom have begun to agitate for advance content notices (or “trigger warnings”) to alert them to any potentially trauma-inducing course materials. For faculty who have already adopted a defensive posture in response to threats to eliminate tenure, this demand feels like an additional assault on academic freedom; one that reflects a distressing student-as-consumer mentality. From this vantage point, students are too easily cast as another group of adversaries when, in actuality, students are straw targets who have little power compared to the real threat—the unchecked corporatization of legal education. This essay attempts to redirect faculty outrage back to the proper mark by decoupling the trigger-warning movement from the broader phenomenon of the neoliberal law school. It presents an alternate reading of trigger-warning mandates: as a student critique of legal pedagogy that demands access and opportunity for all students to fully engage in classroom discussions that can be difficult and are often painful. Trigger warnings give lie to the myth that law is based on dispassionate and objective legal analysis. Seen this way, trigger warnings invite students to become partners in the production of knowledge, while allowing faculty to maintain intellectually rigorous classroom environments. Faculty cannot afford to view students as antagonists. Instead, students should be enlisted as allies in our efforts to challenge the orthodoxy of market-based solutions to the legal education crisis." Katie J.M. Baker, "Teaching Rape Law in the Age of the Trigger Warning." https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katiejmbaker/teaching-rape-law-in-the-age-of-the-trigger-warning "You're in a Harvard Law classroom, which is supposed to be this advanced, high-minded environment, and when we got to rape, the conversation totally devolved into bullshit," one Harvard Law graduate said. "I don't need to pay Harvard tuition to hear men be dumbasses." "Criminal law is a required class, so even students who want to practice tax law or litigate intellectual property cases must participate in "rape week." It also means that professors who aren't necessarily experts in the field sometimes teach it. For many students, that's where the problems start. "Some hate when professors insist on using the Socratic method, a common law school teaching practice in which students are cold-called and mercilessly questioned, because a rape survivor might have to argue an accused rapist's case. Others don't understand why professors engage with students who make insensitive remarks about victims such as "What if she looked older than 12?" or "Is it still rape if it wasn't consensual but he really thought it was?" instead of shutting them down. Some law students even told BuzzFeed News that they chose to skip their "rape week" classes completely rather than seethe in silence." AS296: Life in the Light of Death, with James Lindsay http://atheisticallyspeaking.com/as296-life-light-death-james-lindsay/ SIO44: Debunking the Conceptual Penis Stunt with Eli Bosnick https://seriouspod.com/sio44-debunking-the-conceptual-penis-stunt-with-eli-bosnick/ SIO45: James Lindsay, Co-Author of the ‘Conceptual Penis’ Hoax Paper https://seriouspod.com/sio45-james-lindsay-co-author-of-the-conceptual-penis-hoax-paper/ Very Bad Wizards https://www.verybadwizards.com/ VBW Episode 116: Pain, Pleasure, and Peer-Reviewed Penises https://www.verybadwizards.com/116 VBW Episode 118: We Don't Love Them Hoax https://www.verybadwizards.com/118 The conceptual penis as a social construct https://www.skeptic.com/downloads/conceptual-penis/23311886.2017.1330439.pdf "We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change. "An explicit isomorphic relationship exists between the conceptual penis and the most problematic themes in toxic masculinity, and that relationship is mediated by the machismo braggadocio aspect of male hypermasculine thought and performance. A change in our discourses in science, technol-ogy, policy, economics, society, and various communities is needed to protect marginalized groups, promote the advancement of women, trans, and gender-queer individuals (including non-gendered and gender-skeptical people), and to remedy environmental impacts that follow from climate change driven by capitalist and neocapitalist overreliance on hypermasculine themes and exploitative utilization of fossil fuels." Skeptic Magazine [writeup] https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/conceptual-penis-social-contruct-sokal-style-hoax-on-gender-studies/ "Assuming the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” actually means. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal." Charmaine Chua, The Slow Boat to China https://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/01/05/the-slow-boat-to-china/ "The captain tells me that the Ever Cthulhu, like all other ships, never stops for a break. It continues traversing the globe’s surface in 45-day rotations, reaching one end of its route and turning around almost immediately. Container ships are monuments that move, and 100, 000 of them ply the oceans at any given moment. In 2014, the Ever Cthulhu traveled a total of 103,000 sea miles — halfway to the moon. All that distance, all that steel, all that power. Yet, even ships as large as these require very little human labor: a few seamen to navigate, engineers to monitor the ship’s internal workings, others to keep watch, clean, fit, change the oil. The Ever Cthulhu itself has a crew of 22 men – four German, one Polish, seventeen Filipino, and one passenger: myself. Across the world’s ocean, 1.5 million invisible seafarers toil on three to nine month contracts to bind the world together through trade, though they remain, for the most part, isolated in their cabins and mess rooms, retained on precarious short-term contracts, and kept away from their families – indeed, from most of the world. The third mate, a young Filipino, tells me that all his sacrifices are worth it for a salary that pays much more than he could possibly hope for on land. In some sense then, as a container of both aspiration and drudgery, one might think of the ship more as a space than an object; a floating island of both hard labor and the possibility of better futures. "This trans-pacific passage is of particular interest to me because it is by far North America’s largest trade lane, and accounts for nearly twenty million TEUs in U.S. trade alone. This U.S.-China market is dominated by large U.S. retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, and Home Depot – companies notorious for cutting labor costs by using the enhanced mobility of labor to shift work to third parties, erecting cruel hierarchies in both their Chinese factories and U.S. stores. Transoceanic shipping is, in large part, responsible for these widening inequalities: since shipping operates beyond the territorial spaces governed by labor regulations, it allows corporations to do away with the hard-fought democratic and labor rights struggled for and earned within local labor contexts. The internationalization of the supply chain, in other words, is aided by increasing innovations in the speed and efficiency of the shipping market. As a result, circulation has been folded into the production process, becoming a field of experimentation for value-generation in its own right. Of course, there are highly uneven aspects to this story of logistics. Even as members of the International Longshore and Workers Union [negotiate their contract under embattled circumstances](http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/PMA-vs-ILWU-Negotiations-Jeapordized-Ports-Congested-2014-11-04) on the west coast of North America, indentured truck drivers [struggle against overwhelming legal barriers](http://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/port-truck-drivers-on-strike-dispatch-from-los-angeles-long-beach-ports) to unionization in Oakland and LA, port workers in mushrooming Chinese ports can scarcely dream of ILWU wages or safeguards, and factory workers around the world toil under the poverty line. The world of logistics looks very different indeed from the perspective of Taiwan, California, or the Ocean." You're Wrong About podcast on Political Correctness: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270/8355175-political-correctness Samuel Hoadley-Brill on James Lindsay and CRT: https://conceptualdisinformation.substack.com/p/james-lindsay-v-critical-race-theory?r=7v05d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say to each white nationalists, white supremacists, and
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
And it's 87.
We're so close.
So close.
So close.
We're just going to skip 88, right?
Is that the plan at this point?
Just don't do 88?
No, we have a plan for 88.
Well, we're going to have a conceptual episode 88.
Conceptual 88, yes.
Much like a conceptual penis, although, you know, much less pleasant than.
Very much so, yeah.
Well, depending on your opinions on penises, I guess.
Well, this is it.
I mean, I think our show is very much like, you know, a penis every week.
You know, it's incredibly useful and enjoyable.
But not for everyone.
I think we should be clear about that before we get it.
But not for everyone.
Erasure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's where we are.
And we should we should probably highlight our our topic for this week, which is James Lindsay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Before we get into that, I do have a couple of things I want to say first.
Firstly, in the last episode, I made a factual error.
I attributed the phrase palingenetic ultranationalism to Robert Paxton.
And it is actually comes from Griffin, not Paxton.
And also, I was mistaken to raise it at all because Thought Slime doesn't even use the phrase.
So it's sort of a it's a fuck up section there on Jack's part.
The other thing I need to say is that I I had my first vaccine yesterday.
Yep.
How do you feel?
Yeah, well, this is it.
I felt fine initially, but it's more than 24 hours.
Yeah, it's more like 30 hours now.
And I'm a bit groggy.
I thought I'd gotten away with it.
I thought 24 hours went by and I thought, oh, I got away with it.
And then I started to feel Really, really tired and a bit muddleheaded and, you know, more than usual.
It's a bit better now, but I should probably apologize in advance because I might be a little bit sub par this episode, but it's fine because Daniel has a lot to get through.
So it's actually going to be better because there'll be less of me interrupting with irrelevant, you know, Well, cushions into ephemera.
So the more the less you talk, the more people have to listen to James Lindsay talk.
And, you know, I can promise you they would much prefer having your voice than his, although we do have kind of a defiant amount of James Lindsay material here.
So, you know, it just kind of you know, you can you can intersperse more of your talking to make make it easier on the listeners.
But if if if the vaccine, if Bill Gates is doing that to our audience, that I guess we're just going to have to live with it.
Yeah, it's those Bill Gates nanobots coursing through my bloodstream.
And yeah, it's making me a little.
So I think really preferable to James Lindsay clips would just be me sort of going, so I might just do that anyway.
Yeah.
So Episode 87, James Lindsay.
And this is first of a this is the first of a projected, I think, three part series on James Lindsay.
At least three.
We will not be doing them in order.
We will be interspersing other things in the middle, just to not focus relentlessly on James Lindsay.
But we will.
Why wouldn't anybody want to do that?
We will be doing at least three, if not four episodes on James Lindsay.
And if you knew the amount of material that I dug through for this episode, then you would understand because.
Yeah.
This may be our longest episode to date, or at least one of them.
And I'm literally mostly only covering the years between 2014 and 2017.
Like that's how much stuff and we're only scratching the surface.
So yeah, this is this is this is the first of a trilogy.
This is Lindsay Begins.
Yes.
So.
So James Lindsay, let's just start with James Lindsay.
Yeah.
What do you, let's just start here, just because I'm going to have to talk a lot.
What do you, how would you summarize James Lindsay from what you know about him?
Professional reactionary these days.
Pretty much.
Yeah.
Look, I mean, it's a bit like, you know, Eric and Brett again.
James Lindsay is obviously a very intelligent man.
This man has a PhD in mathematics.
Now let me say at the outset, that is not something I am capable of doing.
Okay.
So I take my hat off to, to James Lindsay.
You know, he has made an intellectual achievement that I'm simply not.
I'm not in the running for that.
So great.
Well done.
The trouble is that now he seems, at least to me, maybe you'll disagree, Daniel.
I don't know.
But he seems, at least to me, to have become a self-promoter and a culture warrior for the right.
And as I say, basically a professional reactionary and a charlatan.
That's how he comes over.
Very.
I would I would agree with an online bully as well.
That was the thing I was really going to highlight.
First of all, if you know of James Lindsay and you're on Twitter, you probably know him because he has bullied you or someone, you know, at some point on Twitter.
He is amazingly prolific at Twitter and it being an asshole to everyone he meets on Twitter.
We're going to not really cover that in so many details, but we're going to explain how I think he got there in this episode.
How he gets to that point.
He's also a business model now.
I mean, let's be honest.
It's how he drums up clicks and engagement.
He's an asshole to people on Twitter.
And it's part of it's an essential part of his job, which is to be a professional reactionary provocateur.
I'm using the term reactionary because, of course, he self identifies as a liberal.
So calling him a conservative is kind of You know, it's kind of inaccurate, at least in terms of his self-definition, and I think he actually does, he at least purports to support some liberal policies, but he's certainly a reactionary and he's in bed with extreme reactionaries.
Yeah, absolutely.
He is currently in bed with Sovereign Nations founder, what's his name, Michael O'Fallon.
Yeah.
Which is, and apparently O'Fallon is kind of a big part of the New Discourses Project, which is where James spends much of his time today.
We will again cover that in a future episode because I just don't have time for it today.
But like, if you know him, if you know him, you know him as this kind of anti-woke, anti-critical race theory person.
He does a ton of interviews on like every right-wing dipshit show he can possibly imagine.
If you go and search for him on YouTube, you will find endless, endless hours of content of him mocking the left, mocking social justice warriors, critical race theorists, and spewing a bunch of horseshit about postmodernists and leftist theorists that he pretends to understand, but does not.
He is also in 2019, the author of, the coauthor of a book with Helen Pluckrose entitled "Cynical Theories", which is basically a giant piece of dog shit I'm in the process of reading it now.
But yeah.
Well, it's kind of the next step in his quest to be a SoCal tribute act, because, of course, SoCal published the original SoCal hoax in the 90s.
Right.
It's not our subject, so I won't go into it.
But SoCal hoaxed a A postmodernist, to use the term loosely, journal with a completely fake paper talking about physics.
Sokal was a physicist, I believe.
And then that caused a big furor and the, you know, we might talk about this another time, so I'm just going to skip over here.
But he followed it up with a book that he co-wrote with a guy called Brinkman, Jean Brinkman.
Which has got different titles depending on where you read it.
My copy is called Intellectual Impostors.
And the move on the part of the quote-unquote grievance studies hoaxers to then, you know, get their PR splashed with SoCal squared or grievance studies hoax, whatever you want to call it, and then move on to write their book about it.
It just to me, it looks like, you know, being a bad SoCal tribute act.
Yeah, no, and in fact, he often references Sokal explicitly in terms of what his kind of project has been since late 2017.
And you're right, you call out the Grievance Studies hoax, the Sokal squared hoax, that's the other thing that people are mostly aware of him from.
We're going to, again, talk about how he got there, about what the thing that he did that leads into that project, the smaller scale version of the so-called Squared Hoax.
