Today I felt compelled to post this on Facebook, where it will probably fly over the heads of the intended targets:
When I read something I disagree with, it has never occurred to me to engage in ad hominem attacks, in other words, to call the author names or to characterize them as morally repulsive or suspect. I don't comment on posts and articles that I haven't actually read. And when I read something I disagree with, I put some effort into giving the author his or her best foot forward. I work hard to avoid characterizing people as "good" or "bad." "Good" people often make errors or have lapses in judgment. "Bad" people often say things that are true, even wise.
If one disagrees with a post, there's always the option of disagreeing with the content (foregoing the ad hominem attacks). One can also ignore the post or even stop following that person. To the various people on this site who prefer ad hominem attacks to civil discourse (they might not realize who they are), I suggest "The Canceling of the American Mind," an excellent book by Greg Lukianoff. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Canceling-of-the-American-Mind/Greg-Lukianoff/9781668019153
a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3h7pmhyIwg">
I've listened to this podcast several times. It's long, but it is extremely thoughtful, engaging, disturbing, but also hopeful and celebratory of the human spirit. It involves Jordan Peterson and Glenn Greenwald. These are two of my most cherished thinkers. I am inspired and provoked by many of the topics that they explore here. Topics include censorship, propaganda, the history of these things in the United States. Also, the relationship between religion and politics, and what goes wrong when religion is absorbed into politics. And there's even some meaning of life moments. I took the time to transcribe a large chunk of this discussion, and I am sharing it with the hope that those of you who listen to it or read it will also find it worthwhile.
I asked Grok to crank out a basic table of contents to this interview:
Min 21:30
1. Censorship of RFK Jr. by Google and the tactic of starting with hated figures like Alex Jones
2. Expansion of censorship to mainstream voices, including Devin Nunes and Rand Paul
3. Reasons for increasing censorship: Generational shifts in values among Millennials and Gen Z, and the impact of Trump's election
4. Depiction of Trump as an existential evil justifying extreme measures, including the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and Sam Harris's views
5. Connection to post-9/11 clampdown on civil liberties, transformation of airports into authoritarian spaces
Min 27:35
6. Reflections on 9/11 trauma, the war on terror, and how airport security conditioned obedience to authority
7. Threats to liberty from fear rather than greed; free speech as equivalent to free thought and essential for adaptation
8. George Orwell on tyranny through mind control; the internet's shift from liberation to control, Snowden revelations
9. Biblical phrase "render unto Caesar"; collapse of religious domain into politics leading to unsophisticated good vs. evil wars
10. Personal background on religion; hubris in censorship; human need for spirituality, politics as a substitute for religion
11. Discussions with Douglas Murray on humanism needing a religious framework; Carl Jung on rationality bounded by the dream
12. Grappling with ethics and morality without religion; necessity of spirituality to avoid nihilism
13. Response to materialist atheists; human relationship with the larger whole; introduction to the story of Abraham
These excerpts start at Minute 21:30 of the above video.
Glenn Greenwald
20% of Democratic Party voters say they intend to vote for RFK, Jr. for president. And the most powerful corporations, or one of the richest and most powerful corporations ever to exist, Google sweeps in and says, This is something that you are not permitted to be heard.
Glenn Greenwald
And what happened was, what always is the tactic of sensors is they always pick a test case in the beginning that they believe is someone who is sufficiently hated or disliked so that everybody will acquiesce to the precedent, simply because their emotions for that person are so high. So the first person to really be deplatformed in this collusive effort by Silicon Valley was Alex Jones. And Peter Thiel was on the board of Facebook at the time. Mark Andreessen in Silicon Valley, and a few other people stood up at the time and said, no matter how much you hate Alex Jones, this precedent is going to work its way slowly, or maybe not even so slowly, to expand into the kinds of voices that you probably think shouldn't be censored. And by the point that you cheer the precedent in the first instance, because you allow your emotional dislike for this person to outweigh your rational capacities, it will be too late the precedent is already implemented, and then you're left to just bicker about its application, rather than the principle itself.
Glenn Greenwald
And that's precisely what has happened. They began quickly censoring mainstream conservative voices. Devin Nunes went to rumble in part to escape from Google censorship, and then a huge stream of people did as well. One of the most shocking things that happened along those lines, Rand Paul questioned a couple of epidemiologists, scientists who were testifying before the US Senate about the possible efficacy of ivermectin and other alternative medication for covid. It was a Senate hearing, a hearing in the United States Senate. Rand Paul put it on his YouTube channel as a excerpt of this hearing, and Google decided that was something that ought not to be heard as well.