And in fact, I think we're going to listen to some audio of him figuring out what he has to do to do the Griffin Studies Hoax.
So let's get into it.
But you are correct.
He does have a PhD in mathematics.
He got a bachelor's degree in physics and then a master's degree and a PhD in mathematics.
I have linked to his PhD dissertation.
If you care to read a title, Combinatorial Unification of Binomial-like Arrays, you can read it for free on the Tennessee website.
So if you choose to do so, that is certainly open to you.
I might wait for the movie version.
I have a minor in mathematics, and I am vaguely aware of those terms.
Once you get above Calc 4, which is kind of what you need to do the minor to do, you know, to do like kind of, you know, basic science.
Once you get above that, you get into like very abstract theory.
And they start to use jargon that no one outside of their fields really understands.
I understand what kind of all those words mean separately, but not how to put them together in a like, I couldn't tell you what that paper is just based on reading it.
I have glanced at the paper and I can kind of Google the terms and kind of go, yeah, I kind of know vaguely what this is.
But I would not be able to like understand that paper based on my own understanding in mathematics.
This is going to come back, if not in this episode, in when we actually do the Grievance Studies episodes, because James Lindsay, it turns out, has spent a lot of time trying to infiltrate fields that he has no understanding of.
Yeah.
Thanks and chooses to mock them, despite the fact that he has no concept of them.
So, yeah, anyway, I wanted to hit the I'll let you get on, but I wanted to know about him being a maths PhD and obviously being an intelligent guy because you can't have a maths PhD if you're not an intelligent guy, at least with regards to maths.
You know, you've got to have a functioning brain to achieve that.
I wanted to hit that note, firstly, to sound the proper level of Humility, I suppose, because I think we're going to spend quite a lot of this criticizing him.
So, you know, I didn't want to sound like, you know, I'm setting myself myself up as some sort of rival intellectual.
You know, it's always it's always good to acknowledge other, you know, your opponent's achievements when they have them.
And the other thing I want I want to establish that this is a bright guy, because to me it means that when he deliberately games the system to create these hoaxes and when he deliberately misrepresents fields of study and writers in those fields of study and etc, etc.
To me, a guy that intelligent, he must know on some level what he's doing.
Oh, yeah, no, that's it's pretty clear that he knows exactly what the fuck he's doing.
Yeah.
So really, I was paying him a compliment so that I could then prove that he's basically a charlatan, a con man.
I think he does believe what he's saying on some level, like I don't think that he's fraudulent in that way.
No, no, I think he believes it fanatically, but this is the paradox of fanatics.
They engage in conscious fraud in order to prove the things that they believe fanatically.
So let's, this is a good excuse to dive into our first clip, which is our shortest clip.
Thank you.
And this is from the Joe Rogan experience with Pete Kogosian, who is one of his partners in crime on the Grievance Studies.
Yeah.
Peter Boghossian, friend of Stefan Molyneux.
Who we will talk about to some detail here in a few minutes.
But this is only about 25 seconds long and it is, when Joe Rogan asked James Lindsay in 2019, tell me about yourself, this is what James Lindsay said.
Tell me what you guys did.
Jim, go for it.
Let's explain who you guys are and what you did.
My background is in mathematics.
I bailed out of academia in 2010, though, because I kind of see the writing on the wall.
And so now I am a renegade gender scholar, and I write nonsense about genitals.
That's primarily what I do.
I mean, I manage a business at home, so I got academia.
Interesting bits here.
First of all, he admits that he basically got done in his academic career and realized he graduated with a PhD from UT in mathematics, which is perfectly acceptable.
I have no reason to doubt the quality of his education or the quality of his knowledge or his experience, but you enter that field and there are at least 200 applicants for every single tenure track job offering.
You end up spending 10 years as a postdoc, and maybe you end up teaching intro-level calculus at a small state school in the middle of North Dakota or something similar.
You don't have attractive career prospects here, right?
Um, and so what he seems to have done is to gotten out of the gotten out of academia, maybe he was teaching he was doing some, it's unclear to me exactly kind of where he was kind of making his money from this time forward, but, um, he leaves school.
He starts writing books.
He gets involved in movement atheism in a real way.
And he wrote several books, some of which look, you know, kind of vaguely interesting.
I mean, he wrote one about, you know, kind of the nature of God in comparison to the nature of infinity from mathematics, which looks like a, it's actually called Dot Dot Dot.
And if I was going to read one, like just for my own interest, that would probably be the one because it would be interesting to me to see what he was saying.
He did talk about these books on numerous podcasts, and we'll get into one of the reviews of one of these books here in a little bit.
But he seems to have been a fairly anodyne kind of post Dawkins, post that kind of first wave of new atheism, new atheist thinker.
And his big kind of perspective is, Look, new atheism is kind of done.
We won the argument.
We as atheists won the argument culturally.
And now we need to just kind of move forward and stop arguing about the existence or non-existence of God.
Stop, you know, arguing with creationists and start trying to build something of our own.
I would disagree with a lot of that.
That's a reasonable conversation to have, right?
That is not an unreasonable point of view.
I would disagree with a lot of that.
I don't have to take that 100% seriously, but that's kind of where he ends up between about 2010 and 2014 and later.
And we're going to play a lot of clips from this podcast, which was originally called Atheistically Speaking.
This is a guy named Tom Smith, who's been running this podcast since 2014.
And then at some point in late 2017, it shifted to being called Serious Inquiries Only.
I have included in the show notes every single episode James Lindsay appeared on.
There are quite a few of them.
And in some of these cases, he's kind of talking about social war issues.
And in some cases, he's talking about his books and his kind of like work in atheism.
If you want to go check those out, feel free to do so.
I've given you the clips.
I've given you the links, at least.
We are not going to be listening to anything of James Lindsay talking about his work within atheism.
We're only going to be focusing on the stuff that's a little bit more in our wheelhouse.
But I've given you the place to kind of look at that if you want to.
That said, before we kind of start digging into the history, I think there's one more thing we should look at in terms of understanding James Lindsay as he is now.
And that is, as you say, a reactionary kind of cultural commentator who is very, very comfortable in right-wing environments.
And when I say very, very comfortable in right-wing environments, what I mean is He literally attended CPAC 2021, CPAC being the Conservative Political Action Conference, i.e.
this is where all the Republicans go to tell each other how great they are.
He did not, as far as I can tell, actually speak on stage at the event, but he gave at least one interview from behind the scenes.
And these are also like kind of big hobnobbing events for people who are going to be kind of big and kind of Republican Party politics moving forward.
He currently is a noted expert in critical race theory, speaking to state legislatures and state representatives in the United States in terms of getting them to ban critical race theory, etc, etc.
He is very active as a right-wing political actor at this point.
All right.
So I'm going to play this clip and I promise you I am not here.
To make our leftist audience tear their hair out for all of the complete bullshit that I'm about to throw at you, because... I think there's a certain masochism, you know, involved in, if you're listening to this, I think you want to be tearing your hair out to a certain degree.
Right.
So enjoy.
And this is like, if you want to know what it's like to do the work that I do, this like, Like this for like eight hours a day is kind of what I'm doing.
I actually really regret, I mean, we had several listeners say, stop speeding up the clips, just play them at 1x speed.
It's too fast for me.
I feel like this guy is so much more painful at 1x speed than he is at like 1.5 or 2x, which is where I'm usually at listening to him.
Yeah.
But anyway, this is a segment of an interview he gave at CPAC 2021 just a few weeks ago as we record this.
This is about 2 minutes and 17 seconds long, and I'm just gonna say, don't even Don't think about the content too hard.
It will hurt your head.
He's going to throw in a bunch of names.
He's going to connect things that don't deserve to be connected.
There's no sinew on these bones whatsoever.
But this gives you a real sense of what James Lindsay sounds like and what his speaking style is like today.
And what we're going to do in this podcast episode to some degree is to track the evolution of how he comes to do this.
So I wanted to show you this now to know like what we're prepping for in the years between 2014 and 2017.
So here's what James Lindsay sounds like today.
So a lot to unpack.
Lots.
I want to go into critical theory and what this is.
I also want to touch on the cynical nature because you know a lot of people around Marx said that he is so cynical that actually most of what he did was just criticizing.
That's right.
Ruthless criticism of everything that exists.
That's a Marx quote.
I want to talk to you about that but let's start off first With what critical theory is.
So critical theory actually is a reinvention of Marx's ideas.
Marx had his ideas.
They attempted revolutions in the early 20th century.
One of those succeeded, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
None of the others succeeded all throughout Europe.
In particular, the Hungarian Revolution took and failed.
Georg Lukács was kind of in charge of that.
And then you had this entity called the Frankfurt School, or the Institute for Social Research.
It was founded by Lukacs and a handful of other guys in Frankfurt, Germany.
Frankfurt School, of course.
One of whom was Max Horkheimer.
Max Horkheimer was the first person to lay out what critical theory is, and what he meant is that it's Marx's critique applied to everything, ruthlessly.
And the idea was to actually analyze the cultural and psychological elements, so you can read people's minds cynically, to try to figure out why Marx's predicted revolutions weren't happening in industrial nations like Britain and Germany and the United States, but only took in a peasant society like Russia.
And so the simplest summary of a critical theory, as Horkheimer laid it out in 1937 in a very famous essay that he wrote that year, is that it has to have three components.
One is that it has to have a normative vision for society, an endpoint, a goal for society, which they saw as being somehow generally communist, but not specifically Marxist.
So it's neo-Marxist is how it's been labeled by history.
It has to have a normative vision.
It has to be able to identify how the society in its systems, so it's systemic thinking, fail that normative vision or fail to have what it takes to bring about that normative vision.
And then it has to inspire what Marx called praxis, which is the fusion of putting theory into practice.
And so it's theoretical driven activism.
So it has to inspire social activism on behalf of bringing about that normative vision, which again, for the neo-Marxist meant something like communism, but not exactly the way Marx laid it out, say in Kapital or the Communist Manifesto.
Your thoughts, Jack?
Well, firstly, Marx doesn't lay out communism in the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital.
So I don't know if he's read those books, but if he has, he's misremembering them.
Secondly, So what?
I mean, what does any of that have to do with the modern practice in the American academy of studying gender and systemic gender and race oppression?
But it's just all he's doing is he's throwing in these buzzwords he's using the word cynical like in the previous bit that I didn't air for you he's talking about how like there were critical theories but now that he calls them cynical theories because they're just about criticizing everything that's there instead of trying to build something up and always looking at history through the cynical lens and that You know, it's all about power relations and not about ideas, et cetera, et cetera.
But it's always he's just kind of throwing in things like, you notice that he throws in the word like systemic because like his right wing audience has heard people talk about things like systemic racism.
And so if you can throw in the word, well, these guys, the Frankfurt School, and he's rubbing his hands together at the time, right?
They're talking about they're talking about systemic problems.
And so now when we talk about systemic problems, it's all the same thing.
It's all the same fundamental error, and it's all coming for you, it's coming for you as a responsible, conservative, right-wing person who just wants to live their lives.
That's the ultimate thing that he's not saying in so many words, but he's definitely implying through all of the work that you're going to hear, you know, through everything that he does currently, that's exactly kind of like the implication that's always left unsaid, is that this is something that's coming for you, that they are coming for
The value that you have produced, the things that you own, the things that you love, your family, your way of life is under attack by the cynical theorist, by the critical race theorist, because all they know how to do is destroy.
And because they lack an epistemic status, an epistemic reality that is built on science and built on reason, it's built on this like postmodernist crap, in his words.
It's fundamentally going to always fail.
That's the argument that he's essentially making there.
You're absolutely right.
And really, all I can do is, you know, pick holes in his account of the Frankfurt School and its relationship to modern scholarship.
Look, it's the genetic fallacy.
Yeah, the Frankfurt School has been incredibly influential in the social sciences.
By the way, what the hell is... I mean, that's accurate.
There's a Marx quote where he says, I think it's in reference to his method, which is historical materialism, ruthless criticism of all that exists.
Yeah, that's the scientific method.
That is the basic scientific method.
You interrogate reality using the tools you have as best you can.
How you get from, you know, Marx thought we should use the scientific method to criticize everything, i.e.
interrogate, try to understand everything that we encounter, to post-modernism rejecting the idea of an objective reality, which is an incredible vulgar oversimplification of, you know, again, huge side topic, I'm not going to get into it.
But the idea that postmodern theorists like Foucault and so on, you know, they doubted the existence of objective reality outside their heads.
I'm not even, I'm very critical of poststructuralism, etc, etc.
They didn't think the real world didn't exist.
Okay, they didn't, they There was no such thing as objective reality, but that doesn't even connect.
He's talking about historical Marxist method, historical materialism as the ruthless criticism of all that exists, and somehow relating that as being the same thing as a political movement that not only, I mean, I would say that Foucault is Foucault, for instance, is a profoundly anti-Marxist thinker.
That's why these theories were very fashionable.
One of the reasons, in the 90s, because they were a reaction against the radical intellectual ideas of the 1960s, which were perceived as having failed.
Again, huge side topic, not going to get drawn into it.
It's inherently incoherent.
You can't go from Marx's method of severe criticism to this fictional idea of postmodernism as just based upon a rejection of external reality.
And again, what I was saying before, the genetic fallacy.
Yeah, Frankfurt School.
More complicated than he's depicting it, but it's true.
Very influential.
Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm, etc., etc.
Very influential.
But you can't claim that because these thinkers, who to a greater or lesser extent had as their project the replacement of capitalist society by some form of communist society, And again that's debatable.
You can't claim that because they've been influential that therefore necessarily modern theories which draw on them aim at the exact same goals.
That is so incredibly childish and it's just not how ideas work.
It's not how scholarship works.
It's not how academia works.
It's not how academic fashion works.
It's not how anything works.
But it's being done, as you said, To imply, hint hint, using intellectual sounding words, basically a conspiracy theory.
It's basically the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory.
He literally talks about the Frankfurt School!
One more thing, right?
The cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, they always tie it back to Gramsci, you know, the supposed march through the institutions.
He didn't say that, but Gramsci used the phrase critical theory in his notebooks.
You know, he used it to mean Marxism.
I'm surprised none of them have gotten hold of this actually, or maybe they have, but you know why he did that in his prison notebooks?
Because he was in prison He was in the fascist prisons of Mussolini and they read what he wrote and he had to use code.
Understood.
So here's what here's what if if if James Lindsay are one of his fans or 100,000 of his fans because he has over 200,000 Twitter followers.
So, you know, I'm sure we're going to get some Lindsay fans deciding to get angry at us at this, but And so let's have this off of the past now.
If they were to listen to this and criticize us, they'd say, well, yeah, but you guys, whenever you talk about racism in a modern American society, you go back to slavery.
You go back to the beginning of policing and the prison system and talk about these things as if, oh, that's connected.
And what does a what does a person who was never a slave have to say about it?
It's empirically connected.
And that's what these disciplines are to a greater or lesser extent.
Showing, that's the research program to a greater or lesser extent.
Exactly.
That's the point.
And you use the critical theories, you use these theories in order to kind of develop hypotheses which are then judged based on their empirical support.
Like we have Direct empirical support, direct empirical data, like material understanding of how the Civil War impacted Jim Crow, impacted the Civil Rights era, which impacted redlining and all those things which lead to African-American people being over-policed and being having No household wealth, etc, etc, etc.
All the things that, you know, we could bring up here.
It's not just like, well, we just looked through the rose-colored glasses and saw a butterfly and the butterfly said black people are oppressed, even though Barack Obama is president of the United States.
That's not how it works.
There's like endless amounts of like actual research, actual people talking very seriously about these things and arguing with each other that leads to like these kinds of conclusions and You guys, you Lindsay fans, you're the creationists in this scenario.
You're the ones denying the mountains of evidence.
You are the postmodernists that only live in your own heads, denying the existence of objective reality, because you don't feel like slavery should have any sort of influence on the modern world and how African Americans live today, because you don't like that idea.
You assume it's wrong, and therefore you assume that people that adduce the empirical evidence proving that it's right are up to shenanigans.
You are literally, as always, they're doing what they accuse you of doing.
Always, always.
So, moving forward.
By the way, I like the reference to psychology as reading people's minds.
That's just the entire discipline of psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, everything that involves evaluating anybody else's mental state, just equated with clairvoyance.
He's saying that the claims of implicit racism or the claims of structural racism are like reading racism into people's behavior based on nothing.
reading people's minds as opposed to making inferences based on clearly observable behavior.
And so again, all this stuff, it's all like code words that his right wing audience is going to pick up on.
Yeah.
That he's like dropping in almost as non sequiturs.
So we're gonna we're gonna move forward by moving back.
And so I'm going to take you back to 2014.
We're going to spend a lot of time with this atheistically speaking, serious inquiries only podcast today, because he did so many appearances.
And it's really it's this like treasure trove of data, of information that I found just a couple of weeks ago.
And I. Can I just clarify one thing?
This isn't his show.
This is a show he appeared on.
No, this is a show he appeared on several times.
This is actually a show from from this guy, Tom Smith, who we're going to play some old clips in which Smith Not the greatest guy.
He does not come across all that great in some of these from 2014.
He, I don't think he's a leftist, but by the way, I would consider, I think he's, he's kind of progressive liberal, but he is very much kind of on board with the broader, you know, kind of project of trying to combat these guys.
And as, as you will hear, he has no love lost for Lindsay by 2017.
And his most recent episode was calling out Brent Weinstein for his Weinstein and Hying for their vaccine denial bullshit.
So, he has definitely gotten better over the years.
But this is Tom Smith's podcast.
I dip in and out of this.
Aina Mohammed, who has been a guest on this show, we've guested on hers, guested on his show fairly recently.
He seems like a decent enough guy.
Tom, please reach out to me.
I would love to have a chat with you at some point about some of this and maybe come on the show.
So this is not James Lindsay's show.
This is not James Lindsay's thing.
He regularly guested on the show, and that's why we're playing a lot from this.
We're playing from his appearances to understand how James Lindsay got to where he is today.
So this first clip requires a little bit of setup, and I was not expecting this name to come up because his current partner in crime is Peter Boghossian.
I wasn't expecting Peter Boghossian to show up so early in my understanding of James Lindsay, but in his very first appearance on this Atheistically Speaking podcast, it's about a tweet by Peter Boghossian.
Okay.
This tweet has since been deleted.
Oh, my favorite kind.
Yeah, it is on the Internet Archive.
It is linked in the show notes.
I am now going to read this tweet.
This is from the October 30th, 2014.
I've never understood how someone can be proud of being gay.
How can one be proud of something one didn't work for?
That is so fucking stupid.
I don't even.
It's it is the ultimate it is like the stupidest like in 2014 is not 2021.
It was seven years ago, it might as well be the Neolithic Age, right?
But everybody understands what gay pride means.
That's your grandpa suddenly blurting it out, you know?
Well, I don't understand why they're proud of it.
They say they're born that way.
How can you be proud of it if you're born that way?
Yes, Grandpa.
Go back to sleep.
There are people in the mentions, even in this archive link, saying, look, saying what Pride is.
And we're going to, don't worry, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to spend a little bit of time on this because Lindsay and Smith certainly did.
So let's just play, once you've done that tweet, Understand that I'm clipping a couple of minutes out of an hour-long podcast.
Actually, I think this is a two-part podcast, so two hours of these two men talking about it, in which Smith is basically saying, like, look, He has the right idea.
He knows why people say this but is willing to sort of like have the conversation about well maybe it shouldn't be used that way or maybe this is like kind of a thing this kind of like debate bro or like conversation bro anyway this is a very this is a very like This is a very powerful clip, if you want to understand who James Lindsay was in 2014, and how he always was the douchebag that people were pretending he only is today.
So, here, 2014, proud to say you're gay.
And this is all about this particular tweet, so.
And oh, by the way, he refers to Pete here at the beginning of the clip.
He calls Peter Boghossian, he calls him Pete, he calls him by his first name.
So, just to be clear.
He is a totally genuine guy.
I've gotten to know him a little bit in the last year, and he walks what he talks.
He is a completely genuine guy.
He is ready to have an honest conversation that is an honest conversation with anybody who wants to have one.
The only thing that's important in this honest conversations?
Yep.
But, you know, he has some stipulations that the conversation isn't, you know, so reactionary that there's an openness on both sides, etc.
Well, I can really relate to that.
That's what I like to do.
And I think that the response, you know, between Greta and Chris Stedman was another one I saw, was mainly like, you know, look, idiot.
It's pretty obvious.
We're proud to be out as gay in a society that's, you know, sort of hostile to that.
That seemed to be the response.
Now, you already addressed that.
Maybe he was, you know, he's not really talking about that.
He's saying it shouldn't, you know, the phrase maybe should be different, should be proud to be out or proud to be, you know, not just proud to be gay.
And... Proud to say that you're gay.
I mean, it's one syllable, really.
You know, let me, let me mention, I mean, Greta's thing, I tried to read it, um, I really, I couldn't.
I made it a few sentences in, I skipped further down.
All right, so I'm just going to pause it right there.
He's talking about Greta Christina, the, uh, who was very active in atheist movement, atheist circles, uh, around this time.
Uh, someone that I have enormous respect for.
I believe she's still kind of, like, on Facebook.
I think she's kind of stepped out of the limelight to some degree, but she was well known to be A queer woman living in San Francisco who had literally come out in the 60s, who had experienced enormous amounts of personal and political violence against herself and her body, and who was beloved among movement atheists who were not reactionary dipshits.
She is a person that I have had enormous respect for over the years.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
All that, yeah.
But it's only one syllable, Daniel.
Actually, I love that he's saying, you know, instead of saying gay pride, you should say, I'm proud to be gay, which is more than one syllable.
No, yeah.
Yeah.
It's more like it's one syllable, basically, which means it's not one syllable.
And also, like, do you not understand how political slogans work?
It's it's just it's just like this, like Put a pick in the side of my skull and just slowly pound it in.
It's what listening to these people talk about this for two hours.
But you see, you know, prioritizing, listening to the lived experiences of queer people or African-Americans or whatever in these sorts of studies, these sorts of critical studies.
That's basically exactly the same as saying that Western science is just a completely artificial and subjective framework of, you know, knowing that's limited to white guys and is therefore inherently bad, and that you should privilege the experience of people who are on an oppression pyramid.
You know, just admitting that she might have a more informed, richer perspective on how it feels to be gay in a homophobic society.
No, that's basically denying the existence of objective reality for identitarian reasons.
Oh, fuck off!
Well, now you get to listen to the rest of James Lindsay's comment here, in which he describes the fact that he was not able to even read Greta Christina's blog post talking about this issue and his reasons why.
And so you can note that he calls out Boghossian for, you know, being, he's just, he's a really straightforward guy.
He's a great person.
He can have any conversation out there.
He can stay polite and be nice and, you know, all this sort of thing.
Actually, He's actually very, very bad at that.
And in fact, we will eventually talk much more about Peter Boghossian.
Yeah, that's the claim.
And as opposed to the terrible Greta Christina, which we will now finish this, and then to wash the voice out of our head, I will read a section from Greta Christina's blog post, which James Lindsay was completely unable to read.
Well, it better not be too long because my attention might wander, you know, because I'm a very honest guy and I'm only interested in serious conversations.
I read a couple more sentences.
I realized, to my rather astounding surprise, that she was basically saying the same thing that Bogosian had said, but somehow had managed to get so consumed with You know, some kind of a self-righteous wrath or dyspeptic vituperation or something, you know, words like that fit.
But I just quit reading it.
I can't read that.
It's not discussion.
The only thing I remember standing out from it is seeing that she wanted to tell Pete what gay people have to be proud of.
And what it was that she said is exactly what he said they should be proud of.
That they have faced adversity and overcome it.
That they can own who they are, despite the adversity, and that they're proud to say that they're gay.
That's exactly what Pete said that he understands to be the use of the word.
So I'm not quite sure what was going on, you know?
Let me ask, where did he say that exactly?
Because, I mean, obviously the first post was really short.
Was it in comments, or...?
So, I don't... I didn't... So... So Boghossian... I mean, if it's true that Boghossian did say all that, then he basically answered his own question, and left the deliberately provocateur-ish original question standing.
And Lindsey's problem is that...
Is what exactly?
That this woman dared to be angry about the provocation?
So let me be clear about this.
His super rational genius brain just couldn't handle all these feels that were coming at him from this woman.
Smith asked the right question.
So where exactly did Boghossian say this?
And Lindsay, it sounds like I am quoting that I am not giving Lindsay's answer here.
The truth is, he fumbles around, never really gives a real answer to that question.
I could play a long clip that would demonstrate that to your effect.
I'm just going to tell you if you want to go listen to episode 83 of the podcast of Atheistically Speaking, you can listen to the whole thing yourself and come to your own conclusion.
I really am trying to live enough context so that I cannot be accused of taking this man out of context.
I am not playing five minutes of this clip.
Five more minutes of this clip just to prove that fact.
I have given you ample sources so you can go look for yourself.
So that's where I land on this.
I did quite a bit of looking for this.
I cannot find where Boghossian said anything of the sort in the context of this.
Lindsay does not claim that.
Lindsay claims in a blog post that he wrote that from what Peter, what Boghossian has said to him privately, that Boghossian believes that and understands that, right?
All right.
I cannot find a public pronouncement where a Boghossian says that.
Now, I believe that Boghossian is not bigoted against gay people in the way that plenty of the other people we've covered on this podcast are bigoted against gay people.
I think he's a very nice kind of liberal guy who's just asking questions, who's just doing the thing.
We will cover Boghossian in much more detail in a future episode.
I think it's time now to read a little segment from the blog post That James Lindsay just couldn't get through.
He read a few sentences.
It's not a conversation.
And I think if you if you got this far, you deserve a little bit of this, a little bit of this.
It's all that dyspeptic vituperation, which sounds fucking great, to be honest.
Bring it on.
Yeah.
No, this is a segment from this.
And again, this is linked.
I've linked this in the show notes.
This has not been taken down.
You don't even need an Archive.org link for this.
So here's here's Greta Christina.
Okay, fine.
As a fully licensed and registered LGBT person, I will spell out to Peter Boghossian what exactly gay pride means.
Actually, to be precise, I will point out what LGBT pride means.
LGBT pride does not mean being proud of having been born lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans.
It means being proud of having survived.
It means being proud of living in a homophobic, biphobic, transphobic society, a society that commonly treats us with contempt at best and violent hatred at worst, and still getting on with our lives.
It means being proud of flourishing in a society that commonly thinks we're broken.
It means being proud of being happy in a society that commonly thinks we should be miserable.
It means being proud of being good and compassionate in a society that commonly thinks we're wicked.
It means being proud of fighting for our rights and the rights of others like us in a society that commonly thinks we should lie down and let ourselves get walked on, or that thinks we should be grateful for crumbs and not ask for more.