I'm a race abolitionist. I think we should completely dispense with the categories of "black" and "white" and describe people in other, less destructive, terms. The only exception is that we should retain and enforce civil rights laws because some people enthusiastically categorize people in terms of "race," discriminating against some races and preferring others. I set forth my position in this acticle, ""Race" is Like Astrology."
I hope that someday, all of us will get back on track with the purpose of the original civil rights movement (rather than the absurd and destructive "anti-racism" movement) and that, someday, "race" will be the least useful or interesting thing we can say about people.
That said, "white" males are actively being discriminated against, especially against Millennials and beyond (Millenials were born between 1981-1996), especially in the creative fields, including writing. This oftentimes overt discrimination is well-documented by Jacob Savage in his article at Compact, "The Lost Generation." . Here's an excerpt:
In 2021, new hires at Condé Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white; at the California Times, parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, they were just 39 percent male and 31 percent white. That year ProPublica hired 66 percent women and 58 percent people of color; at NPR, 78 percent of new hires were people of color.
“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,” the hiring editor recalled. “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.” The pipeline hadn’t changed much—white men were still nearly half the applicants—but they were now filling closer to 10 percent of open positions.
Suddenly, in Andrew’s newsroom, everything was driven by identity. There were endless diversity trainings, a racial “climate” assessment—at one point, reporters were told they had to catalog, in minute detail, the identity characteristics of all their sources. Andrew had been instrumental in forming the union at his company, and objected when negotiations shifted from severance pay and parental leave to demands for racial quotas. “They wanted to do like ... emergency hires of black people,” he said.
When he questioned these new priorities, the response was swift. “On a Zoom call, women would clap back at something I was saying and other women would snap their fingers in the [chat] window,” he recalled. “It was this whole subcultural language being introduced wholesale.” ...
It’s striking how casual it all was. “Chicago Fire—the UL [upper level] can be [anyone], but we need diverse SWs [staff writers].” As in other industries, upper-level positions—writers with experience and credits—could still be filled by white men. But the entry-level jobs, the staff writer and co-producer positions that Matt and thousands of other aspiring writers were competing for, were reserved for others.
I would hope that these dire statistics don't dissuade any "white" male from pursuing their dream, of course. But this is a tough time for all creative writers, given the growing threat of AI. Grok offers these statistics showing that although Hollywood scrips are still largely being written by organics, publishers are caving to the bots:
v
Publishers' AI Reliance (Web, Books, Articles)
Web publishing: >50% of new articles AI-generated in 2025 (up from 5% in 2020), displacing freelancers in copywriting/editing; focuses on news, how-to, reviews, and SEO content.
Books/articles: Emerging displacement; survey of 258 UK novelists shows 51% fear full replacement, 39% report income losses (85% expect more), with 59% of genre authors' work used to train AI without permission.
Broader impacts: Google's AI Overviews cut traffic 34%, leading to layoffs; >25% of Americans use AI for info over traditional sources; 97% of novelists oppose AI writing full novels, citing originality/ethics losses.
Trend: AI replaces commoditized content/jobs, potentially making publishers obsolete; 33% of authors use AI for non-creative tasks, but mass displacement in low-creativity areas is ongoing.
Hollywood's AI Reliance for Screenplays
AI use is limited and experimental, mainly assistive for brainstorming, analysis, and rote tasks; full scripts remain ~100% human-written (study of 3,800 US TV episodes 2020-2023 showed 1.9% AI probability, no increase post-ChatGPT).
Tools like Largo.ai triple green-lighting rates and make focus groups 10x faster/cheaper; 71% of screenwriters use AI for editing by late 2025, with 76% of studios incorporating it to cut post-production time by 35%.
Backlash includes WGA protests over job displacement and copyright; 53% of audiences uncomfortable with AI-touched content; future seen as collaborative, not replacement.
After many thousands of people have been needlessly slaughtered, the truth comes out:
Amanda Sloat (Biden's top National Security Council official for Europe) recognises that if NATO had promised not to expand, then the war could have been avoided.
** This comes after our political-media establishment has for 4 years smeared, censored and cancelled anyone who claimed that NATO expansion triggered the war.
** It is strange how these people present the US as a passive actor in the question of NATO expansion, and suggest that the only alternative to NATO expansion is a Russian “sphere of influence.
What else did we think we knew for decades that now turns out to be bullshit? The the most important lessons we are being taught over the past five years are A) the inextricably fraught relationship between knowledge and power and B) the critical need to be courageous and skeptical whenever we try to make sense of the things of the world in order to swat away the oftentimes insidious power of tribalism.
Steven Pinker:
Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity.
Hello, I invite you to subscribe to Dangerous Intersection by entering your email below. You will have the option to receive emails notifying you of new posts once per week or more often.