It means being proud of retaining our dignity in a society that commonly treats us as laughingstocks.
It means being proud of loving our sexuality and our bodies in a society that commonly thinks our sexuality and our bodies are disgusting.
It means being proud of staying alive in a society that commonly beats us down and wants us dead.
Fuck you, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian.
Yeah, and the shaming of her for, I didn't hear any particular, maybe she was vituperative elsewhere, but I didn't hear anything that sounded remotely unhinged or unreasonable or insulting in there.
The shaming of her for using passionate language in response to what is definitely a provocation and an insult, that illustrates her point.
Exactly.
And the point is that she doesn't take Peter Boghossian and the other little bigoted fuckheads by the hand and say, I'm sorry that you feel like you can't say straight pride and not be talked down to by us who are actually dealing with actual repression.
I'm sorry that you feel insulted by the way that I use the words to express my identity.
I'm sorry.
And I need to learn to communicate better to you.
Because I am the person who is actually in the wrong here if I make your fee fees hurt.
That's what Lindsey is saying, and that's what Begosian is saying, and that's what all these fucking, like, I know we're talking about this thing from 2014, but everything that Lindsey is doing now, the attitudes that lead him to saying and doing the things he's doing now, are absolutely fully present in that exchange in 2014.
Full on.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
You know, I'm sorry that there's me living with rampant, savage homophobia for decades that, you know, constantly disadvantages me and oppresses me and insults me and tells me that I'm wrong for even existing, when really I should have been worried about you sitting there being irritated by your inability to understand why gay people say they're proud.
I should have been more considerate of your slight irritation at that phrase.
Why did we have the nerve to march through the streets saying that thing that doesn't immediately make sense to you?
I'm so sorry.
I mean, I think your penis, your conceptual penis, just was like slightly shriveled by me being like slightly angry.
And, you know, like there's also a lesson to be learned.
Like for me, I mean, I was not always like perfectly on the right side of these issues, you know, and I don't, you know, like, and, you know, if you talk to me back in the 2000s, I was kind of like maybe You know, maybe can we can we kind of change the language a little bit?
And people definitely got like up in my face and got upset with me for not being right on that.
And you know what I did?
I said, maybe these people who are really upset, maybe there's a reason they're upset and maybe I need to like Google something or AltaVista something back in the day, you know, maybe I need to go and do a little bit of research on my own.
And it turns out that when you do the research, you can find people who describe their experiences and who make these arguments for themselves.
And if you put a little bit of work into it, you can at least empathize, you know, like, wow, what a thought.
I know.
So what we've demonstrated, I apologize that we spent a little bit of time there, kind of going through that, but there are certain people that James Lindsay is clearly not, does not think are worthy of his empathy.
And Greta Christina, because of her upsetness at Boghossian's tweet and about like, Centuries of homophobia, etc.
That, you know, that she's living through every day.
This is not a person who is worthy of his respect because she typed in language that he thought was upsetting.
Yeah, he thought was too emotional.
And, you know, Peter Boghossian is entitled to the assumption of good intentions and good faith and reasonableness, etc.
I don't know what it is about him that makes him entitled to that assumption, but apparently he is.
Actually, I know precisely what it is about him that makes him entitled to that assumption, in his opinion.
Well, it will shock you to learn that there is another group of people who are also much more worthy of having their feelings considered, according to James Lindsay.
In a book that he wrote after this exchange, I believe in 2015, this book was called Everybody Is Wrong About God.
And he did a two-part podcast appearance, again, on Atheistically Speaking.
This is episodes 191 and 192, linked in the show notes.
I am not playing clips from that.
Believe me, it's completely off-topic of this podcast, and there's very little there.
There's stuff that you and I could talk about, and there's some interesting stuff there in terms of the belief in the afterlife and how you can interact with that and et cetera, et cetera.
More to the point, I'm going to read from a review of this book by David Chivers in The Humanist.
This is Lindsay's thesis, and I think it tells you a lot, again, about Lindsay's perspective on things.
Given that Lindsay feels most people don't intellectually believe in God anymore, his next main inquiry is an exploration of what people do mean when they say they believe in God.
He argues that most of these people are actually articulating a more subtle need for community, comfort, and a set of morals, which they then equate with God.
God is the embodiment of their ideas on what makes a good life, but once personified, they confuse their ideas of what makes for a good life with the actual individual that they have created and then stubbornly argue for the existence of said character, i.e.
God.
Lindsay calls on atheists.
Secondhand Daniel Dennett, basically.
Yeah, this is this is which is which is already secondhand Feuerbach.
Never mind.
Right.
Yeah.
No, no.
This this is this is not this.
This is there's nothing original in this.
This was listening to these episodes.
I'm very much like and people wonder why the new atheists were.
So marginalized and fucking hated in the 2000s because like, this is what you think you're going to spend like hours and hours of your life talking about.
It's like, well, no, they actually believe in this thing that they call God.
And like, it's just so disconnected from anything real.
Finishing this, this quote that I've got here.
Lindsay calls on atheists to recognize this phenomenon and change their arguments accordingly, addressing the needs that God personifies for that person rather than the actual belief in God.
This is the next step of post-theism.
Society must find ways to fulfill those needs in a secular way.
Once those needs are addressed and met in those other ways, the need for God will quickly and naturally fall away.
Gee, that sounds strangely familiar!
It's almost as if living in middle Tennessee, as they call it, and being surrounded by religious conservatives means that the people that he thinks actually deserve a certain level of respect for their beliefs, even if he doesn't agree with them, are the right-wing reactionary conservative dipshits who are trying to get creationism pushed in schools and
Would burn Greta Christina alive given the political opportunity to do so.
Yeah.
Those people, those people deserve respect and deserve the handholding.
Those are the people that he can have a conversation with and that deserve respect.
Not Greta Christina because she typed in all caps that one time.
Well, she was, yeah, she was vituperative and dyspeptic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's, that's interesting.
Cause it did.
I mean, for a moment there, it reminded me of that famous passage from, uh, from Marx about religion.
You know, the, uh, the passage where he talks about the opium, everybody's heard it, the opium of the people, but then goes on to say about how religion is the, the soul of soulless conditions.
And, uh, Basically, what he's saying is that it's the expression of alienation, and it's both, you know, a complaint against alienation and a plea for changing the world so that it's different.
I mean, it's very, you know, it's nowhere near as sophisticated as Marx's analysis.
But what he's saying, basically, is that religion is some form of expression of discontent.
And, you know, if we want to address religion as a social problem, we need to address The underlying discontent or the underlying problems that lead people to that source of comfort.
Except that he's doing it from the right, isn't he?
Well, and what are the material things that, you know, you need to consider in terms of, like, a bunch of reactionary Christians in Tennessee?
Like, what are their problems?
Their problems are, like, the existence of gay people and, like, black people and welfare.
That's right, yeah.
That's their problem.
That's the thing that we need to reach out to them on and make common cause of these people.
It's such a recurring theme that we kind of come across in this podcast is, when you want to understand who people are and what they really believe, Ask who they extend empathy to, who they extend sympathy to, and who they don't, right?
Yeah.
And it's always, it's always with these people, like when you find someone who's, I just want to ask questions about, you know, whether we should use gay pride, whether that's a reasonable thing to say.
It's to protect the feelings of right-wing dipshits.
And then when you reach out to the right wing dipshits, it's like, no, you queer people just need to stay, just need to be quiet just a little bit longer because we're just trying to get the right wing dipshits like 1% closer to our side.
No, no, they're not going to, they're not, they're not going to, they're not going to do anything bad.
Donald Trump, that's just some guy on the television.
It's just, it's fine.
It's fine.
You know, like, The rise of the alt-right is clearly two years from now, guys.
We don't have to worry about it.
We don't have to worry about it.
There's no white nationalism.
It's not going to happen.
I'm not going to be a thing.
I'm being sarcastic.
Anyway, we should probably move forward, right?
Even if it does happen, you know, it's the expression of legitimate concerns.
And yeah, your your concerns aren't legitimate, but theirs are.
James Lindsay does the thing today of whenever any kind of like these kind of like far right people, the white nationalists, Nazis, KKK, et cetera, is kind of brought up to him.
His response is like, well, that's just like the fringe of the fringe.
That's this tiny minority that has no power in society.
Yes, it's it's it's the standard.
It's the thing that all of these like IDW dipshits always do whenever you bring that up.
It's like, well, yeah, but they don't have they, you know, they don't have any power.
I mean, you got to really talk this.
These college kids, the woke college kids, they're the ones that that are there.
They're the problem.
So, yeah.
Moving forward here, and I'm just going to say really underlies the project to attack things like a critical race theory.
And this is not the place to, you know, examine what critical race theory even is or its flaws or strengths or anything like that.
We're not going to do that here.
But this is the underlying meaning of the project.
You deny the existence of these systemic problems.
So that you can eternally give aid and comfort to the reactionary sectors of society.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And that's the point is like CRT, and like Lindsay's current usage in the kind of larger political means is not critical race theory, a set of ideas within kind of legal institutions and, you know, academic institutions that are designed to Just describe how society works.
It's not an interpretive lens that you can apply to things.
It is any consideration of systemic problems needing to have systemic solutions at all.
Like any examination of that in any context is fundamentally verboten because it's part of the scary, the small word CRT, critical race theory.
That's the thing that he's on these days.
Yeah, absolutely.
It bears no relation to actual academic practice or content.
You know, there's a very good article, which I might link to, which goes into his description of CRT.
He doesn't know the first thing about it.
He gets everything wrong.
His arguments are spurious.
The people he cites are the wrong people.
You know, they're not CRT people, etc, etc.
Is this the Sam Hoadley Brill?
It is, yes.
I was desperately trying to remember the name.
It's a bit of a complex name for me just at the moment to remember.
I follow both Sam Hoadley Brill and Sam Alder Bell on Twitter.
Yeah, this, when this guy talks about CRT, he's not talking about an actual field of study, which has strengths and weaknesses, etc.
You know, he's talking, it's a moral panic.
It's a boogeyman.
And the aim is, as you say, to blacken the name of any sort of collective or systemic opposition and remedy to systemic oppressions.
Yeah, and people within CRT, people within critical theory broadly, argue with each other all the time.
That's what all this academic publishing is about, is people publishing and then having debates.
So, speaking of debates... Yes, let's crash on.
I'm doing a better job of derailing you than I thought I'd be capable of.
You're doing great.
I think this is this is this is fun.
But we we have there's this gets so much worse.
Let's go.
Let's go.
I'm just going to I'm just going to highlight here just the next clip that I'm going to play.
Uses the word rape about 35 times.
So content warning, this is not because we are describing a rape or doing anything like getting into any kind of details about rape.
This is about the teaching of rape law in first year law school classes.
Oh yeah.
So this was a thing that Kind of a for like a month or two in 2015 became this kind of giant like the Daily Mail published pieces about this you got tons of kind of it became like this right wing shitstorm right and you know anyway we'll get into this get into this briefly here but this is part of a three-part episode on this uh Atheistically Speaking podcast um in which James Lindsay and this guy Eli Bosnick who um
He's a comedian.
He has his own kind of podcasts.
He is a regular guest on Atheistically Speaking and now on Serious Inquiries Only.
When he found out this afternoon that I was going to be doing an episode about James Lindsay, or somebody tweeted it at him, and he said, hey, don't forget the three episodes that we did.
And I'm like, oh, don't worry.
I listened to Eli.
So Eli, if you're listening, this is about four and a half fucking hours of debate between this guy, Eli Bosnick, and James Lindsay.
Eli Bosnick is unfailingly polite to this man.
I really regret not using more audio from this, but I just have so much more stuff to do.
It's, as these kinds of debates always are, it is incredibly frustrating because Eli is so polite and spent so much of his time trying to extract the real, like any kind of real value in trying to treat James Lindsay as a good faith actor.
And James Lindsay is just shitting on everything imaginable during this entire process.
Yeah.
Four and a half hours.
I'm going to play you about two minutes of this, but it gives you a sense of how this goes.
And this is from the third part.
And this is an entire episode, an entire hour and 15 minutes or so about trigger warnings.
This is how it starts.
Oh, dear God.
Yeah.
And yes, and again, this clip, it uses the word rape a lot.
So again, if that's something just, just, I'm just, I'm just highlighting that now.
It just does by definition.
Yeah.
So I don't, I didn't, I do know what they are.
I was familiar with the concept going into it, but I decided this was a topic I actually needed to look up to know more about if I was going to talk to you about it, because I'm not familiar with the relevant literature.
What a shock.
And so, like I said, I wanted to bring up in particular, I was talking about, I mentioned the problem with law school, law education.
And I mentioned the paper by Kim Champan.
And I'm saying her name wrong.
I know I'm saying it wrong.
I'm having a hard time with that name.
But it's called Crisis and Trigger Warnings, Reflections on Legal Education and the Social Value of Law.
It was published in Chicago Kent Law Review 2015.
Now, I want to bring this up particularly because she's pointing at a particular problem and her solution is actually trigger warnings.
So it's contrary to my point of view.
There are other law professors, Jenny Souk, like I mentioned, Alan Dershowitz at Harvard, Eugene Volokh at UCLA, that all bring up the same problem.
And this, I know, is something you're a little bit familiar with, Eli, that rape law, you actually now, I know you said at some point that if you knew that there were professors that were shying away from teaching rape law and first year criminal law and it was documented, then you would recognize that as a major problem.
And that is exactly what these papers document, is that this is actually happening.
And Chambonpin, say it really slowly if I'm not mispronouncing it, her paper specifically cites Let's use trigger warnings if it means we can keep teaching rape law.
The problem has gotten so significant because, obviously, if they stop teaching rape law adequately, then you're going to have underprepared legal representation for people who have been raped.
So you need people to learn rape law, and social justice, of course, wants rape law thoroughly covered.
Is social justice an entity?
And it is these, what do they call them, edge cases or whatever, there's a specific name for them.
That are the controversial ones and they are upsetting to people.
And so she specifically acknowledges that maybe trigger warnings are the way but let's not lose rape law because right now what's happening is rape law is people are staying out of it.
They're not covering the kinds of cases that need to get covered and so on and so forth.
So you explain that to me because I'm confused.
Why are trigger warnings making people not cover rape law?
No, no, no, no.
Trigger warnings are not.
Complaints from students that it's causing them to be triggered and upset.
And then they complain to their... So you have compassionate professors, typically, and you have a very compassionate and willing to listen administration, typically.
I included that last bit just because the idea that, like, administration in law schools and even in universities is deeply sympathetic.
Two students complaining of, oh yeah, it's just bending over backwards.
No doubt.
No, this is this is simply this is just fucking not the case.
It just it just isn't like it's it's it's a laughable, you know.
And again, even even even in undergraduates, you know, like there is no there is no sympathy given.
By administrations to accepted like a handful of like, you know, very high, you know, high, high tuition, small liberal arts colleges, you get an occasional, you know, like something that then gets gets fit up, put on the, you know, the right wing ledger of, you know, horrible incidents that happened on like, yeah, campuses, etc, etc.
He spends a lot of time talking about victim culture and about like the culture of victimization and all the stuff that you would expect from something that's talking about trigger warnings for an hour in 2015.
It's all there.
Meanwhile, the planet is fucking burning.
Yes.
And meanwhile, Richard Spencer is at this point getting on television occasionally.
He's out there.
He's organizing.
The alt-right is becoming a thing.
Gamergate is in full swing at this point.
No, we gotta talk about, we gotta talk about trigger warnings.
Yeah.
It's a terrible thing.
It's a terrible thing.
You notice also that he kind of like, oh no, this isn't caused by trigger warnings.
It's sort of like a, like, he sort of like shifts around whenever he's challenged on like, what does trigger warnings have to do with any of this?
Right?
Well, this is it.
I left that quote.
I mean, I don't know if any of this is even true, right?
Because there's a very good recent episode of You're Wrong About where Michael Hobbs, he's doing a series on political correctness and cancel culture.
And the first part of the series is about the political correctness panic from the 90s.
And it's really good because he just shows that the whole thing was based on anecdote
And you know 99 times out of 100 when you go and examine the actual facts of the case what you've got is is absolutely a nothing burger it's been misreported by a credulous press and the stakes are incredibly low and this just sounds I mean like so much now with cancel culture and wokeness again moral panic it's just a reiteration of the political correctness moral panic from the 90s so this sounds like that but even if this is all true I was left with just this feeling of like Where's the problem again?
Like, you know, law students are finding themselves triggered by mention of rape in classes.
So, okay, well, that's a problem.
So what do we do?
We We give them warnings that the topic is about to come up.
The logic that he's going for, and I apologize if the clip didn't really make it clear, what he's saying is that students are now complaining enough about the way that these classes are taught that professors are not teaching these classes, and therefore the next generation of social workers and people doing work in these fields will not have an adequate grounding in rape law.
So are these professors not worried about the fact that these students are going to fail that portion of their exams?
This can't actually be a thing.
I don't believe this is a thing.
But apart from anything else, if they're doing that, if they're cancelling their courses because of this, then they're behaving like whiny Panicky piss babies who are failing out of sheer oversensitivity to students daring to complain to actually do their job and educate their students.
That's the problem here.
The problem isn't students complaining.
What the fuck do you expect students to do?
We want students to complain and question.
It's where you learn how to think, college, at least that's the idea.
The job of The job of professors is to be the grown-ups in the room and to say, yeah, I know it's distressing, but you do have to learn about this.
And to a certain extent, you know, take the feelings of students into consideration as well.
It's not unreasonable to say, don't just spring the subject of rape on me because, I mean, apart from anything else, college campuses, you know, my God.
It reminds me deeply of an example that Michael Hobbes goes into in that podcast we were just talking about.
Oh, don't worry.
I'm about to blow your mind.
And that is that nothing James Lindsay said in that was true.
No.
No, but in that one case I'm talking about that Michael Hobbes talks about that it reminded me of, what it turns out to be is a professor cancelling his course because he has a complete hissy fit overreaction to the fact that one student asked him politely, well didn't even ask him to do anything, just told him politely that I find aspects of your course troubling.
Yeah, exactly.
If it's even happening at all, it's just that all over again.
But you're about to tell me it didn't even happen.
I bet.
Well, it's not it's it's so so first of all, he quotes the there.
This is inception level wrongness that we're about to get into here.
Right.
Which.
I just I picked this clip because I thought it was interesting that you start to see in this exchange where he's like dropping these references all the time so he drops these these names of papers these authors of papers he drops this kind of thing and says well it concludes this it concludes that and we have to look at the real study and in a live debate if you're just presented with this there's no way you're going to be able to go and look at this and this is this is this is what This is how you just sort of, like, bamboozle your opponents.
It's not even like a Gish Gallop.
It's just a, well, I am pretending to have this air of authority by, you know, dropping all these papers.
And then, like, kind of later on, when you go and look it up and go, like, well, I would love to see your sources on that.
Trust me, we're about to get into, like, how egregiously he is using sources at this point.
And again, this is a persistent James Lindsay thing.
Oh, no, no.
Sources that turn out to be bullshit.
Again, we are demonstrating that in 2015 he was doing the same things he's doing in 2021 at this point.
That is the point here, okay?
Yeah.
James Lindsay has been excreting his squid ink for a very long time.
So for the first thing, he refused to learn how to pronounce the last name of the scholar, Chambonpin.
Now, I'm not sure I'm pronouncing it correctly either, but at least I tried.
I googled the name.
It is a Philippine name.
I found the paper that he's referring to because he was nice enough to actually quote the title.
And if you Google the title, you can find it.
I didn't read the paper, but I have the abstract in the show notes.
This is not a paper about trigger warnings.
This is a paper talking about faculty in law schools using complaints from students as a way of neglecting the power that they have in their classrooms.
And even more importantly, the power that the neoliberal institutions behind them have to affect their.
So it's like, I feel threatened that my job will be on the line because these like woke college kids are coming and complaining to me.
And that reflects badly on me.
And instead of using that as a way of challenging the power above them to fire them for things, they are instead blaming the college kids.
Yeah.
And encourages the law school professors to actually take the side of the college, to take the side of their students to prevent a solid front against the institutions themselves, which are the real bad actors in these situations.
Again, I have not read the full paper.
I apologize if I am misquoting it.
This paper has nothing to say about like trigger warnings.
It just, it just isn't about that.
It just isn't about that.
You know?
I also found a BuzzFeed article by Katie J.M.
Baker.
This is entitled, Teaching Rape Law in the Age of the Trigger Warning.
Let's just read a little bit.
This is a quote from a student who was taking, so in first year law school, you take a kind of a basic course in criminal law.
Every person is required to take, it's like a basic required curriculum class.
The vast majority of lawyers are never going to practice criminal law.
You're gonna get into tax law, you're gonna get into corporate finance, you're gonna do something other than criminal law.
Criminal law is a rare specialization.
Everybody who teaches law school teaches intro criminal law because it's just a basic required course that everybody has to teach.
Some of them teach it very badly.
That's the lesson that we learn here, right?
And here's the quote.
You're in a Harvard Law classroom, which is supposed to be this advanced, high-minded environment.
And when we got to rape, the conversation totally devolved into bullshit.
One Harvard Law graduate said, I don't need to pay Harvard tuition to hear men be dumbasses.
Actually, I think you pay Harvard Law, the professors are kind of dumbasses anyway.
Criminal law is a required class, so even students who want to practice tax law or litigate intellectual property cases must participate in quote-unquote rape week.
It also means that professors who aren't necessarily experts in the field sometimes teach it.
For many students, that's where the problems start.
Some hate it when professors insist on using the Socratic method, a common law school teaching practice in which students are cold-called and mercilessly questioned because a rape survivor might have to argue an accused rapist's case.
Others don't understand why professors engage with students who make insensitive remarks about victims, such as, what if she looked older than 12?
Or, is it still rape if it wasn't consensual, but he really thought it was, instead of shutting them down?
Some law students even told BuzzFeed News that they chose to skip their Rape Week classes completely rather than seethe in silence.
Isn't that a much more realistic and valid thing than whatever James Lindsay was pretending was happening?
Yeah.
And it's also one that speaks of institutional and widespread ingrained, one might even say systemic, misogyny and sexism.
You just said it because you're a post-modernist critical race theorist.
There you go.
I'm going to this much detail again to demonstrate the truth of the matter here, to demonstrate how much Lindsay is just twisting facts to his own political agenda all the time in every single exchange he has.
There is clearly a reflex for the guy.
Yeah, he went and picked out papers that he could then use To make this point.
And he doesn't even quote from the papers.
He doesn't even quote from the abstracts.
He just sort of like summarizes.
He lays it all out on this Eli Bosnick guy.
And Bosnick is just kind of forced to kind of go, what does this mean?
What are you talking about?
You know, like, show me the papers.
If you can convince me that this is a real thing, we can have a real conversation about it.
Like Bosnick is at every point treats this guy in good faith.
And, you know, the lesson here is don't, don't do that ever again.
Yeah.
All right.
Moving on.
We're going to talk about the conceptual penis.
At last.
What you all came for.
Hang on.
It's not Hulk Hogan's conceptual penis.
No, no, no.
I mean, that that was a very different kind of conceptual penis, I suppose.
So.
So at some point in 2017, Lindsay and Boghossian decided they were going to kind of get together and write a write a hoax paper because all this critical race theory, all this critical theory, gender study stuff, so much bullshit.
And they figured, hey, we can get a paper published.
we can get a paper published that is equal in quality to that we can basically get a hoax paper a fake paper which is obviously nonsense get it published in a high peer-reviewed journal and approve that the whole field is is full of nonsense spoiler alert the lessons the the failure of this to succeed in any real way and the criticism he gets from this ends up becoming the grievance
So that's why we're ending on this.
That's why we're covering this one in particular.
So they write a paper, The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.
I have linked to it in the show notes.
There is an abstract.
I could quote from the conclusion.
I put a bunch of text in the show notes.
If you want to go read it, I don't want to really spend a whole lot of time on it.
But the idea is that what he's doing He's kind of playing, the idea is they submit the paper to one journal, Norma, which he finds a link to in this Real Peer Review Twitter feed.
Like there's a paper from Norma that had something to do with like masculinity studies that he finds.
Real peer review is a essentially a kind of like, we're going to pull a bunch of like abstracts from, you know, gender studies papers.
And, you know, that we find ridiculous and we're going to summarize them badly and then post summaries of it and go look at how crazy these like underwater basket weaving kids are.
You know, that's essentially what the real peer review Twitter feed is.
Yeah.
He finds this kind of a paper about masculinity in Norma kind of quoted from this real peer review decides we're going to write this thing and we're going to call the conceptual penis.
Right.
And then we're going to fill this paper with a bunch of like, kind of nonsense, a bunch of a bunch of, we don't understand the terms that we're using, we're just kind of googling the terms that we find in other papers.
and just kind of filling in like a bunch of stuff and then kind of say, "And also the conceptual penis is responsible for climate change." Like if you look at the conclusion of this, I mean, basically what the paper is arguing in kind of layman's terms, if you kind of read through all that, it's saying because the penis, the actual physical penis is not always present in every person or every organization that is the actual physical penis is not always present in every person or every organization that
We need to consider if we are going to kind of use this idea of, you know, this kind of like phallic imagery.
Now I disagree with that kind of thing of like using the phallus that way.
This does feel like very like early 90s kind of, you know, post-structuralist theory, second wave feminism stuff.
I think that's kind of a useless thing, but it's a metaphor that's used in, you know, certain kinds of academia.
If you're going to kind of grant this, you know, this kind of idea of the phallus as the kind of symbol of masculinity and the symbol of like raping the world or whatever, Then calling it the conceptual penis and that even people who do not have physical penises can also do this kind of activity, and that using this intellectual construct as a way of understanding these kinds of activities in the world including climate change.
This is a not unreasonable conclusion based on those premises, right?
This would fit within a certain realm of study.
It is a question, it is a something that is within the realm of conversation for people who are- And I think that's the key here.
It's not completely out to lunch.
The basic conception of it is.
Now, if you throw in a bunch of like spurious references and you throw in a bunch of language that proves that you don't understand the basic thing that you're trying to say, and then your paper does not get published in the journal that you submitted it to, which is what happened here.
And instead you get it published in a pay to play journal.
Yeah.
Which will publish literally anything, and these journals exist in every field, and this is well known to everyone involved in this.
You have proven nothing about anything, because you have demonstrated that you do not understand the thing that you're writing, and so your satire, which he defends it, when he's forced to defend it, he defends it as satire, which is so effective because it's obvious nonsense, right?
Yeah.
But I could write a paper That would sound to people who don't know mathematics, just like James Lindsay's PhD thesis, very easily.
And the fact that it would not be published in a mathematics journal, or if it was, it would be published in a pay-to-play journal that has no... that if I just pay them to publish it, they will just publish it.
That's the exact thing that James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian have done here.
And to a great degree, that's also what the Griffith City things are.
That gets a little more complicated, so we're going to cover that in a future episode.
This is where we see James Lindsay become the full James Lindsay, right?
So they published this paper.
They published the hoax.
They write it up in Skeptic Magazine.
Yeah, Skeptic Magazine, edited by Shermer.
Shermer, the very credibly accused rapist, just to be clear.
And former Randian who admits to holding on to several Randian ideas and has written about how capitalism is basically in your genes and other wack doodle stuff like that.
This is how they describe, in the Skeptic Magazine piece, this kind of conceptual penis hoax.
Assuming the pen names are Jamie Lindsay and Peter Boyle, and writing for the fictitious Southeast Independent Social Research Group, we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discourse of gender theory.
The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn't be thought of as male genital organs, but as damaging social constructions.
That's actually not what they argued in the paper, but that's another thing.
We made no attempt to find out what post-structuralist discourse of gender theory actually means.
Agreed.
We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.
Again, this is how they characterize their own work in this kind of skeptic magazine piece.
So it's also a little marker here.
Norma is not a prestigious or well-known journal.
Norma is not a big deal.
Norma turned it down, but Norma isn't a big deal.
It's not even close to being a big deal.
A journal that's on the outskirts of respectability turned it down.
It's not even a critical theory journal.
It's not a gender theory journal.
It's not a, it's not in the, there's like a list of gender, gender theory and critical theory journals.
Like that group apparently keeps a list of like the top 115, like named journals, like top journals in the field, like in a numbered list of like, this one is number one, this was number two, et cetera, et cetera.
Norma is not on that list.
No.
Right?
No.
It's not an influential journal and even they saw through it.
And they saw through it.
They rejected it.
And apparently they sent on they said, if you want to get this published, you can go and, you know, seek out this pay to play journal.
Now, there may be some thing going on there where there's some relationship going on.
I'd be happy to have like that conversation.
This kind of comes up in things that I'm not going to play in this clip.
There is so much detail in this thing.
I've got like 15 minutes of audio, not 15, but I've got quite a few.
I've got quite a bit of audio to play you about this because, again, it illustrates where James Lindsay is kind of going at this point.
So, yeah, there are big problems with academic publishing, as Lindsay and Boghossian admit in places and then just completely gloss over.
Right.
Well, what you're going to find is what he does is he says, like, we've got what he calls a two pronged problem of we submitted it to one journal.
We can't get it in.
But then we thought, like, well, maybe we can also expose the problems in this kind of pay to play, you know, predatory publisher thing.
Well, that's a completely different.
That is not in anything that is said in the skeptic article in the Skeptic Magazine piece.
They're talking about how this proves like all the nonsense about And the fact that it's published is fundamentally a part of that.
Like, if you just put this on your fucking blog, people might find it a funny joke, but it says nothing about anything.
No, you can't use it as reactionary red meat if you just do that.
It's just you writing up a bunch of nonsense and calling it gender theory.
Like, you know, you prove nothing.
And so, Lindsey goes back on is now called Serious Inquiries Only with Tom Smith, formally atheistically speaking, and here's where I really had to start.
You're going to hear some donk donks here and there for the long order donk donk where I did have to like clip some of this because they get into, they go into rabbit holes, they're finding things.
I promise you I'm taking none of this out of context.
I spent a lot of time trying to really trim this down and even then it's the rest of these clips will be I don't think this one actually has a has a break in it but all the rest of them do after this one so just to be clear again everything is linked in the show notes you can go listen and if I have said anything inaccurately call me out for it but I have not so here we go So our hoax doesn't, doesn't say there's, hey, look at this problem in gender studies.
We don't have the data to conclude that.
What we do have is another body of evidence, which is look at all these similar papers that are in serious journals.
They're not, you just, I mean, for real peer review, I mean, you just said you got this first journal from them, which doesn't have a zero impact score.
But they just retweeted the other day yet another one that's from Gender and Society, which is the top ranked.
They've been tweeting a lot of articles, and when I read the abstract, a high percentage of the time they're not even representing what's in the abstract correctly.
They're a satire.
They're a satire feed.
So when they claim, look at this bullshit, they're not required to be honest about it?
And you can cite them as evidence of a problem in gender studies when they're being dishonest about it?
I'm not citing them as a problem in gender studies.
I'm looking at the actual papers themselves.
You just did!
Yep, they did.
They did.
There's an entire field out there within this nebula of the social sciences That's called autoethnography that it reveals a gigantic problem because it's literally, quite literally, taking away as much objectivity as possible and using the most personally subjective avenue to try to create conclusions as possible.
It's the exact opposite of removing cognitive biases from fields.
It's introducing the maximum cognitive bias into a field.
Or confirmation bias in particular.
This is what I experienced.
Therefore, this is a social problem.
And here's how I know, because I tell a story.
You're doing that now.
You are literally doing that now.
Yes, he is.
That's auto-ethnography.
Could you not have been a little more careful in your skeptic article?
I don't know who wrote what, but you really were unambiguous.
And the fact that everybody got from it, who's publishing this, who's reposting it, like Dawkins, Schirmer, everybody got this.
Every once in a while it's necessary and desirable to expose extreme ideologies for what they are.
I mean, everybody got from your article that gender studies is the problem.
And I don't think it's entirely their fault.
You could tell one of the reasons I let that play as long as I did is because you can tell that Tom Smith really getting fed up with James Lindsay, This was the part two wherein we're in the previous episode.
He had had the same guy, Eli Bosnick, who had done the three part four and a half hour debate with Lindsay.
Yeah, I'm listening to that one.
Explained in excruciating detail exactly how like fucked up all of this was in the show notes.
That is really good.
Go and listen to that episode because he just demolishes the conceptual penis.
Yeah, he does.
It's all you need to know.
So after this conversation he has with Lindsay, and at the end of it, as Smith starts to really kind of dig into some details, Lindsay essentially says, well, look, this is the end of my time.
I've really got to get out of here.
He also does that in another podcast appearance that he did around this time.
Now I understand he was doing a lot of media around this time and it's just a thing that happens, but really notable that the second he's like really challenged on any of this in a real way, he bravely runs away.
After the end of the conversation he has with Lindsay, he kind of gets on Lindsay and says like, look, you quoted a lot of sources to me.
You said you had all this stuff that I could look at.
And like, that proves your point that there is something more systematic kind of going wrong with this.
Lindsay apparently does then email him a list of sources with quotes, like descriptions that are presumably taken from the Real Peer Review Twitter feed.
Smith hopes that they are taken from the real peer-reviewed Twitter feed because if Lindsay himself wrote them and was this dishonest about like the contents of the papers whether he's sharing them or whether he wrote them I don't think it much matters but at this point this is where Smith is this is the end of the relationship the at this point years-long relationship between Tom Smith And James Lindsay, because of Lindsay's just complete fucking dishonesty about this.
And so this is where I really had to cut into his face and calling it champagne.
The guy got sick of it.
That's exactly what he's doing.
That's exactly what he's doing.
Yeah.
Let's listen to a bit about James's sources from this list.
And if you listen to 44 to SIO 44, you should probably listen to SIO 45 at least the last 25 minutes or so.
You can skip the James Lindsay bit, but this thing where he goes through all these papers, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty golden.
He gave me those sources, and guys, I have to say, the email that I received from James with the sources for me to put in the show notes, so this is a public thing, is one of the most disappointing emails I have ever received.
It is a list of, essentially, what I can only guess, I emailed him back, haven't gotten a response, it's what I can only guess is just ripped straight from that real peer-reviewed Twitter account.
And it's simply straw men and, I think, deliberate...
misrepresentations of these studies or papers or whatever that's being published.
And that is the foundation upon which a lot of people's, including James's, conception of gender studies is.
I'm going to go through all of these.
I went through and researched all of these.
I'm going to tell you about them.
I'm going to start in order of importance because he just gave me a bunch of links to studies and a description of them.
Which I think, I think, not sure, I hope is taken from real peer review.
If these are James' actual descriptions of these, that's horrifying because they are just terrible.
I'm gonna give you some examples.
The first one I happened to click on was the worst because it caught my eye.
Here's the link he sent me.
This is James' exact words.
Fat men's penises might not exist, comma, social construction.
So yeah, I guess if you see that tweeted, that sounds alarming.
Wow, some idiot is writing a paper saying fat men's penises might not exist.
Holy crap, that's terrible.
Was actually a paper that takes a look at fat male sexuality.
It uses those words.
Those aren't my words.
So it's looking at fat men in movies, Pop culture, and it's looking at how their sexuality is portrayed.
And it comes to the conclusion that it's either ridiculous, like it's sort of a polluting thing, like fat bastard or whatever in Austin Powers, it's looked at as this gross, polluting kind of thing, or it's ignored, or it doesn't exist.
So fat men in media, their sexuality is either ignored or pollutes.
And this is the quote that I think The straw man description is based on, because it's the only thing that's even close.
Here's a quote from the abstract.
"Fat male sexuality paradoxically doesn't exist and in existing pollutes." So that's interesting to me.
Does that not seem like a legitimate study?
Like, if someone wants to say, hey, how are overweight men portrayed in movies sexually?
Like, what's their sexuality like?
Listed all the sources that they went through, there's a bunch of them, the movies, etc.
And they went through it and said, here's what it looks like.
It's either gross in movies, like it's depicted as a disgusting thing, or it's ignored.
That's interesting.
Is that not a legitimate thing to look into?
Is that beneath us as scholars?
Or, in my opinion, is the horrible strawman description of that, which is fat men's penises might not exist, Is that awful strawman beneath scholarship?
Because that's my view.
Could you truly say that James is the one, James and Peter Boghossian, who are using this to make a determination about a field that they are not in, who are using a strawman parody account, as Eli emphasized a lot.
These are the descriptions from that account, or James's descriptions, either or.
Using that to make a determination about a field they don't have expertise in is the epitome of anti-intellectual.
I kind of knocked on Tom Smith at the beginning of this episode, so I thought I'd give him a little bit to be righteous, almost as righteous as Christina was in her blog post in 2014.
He's absolutely right there.
I don't really know how, you know, there's nothing to add to that.
He's absolutely right.
It's outrageous and it's intellectually dishonest.
And this is the thing that James Lindsay is building his entire Like, when we get to the grievance hoax papers, it's just this over and over and over and over again.
It's just this time.
Everything, every YouTube appearance, every podcast appearance, everything that James Lindsay does, every time he speaks to lawmakers, every time he influences policy, this is what he's doing.
It is, it is this, this thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And just I mean, we're going to talk about the grievance studies hoax properly another time.
Yeah.
I just I just want to say one thing, because this really this does infuriate me.
And I think it's awful.
And I want to express this.
This whole thing, like with the conceptual penis hoax and the grievance studies hoax, the entire thing.
The the basic idea behind all of it Is it absolutely a violation of the claimed values?
Because the claimed values are all the, you know, the lovely liberal values about free expression and free inquiry.
The lovely scientific, you know, the idea of science is this completely, you know, it's a very, it's a, it's a troublesome idea.
I'm not defending it, but the idea of science is this neutral, objective way of looking at the world.
And you arrive at truth through, you know, discussion, open discussion and open inquiry, and you might even call it the ruthless criticism of all that exists.
But these are the claimed values that they're claiming to be standing up for, right?
And this stuff, this ridiculing of these attempts To dig into these subjects.
It's a direct violation of what they're claiming to be championing.
It's a direct violation because, you know, if you actually follow those values, then what you say is everything's up for discussion and how we work out what's worth discussing.
is by discussing it.
We put it out there, we argue about it, and we arrive at as close an approximation of truth as we can by examining each other's ideas, subjecting them to scrutiny, arguing about them.
And this entire, the unspoken implicit claim being made is that Some questions, some ideas, some propositions are just not worthy of consideration.
They're beneath consideration and it always seems to be, by pure coincidence I'm sure, the ideas and the propositions that are about the fact that there is injustice in this world and some people suffer from it more than others.
And that is that is not liberalism.
That is it.
Well, I mean, it is liberalism in its worst aspects, but that is a betrayal of the of the better of the quote unquote liberal values that that Lizzie claims to espouse, or at least, you know, at the time claimed to espouse and other people within this within the IDW sphere.
Exactly.
This is now I actually agree that there are certain ideas that we don't need to be discussing anymore, for instance.
So should we kill millions of people, not I think the answer to that is pretty obvious.
No, the answer is no.
Just asking questions is sometimes completely illegitimate when we have the answers and they're freely available.
And we know from bitter experience that these ideas don't need to be discussed or these questions asked.
Yeah, I agree.
But even if even if these fields were what Lindsay says they are, right.
And this is, you know, this kind of gets into the larger, even if
Gender studies and these kind of like postmodern neo-Marxist nonsense, even if it was just kind of full of this standpoint epistemology that has like nothing to say in the real world, and it's like kind of coming to infect other fields like science and engineering, even if that were true, which it's not, I want to be clear, that still doesn't say that we don't need to have conversations with the, like, the point is, again,
When he was talking about Christian conservatives in 2015 and 2016, his answer was, we need to be taking their interest and their values into account and saying like, well, hey, maybe these marginalized people who in this hypothetical are engaging in completely non-scientific, maybe these marginalized people who in this hypothetical are engaging in completely non-scientific, non-scholarly pursuits and are being encouraged by some system
Even if you were going to take that as valid, even if you were going to take that as true, answer be then what kinds of things are causing them to need to engage in this activity and can we not provide support to them that allows them to enter the rarefied halls of science and reason with the rest of us?
Isn't that the answer to this, James Lindsay?
Isn't that really...
Wouldn't that really be the consistent response?
Even if it were true, like, I mean, it's not.
None of this is true.
I'm highlighting that here.
But even if it were true, it wouldn't mean the things that he says it does.
You're pointing out very effectively that it's all based on just lies and bullshit.
But it's the hypocrisy that rankles with me, because the claimed worldview that they claim for themselves and the worldview that they claim to be championing and defending is the worldview that ought to lead somebody to say, yeah, We work our way through all the ideas, even maybe the ones that turn out to be stupid.
The existence of a stupid idea and a stupid proposition is not a scandal in and of itself.
Right.
And I agree.
And I agree like philosophers, you know, and people, you know, people who live in the mind, people like, I'm fine with people having conversations about like, Uncomfortable ideas, or even disgusting ideas, vile ideas.
I think that having that and being able to do that, that's an essential part of being reasonable and being an adult and having these things.
And just in terms of safe spaces, I didn't play the whole safe spaces thing that they did in the first bit of that four and a half hour debate, but I have absorbed more horrifying material than anyone else involved in this conversation.
You cannot do that without a safe space at some point, because a safe space is a place that you go when you need comfort from the rest of the work that you do.
Or just the existence you live as a person in a marginalized group.
No, they're just hypocrites.
I just wanted to hit that because I think it's worth, you know, I'm not even a liberal.
And as usual, I have more respect for the best versions of liberalism than than this kind of liberal.
Exactly.
No, no, I absolutely agree.
All right, so.
Last couple of clips we're going to play at the end of this episode is that not only did he appear on this serious inquiries only podcast, but the last time that I can find of James Lindsay engaging with his critics in long form anywhere ever, was a few weeks after this.
And I believe, just again to put us somewhere in time, this is mid-2017.
I believe in between these two recordings from the Serious Inquiries Only and this new podcast, the evergreen events involving Brent Weinstein happened.
And they actually referenced them a couple of times and I don't think I have any of it in this in this in the clips I'm going to show for you, but they did reference it in the episode and Unite the Right is about six weeks away.
So this tells you.
What the political conversation is around this time, what the context is kind of going on here.
So this is a podcast called Very Bad Wizards, and this is like a psychologist and a philosopher having deep conversations about all sorts of things.
I'm going to say I don't much like this.
I mean, it's fine.
It has its moments.
I've kind of dipped in and out of it a little bit here and there since finding this clip, just to get a sense of what this podcast is like.
They did a two-parter about IQ and the existence of G and the G factor and kind of hereditary hypothesis.
And they definitely fall on what I think is the wrong side of that debate.
In this podcast that we're going to play, talking about the conceptual penis hoax, these guys agree with James Lindsay about the kind of fundamental value of critical theory and gender theory and gender studies.
They actually agree with James Lindsay about what James Lindsay agrees with and thinks about these fields.
And even they call bullshit on him.
This is, if you're going to check this out, this is Very Bad Wizards.
This is episode 118 called We Don't Love Them Hoax.
I'll skip ahead about to the 38 minute point because they do kind of an intro to every episode and then they do like an interview or they do kind of a main conversation.
So you want to probably skip the first bit of it, which is not interesting to you for our purposes.
But this is a gold mine.
If you want to understand James Lindsay, you want to understand where James Lindsay is now, this is a really, really great place to start.
You did submit it to one gender studies journal who rejected it without sending it out for peer review.
The pay per published journal that it was, the Open Access Journal, Suspicion.
So let me ask a kind of simple question.
I'll ask, I guess, two of them.
studies journal.
So in what sense do you think you have drawn attention to or provided evidence for your initial, uh, suspicion?
So let, let me ask a kind of simple question.
Um, I'll ask, I guess, two of them.
Why is Melissa McCarthy's portrayal of Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live, A, so funny and B, so effective at what it does?
And secondly, in related, why is the television show Portlandia, which satirizes life in the city of Portland, so funny and so effective?
What just happened?
I, I promise you, there is no cut there.
There is no cut.
There is no cut that I did.
I am not making him sound this stupid.
I promise you, I'm not making him sound this stupid.
Lindsay is making a point about satire and the value of satire in terms of drawing attention to things.
I want to just quote here and say, This is the most 2017 reference imaginable in that, like, you know, Melissa McCarthy driving the Sean Spicer desk on SNL.
Yeah.
And Portlandia.
Those are his two examples of, like, really spot on hitting satire.
This is what happens when you study math for 10 years and never crack a book.
Like, just to let you know, like, this is actually what happens.
I was going to say, like, I, you know, I kind of like James Liz and I are about the same age we have kind of similar backgrounds he went further in academia than I did but we both have STEM backgrounds we're from relatively kind of the same general area.
I lived within a couple of hours of him for you know, a number of years.
His accent, I think, even sounds a bit like mine.
So, you know, we can, you know, all of that stuff we can we can kind of, you know, I have I have some identification with this band.
I have known so many fucking people with like advanced degrees in like a STEM field who have exactly this level of like cultural understanding of the world around them.
So, you know, he is a very, very standard.
Like I have a you know, I have a math degree.
I have an engineering degree and I'm from like middle Tennessee.
Very, very standard.
And the fact that he's going, like, why is Melissa McCarthy's performance on SNL the greatest thing I've ever seen?
It's just, it's just god tier.
It's god tier.
Okay, continuing with the clip here.
I may question both of those premises.
I think Portland is hilarious.
You know, here's a case where one could say that the field has successfully withstood the attack of publishing gibberish, and given that any field with these sort of predatory journals will publish anything, that it is equivalent to zero.
And perhaps even a point in favor of the editorial staff of Norma for rejecting you.
Otherwise, you have an unfalsifiable claim, right, which is just, well, we wrote a gibberish piece of satire.
The publication of that piece isn't what is making any illustration.
So submit that to McSweeney's or The Onion or whatever, but that's not the way it was portrayed.
Does it count as a point in favor of gender studies?
I don't think it does.
And the reason is that we didn't write a particularly sneaky hoax.
As a matter of fact, we wrote an absolutely ridiculous pastiche.
The question becomes, if you want to defend gender studies on the charges of morally biased views and obscurantist language.
It's going to require, I think, and I always thought this, a slightly sneakier paper.
Of course, the more obnoxious the satire, the more pointed it is, the more successful it is.
That's why Melissa McCarthy gets so much attention.
He's saying if you do want to get it published in a higher quality journal and you've just got to be sneakier, You can see the wheels turning where the conceptual penis paper becomes the Grievance Studies stuff here, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Looking into the details of the Grievance Studies hoax again, we're not going to talk about that in detail this time, but I noticed the process whereby even the Grievance Studies hoax involved like a first round that didn't work.
And he and Boghossian and Pluckrose Had to learn as they went along how to write a paper that would get accepted.
They actually had to learn some of the details of the fields that they studied.
Yeah.
Like they realized early on that they actually couldn't do this and get it into real journals.
Yeah.
And in fact, they're the one that they're proudest of and we will just we will we will This will be something that we discuss in much more detail and very amusingly in a future episode, probably episode 89, the one that the Dog Park Study, which is the one that they tout all the time, that actually did get published in a fairly high-end journal from what I understand and what everything I'm led to believe.
The reason that it got published is because they literally just fabricated a whole bunch of data and then drew conclusions based on that data.
And it turns out that when you fabricate data, it's not hard to get published in journals when you make up data that is really compelling.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because the point of journals publishing studies with data is the data gets disseminated and the kind of people that do this sort of thing say, can we replicate these results?
How do they track with other results?
Right.
And can we, like, at that point, the publication... It's not the job of the journal to evaluate the results.
So if you just make up results... The journal assumes, again, we're getting into something we're going to do later on, but the journal assumes that you've done your thing the way you said you've done it.
And they are evaluating whether, if you get the result that you claim you got, does it follow from the thing that you said you did?
And if you write the paper that way, if you're just allowed to fabricate data, I could get a hundred papers published next year in all kinds of fields.
Yeah.
They wouldn't hold up to the slightest level of scrutiny, which the Dog Park paper actually didn't in the real peer review.
Twitter was a big part of why that happened.
Spoiler alert for a future episode, which I already have a bunch of notes ready for 89 because, you know, I ran into a whole bunch of stuff as I was prepping for this.
Oh, my God, I put so much work into this episode.
Anyway, spoilers for 89.
Let's let's continue in on here on this on the rest of this clip talking about Melissa McCarthy some more.
Oh, yeah.
I can't wait to hear where this is going.
driving her little podium around ramming people with it squirting it with a super soaker full of soapy water or whatever the joke is that's why it gets so much attention is because it is over-the-top ridiculous so if you want to do an academic hoax you have to look at it in two regards you have to look at how much of an impact can you get by being obnoxious and how much of How sneaky do you have to be, so how much do you have to turn that down in order to make it happen?
How much exposure you can get from being obnoxious and how sneaky you have to be.
He's working out his career trajectory in real time.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
And you know what?
You know what else I have for you?
I have one more clip that demonstrates it even more clearly, if you believe it or not.
It's not even it's not even full there.
I can't imagine listening to this in 2017.
Like if I listen to this 2017, I would have no idea what he was going to go on to do.
But listening to both this SIO 45 and this Very Bad Wizards clips, like listening to those, I've listened to them both.
A couple of times, you can tell that James Lindsay, like he's listening to the criticism.
And while in real time, he's responding defensively and he is kind of doing his like check and jive routine.
You can tell he's figuring out like they're teaching him how to do this better next time.
Like, and I don't know, take that with what you will.
Again, that's not necessarily a criticism of either of these things because it's worth having this material from 2017.
Again, it is notable that James Lindsay, as far as I can tell, has never interacted in any long form way with any of his critics since this Very Bad Wizards appearance.
So let's bring this puppy home.
How does that sound?
That sounds good.
Okay.
Well, gender studies, it isn't related to race, but then also uses the critical theory.
So you have a... So it's the critical theory that... It's critical theory that's... I mean, just what they call it, just theory.
That's the umbrella organization.
That's the umbrella problem.
And then under the feminist side of it, which is women's studies and gender studies, you have all of this stuff, like I said, about standpoint epistemology and radical constructivist epistemology.
So we're talking, you know, Judith Butler and Sandra Harding and people like that coming up with this stuff.
And again, I can't get away from this, just like with Reformed epistemology from the evangelical theologians.
You can't make up your own epistemologies that outside your bubble get nothing but criticism and then proceed with them and then not send up a big red flag saying something is badly wrong here.
And then if your main objective is to produce activists, and those activists are changing the culture around you, especially at the university, but to the point where Obama's citing, you know, a few years ago cited the the one in five rape study that's been thoroughly debunked.
How many right-wing Gamergate talking points did he just spew in about 45 seconds there?
I was going to say, we ended on Sargon of Akkad.
Yeah.
No, that's, I mean, he's, he's, he's, he's right there.
He's right there in, in that same, I mean, complaining about the one in five rape study, like completely out of the blue, just throws it in there.
And it has nothing to do with this like standpoint epistemology thing.
Like if there were problems with that study, again, even taking the right wing talking points is given.
If you were going to say the problem, the problems with that study were based on The way the survey was conducted has nothing to do with standpoint epistemology, and certainly not, what is it, reform epistemology, which also has nothing to do with kind of modern day evangelical culture, as far as I understand.
Like, that's like 17th century Calvinism, I think?
You hear there's a mix of like, he's just throwing words out there and hoping that nobody knows what he's talking about, because he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Yeah, and he's running through, basically, he's flailing, so he's running through a list of things that bother him.
You know, Judith Butler bothers him.
The one in five rape study bothers him.
The fact that critical theory exists on campuses and might be recruiting activists, it bothers him.
So what's happening is that he's being challenged on his methodology, on whether the, you know, the most basic aspect of this, which is, did he in fact prove anything?
And the hosts, they're pretty, pretty Convincingly lay out that he didn't prove a fucking thing.
And I have not.
I have only given you a hint of that, by the way.
They rake him over the fucking coals.
Yeah.
Again, as people who agree with his conclusion, make his methodology over the coals.
And in response of that, he responds to that.
He goes into defensive mode and his defensive mode is basically flail around mentioning bad things.
This is almost like the, what's the Ben Shapiro, what's the name of the BBC presenter?
Andrew Neil.
Andrew Neil.
Oh, this is about as classic as that is for me.
Like, in my little world, this is that level of cringe.
Anyway, we should finish this clip here.
Yeah.
That was completely biased.
So the orthodoxy and then the doctrines coming out of that orthodoxy are spreading deeply into both the culture, to the point where the president of the United States is quoting this stuff, to the point where our current president of the United States is largely elected and a backlash to a lot of this stuff.
If you have any conservative friends, they'll happily tell you that.
There are significant problems here.
And so why is gender studies in the bullseye?
Well, partly because it uses critical theory, partly because so many of its papers seem to be fairly vapid, and...
But here's my deep concern, which is, again, I can be on board with the sort of bullshit of critical theory.
I think it is mostly a crock of shit.
My concern is, pedagogically, what's happening to our students is that, suppose that you have a student who's inclined toward fairly liberal ideas about justice when it comes to race and is inclined to believe that society is unfair to women.
I feel like they are getting pushed in one of two extreme directions now.
They are often seeing a group of people criticizing and mocking their ideas in a blanket fashion, and that pushes them more toward endorsing some of these softer ideas.
Like, I think that the solution isn't to create the equivalent of an all-out culture war, but rather to try to engage That may be true.
That may be true.
The question is whether it's gone too far for that point in a culture war, as the seeds of culture war are already said.
Maybe they are, maybe they're not.
I don't know.
I honestly have no idea.
But if they are, Satire's the tool.
Satire's the tool.
Again, that's where, what's his Twitter feed all like?
The random assortment of names that he gives himself.
The fact that he doesn't respond to his critics.
The fact that he uses this You know, dancing around persona to interact with people, the fact that he bullies people.
It's he doesn't consider the point of view of the critical race theorist, by which he means anyone to the left of Donald Trump effectively.
You know, he doesn't consider any of that valid.
And so his response to that is to mock it and to use it and to use the tools of like satire and bullying against it.
This is where James Lindsay, the entire thing that James Lindsay has been doing since this interview, Is he figures out how to be sneakier and to get into the talk about critical race theory.
And I'm just going to go joke about this and not respond honestly to the people who disagree with you, because those people are fundamentally wrong because they believe in something called standpoint epistemology.
And in other places in this in this in this clip, which I didn't include the whole thing, but in other places, you know, these guys who, again, agree with The overall import you could hear, you know, David Pizarro there I think that's David he's talking about, you know, I actually agree that all this is a bunch of mess I think there's nothing worth of value in this entire field of study.
Yeah, but at times he's saying like, you know, or maybe Tam or the other guy saying.
It's not like nothing, like standpoint epistemology teaches us something.
It's not like it's completely valueless, right?
And, you know, James Lindsay is like, no, it's completely valueless.
It's, he says, it's literally like, you know, it gives you value in the same sense that if you want to go South, you should drive North first.
Like that's, that's the, that's, that's, yeah.
That's his caricature.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All it basically means, standpoint epistemology, unless you take it to ridiculous extremes, and you can make anything ridiculous if you take it to ridiculous extremes, all it basically means is that different people know things and understand and experience things differently depending upon their social position.
I mean, it's an uncontroversial statement.
The controversy lies in the fact that there are huge swathes of people who have just not been taken into account in the social sciences or in politics or in the discussion at all.
And, you know, any attempt to bring those people or listen to their perspectives or understand how they understand the world from their position is just scandalous.
And the way people like James get around it and blacken it and escape from it is to pretend that what's being claimed is that there is no such thing as objective truth.
And it's all just It's all just in the head, and that we should privilege the completely subjective experience of the world of some people because they win spurious oppression Olympics.
And, you know, we shouldn't listen to what white men think.
And of course, implicitly, what he's saying is bemoaning the loss of the Enlightenment and all that sort of stuff, which, of course, is supposedly the actual objective truth.
Which is why it's so scandalous when Critical Theory points out that so many of these structures of our civilization, they're based upon the doings and the experiences of privileged, white, rich men.
That's the scandal.
It's pointing that out, and then pointing out the non-privileged and the neglected perspectives.
That is a scandal in itself, and it has to be silenced, and it has to be blackened.
I mean, modern day gynecology, I mean, a lot of the kind of early work in gynecology was done by a particular, you know, medical doctor who made enormous advances in the field and built a lot of what modern gynecology, you know, the early form that led to modern gynecology is.
Brilliant doctor, brilliant researcher, literally tortured Black people to do that.
In some cases, subjecting individual Black women to dozens of painful surgeries on the most intimate parts of their anatomy.
Learned a lot.
Tortured the subaltern.
Acknowledging that and trying to address it is not claiming that biology doesn't exist.
Right.
You can acknowledge that the biology is real.
You can acknowledge the value.
You can acknowledge the value of the data that we got from that and the theories and the understanding that we got from that.
And also go, man, that was a really fucked up thing that guy did.
And maybe the systems that allowed him to do that, We still have influence on our world today, and maybe we should be thinking about that and thinking about that in an institutional way.
That's all.
I mean, we could talk a lot about post-structuralism and critical theory in terms of the details of the literature and the problems that we'd have with it.
But that's all we're really talking about in public discourse when we're talking about critical theory.
is taking these things into account and having a real conversation about them and redressing the wrongs and actually saying, yes, we should actually do something about this.
And that means being a better society moving forward.
But that doesn't benefit the James Lindsay's of the world.
No, that's right.
And we've heard him, as I say, in real time, working out what will benefit him.
Exactly.
So I know this is a long one.
I know I asked you to listen to complete dipshit for longer than you probably wanted to.
But I think I made my point on this one.
I think I had to listen to James Lindsay as well.
But well, you know.
There's that.
So I have one more thing.
Just again, I like to wet the palate a little bit after you got through all this.
I have something I really liked while I was in preparation of this episode, and I just wanted to highlight it here.
Just to give you a sense, we are recording this on, what, the 9th of May?
I think that's, yeah, May 9th.
We're recording this on the 9th of May, 2021.
I was prepping this when the Ever Given was blocking the Suez Canal was when I first started like seriously prepping the James Lindsay episode.
So I've been prepping this for like five or six weeks at this point just to just to give you an idea of like how much work went into this and That's the kind of thing that kind of captivated Twitter because it was very, very funny and like had a lot to, you know, like it was just a kind of a great six days to be on Twitter was all the ever given memes.
Like it was very memeable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But there's a real kind of reality behind that.
And in the, you know, underneath the kind of Twitter conversation, the memes and the funny stuff, I found a Five-part blog series written in 2015 by a scholar by the name of Charmaine Chua, who I believe is Thai?
Singaporean, maybe?
She actually traveled on one of these giant container ships For 40 something days in 2015.
She is a ethnographer.
I don't think she describes herself as a critical theorist, but working in the same kind of general field of, you know, of looking at these kinds of systems and looking at them through the lens.
It'll be close enough for James.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And I found I read this five part series when I think when I was recovering from one of my doses, actually, I may be misremembering, but She wrote a series called The Slow Boat to China and I'd like to read a little bit of this because for all that we've listened to James talk about the enlightenment and talk about science and talk about the need to understand the world and the beauty that you can gain from understanding it and all the things that like Brett and Heather had to say and all the things that all these people who
There's something really beautiful in understanding the world both through that kind of personal and scientific lens that the combination of these things and looking at these systems really enlightens our understanding of the world in a much more sublime way than I think is even possible within James Lindsay's understanding of the world.
So I just wanted to read a couple paragraphs, if that's okay with you, Jack, just to kind of end on something that James Lindsay will never, nothing in his world will ever come close to understanding this.
And this is a blog post, this is a series of five blog posts written by a scholar Six years ago, that has kind of disappeared beneath the waves of discourse, right?
But this is a speck of what he's missing and something that, again, I really enjoyed and I wanted to link it and then read a little bit of it.
She's on one of these ships called the Ever-something.
She didn't identify which ship it was.
It was not the same size as the Ever-Given.
It was one of the previous generation, I believe.
But she calls it the Ever-Cthulhu, so she doesn't have to name it.
So just to let you know, she's... Again, sense of humor, right?
Sense of humor.
You gotta love it.
The captain tells me that the Ever Cthulhu, like all other ships, never stops for a break.
It continues traversing the globe's surface in 45-day rotations, reaching one of the ends of its route and turning around almost immediately.
Container ships are monuments that move, and 100,000 of them ply the oceans at any given moment.
In 2014, the Everka Thulu traveled a total of 103,000 sea miles, halfway to the moon.
All that distance, all that steel, all that power.
Yet even ships as large as these require very little human labor.
A few seamen to navigate, engineers to monitor the ship's internal workings, others to keep watch, clean, fit, change the oil.
The Everka Thulu itself has a crew of 22 men, four German, one Polish, 17 Filipino, and one passenger, myself.
Across the world's ocean, 1.5 million invisible seafarers total on three- to nine-month contracts to bind the world together through trade, though they remain, for the most part, isolated in their cabins and mess rooms, retained on precarious short-term contracts, and kept away from their families, indeed, for most of the world.
The third mate, a young Filipino, tells me that his sacrifices are worth it for a salary that pays much more than he can possibly hope for on land.
In some sense, then, as a container of both aspiration and drudgery, one might think of the ship as more of a space than an object, a floating island of both hard labor and the possibility of better futures.
The Trans-Pacific Passage is of particular interest to me because it is by far North America's largest trade line and accounts for nearly 20 million TEUs.
That's 10,000 TEUs.
I forget exactly what it stands for.
It's a measure of the size of the containers on the ship.
20 million to EU's in U.S.
trade alone.
The U.S.
China market is dominated by large U.S.
retailers such as Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Home Depot.
Companies notorious for cutting labor costs by using the enhanced mobility of labor to shift work to third parties, erecting cruel hierarchies in both their Chinese factories and U.S.
stores.
Trans-Asian shipping is, in large part, responsible for these widening inequalities.
Since shipping operates beyond the territorial spaces governed by labor regulations, it allows corporations to do away with the hard-fought democratic and labor rights struggled for and earned within local labor contexts.
The internationalization of the supply chain, in other words, is aided by increasing innovations in the speed and efficiency of the shipping market.
As a result, circulation has been folded into the production process, becoming a field of experimentation for value generation in its own right.
Of course, there are highly uneven aspects to the story of logistics.
Even as members of the International Longshore Workers Union on the west coast of North America, indentured truck drivers to unionization in Oakland and L.A., port workers in mushrooming Chinese ports can scarcely dream of ILW wages or safeguards, and factory workers around the world toll under the poverty line.
The world of logistics looks very different indeed from the perspective of Taiwan, California, or the ocean.
I mean, this is not like groundbreaking scholarship.
This is just what it means to look at the world both through this scientific objective lens of logistics and companies and profit and loss and Added to that is the perspective of the people actually on board these things.
What is it like to actually work on one of these vessels?
What does it mean to fight for labor on the ocean versus within the industrial, within the truckers union that you're ultimately kind of fighting against for supremacy?
What would it mean to combine these people?
What would it mean to have a message that resonates with all of them?
This is beyond, James Lindsay would just look at this and make a fart noise.
Yeah.
I'm not trying to make this sound like more than it is.
It's a series of essays about her experience on the ship.
It's so much.
It's it's the stuff that's completely lost to this reductive world that James Lindsay is trying to kind of put these things into.
Right.
And that's and that's what and that's what and that's that's the point, you know?
Yeah.
You have to have this in mind.
And it reveals the projection again, I think, because one of the things you get from James Lindsay about CRT Is the idea that it's just this relentlessly and inherently negative worldview that just exists to criticize, you know, it's basically just a pseudo intellectual rephrasing of the old right wing.
Oh, you're just nitpicking.
You know, you're just complaining.
You complain and complain.
And basically, that's all he's got.
Maybe he's creative in the field of higher mathematics.
I don't know.
I'm not qualified to judge.
But in his current career as a cultural critic or academic critic or whatever he is, all he's got is Nitpicking and bullying at, uh, you know, and nothing's perfect.
There's problems with everything, but creative scholarship.
That's all he's got.
Yeah, no, absolutely agreed.
So that was James Lindsay, part one of 10 probably.
I don't know.
About Lindsay coverage.
Yeah.
James Lindsay and the conceptual penis.
I think that's the title of this one.
I mean, I'm sorry, but why is it all penises with this guy?
The conceptual penis.
I mean, it's too on the nose, you know.
If you wrote that, if you wrote that in a novel, you would think that's, again, too on the nose.
It's like, you know, you get a note back like, yeah, maybe a little bit less obvious.
He's satirizing himself without realizing it.
I would say he's a, he's a, he's a character.
He's a, he's a side character in a Pynchon novel, but he's not even that good.
He's one of the, one of the Pynchon ripoffs.
Yeah.
Is it, is it him that claims to be an in-con now?
An involuntary conservative?
Is he one of those?
I don't know that he ever used that term to describe, he might have.
I think you, I think you're right.
Eric Weinstein kind of, kind of coined that one.
And so I think, I think James Lindsay might have a, You know, we could probably look it up in his Twitter feed if you ever, you know, kind of claim that.
I do follow James Lindsay on Twitter, but like, that's mostly just a screenshot.
I have so many screenshots of James Lindsay at this point.
Yeah.
But yeah, James, go ahead and broadcast your neuroses about, you know, oh, men get blamed for everything.
Men get blamed for having penises.
You're a bad person because you got a penis.
You're manspreading.
We get blamed for climate change because we manspread.
Yeah, just broadcast it.
His profile photo on Twitter right now is him leaning back in a chair and manspreading.
That's literally what that is.
And his Twitter handle, Conceptual James, is literally From the conceptual penis, like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm to that at that time.
Prior to that is all the charitable interpretation of this is that he's obsessed.
That's the charitable.
That's the that's the nice version, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Next time, Episode 88.
We've got something special planned and we've got a bonus episode.
I think we've decided to do downfall.
The Bruno Bonds.
Initially, that was going to be our 88.
We were going to talk about Downfall and we were going to spend the entire episode talking about what a dick Hitler was, but we've got something better lined up for the actual 88.
We've got something a little off the beaten path, something a little fun, and we'll talk about that in the next episode.
Because we decided in the end what to do with 88 was just completely no-seller.
So yeah, Downfall will be our bonus for May.
So, yeah, come to our Patreons and give us money so that you can hear that.
One or the other or both, really.
And that will do it.
Yeah.
So thanks for listening, as always.
And cheers.
Thanks for sticking out through a long episode and sticking out.
And that's it.
Bye.
That conceptual.
Sticking it out conceptually.
Yeah.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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