If it were the Onion, it might be funny, but this is the New York Times promoting a group calling themselves the Intellectual Dark Web
. They aren’t particularly intellectual, they’re not part of some “web” of something or other, but they are rather dark. Can we rename them the Dark Dorks?
The list of members consists mainly of people who are demonstrable assholes. They include:
- Sam Harris
- Eric Weinstein
- Christina Hoff Sommers
- Dave Rubin
- Jordan Peterson
- Heather Heying
- Ben Shapiro
- Douglas Murray
- Joe Rogan
- Maajid Nawaz
- Bret Weinstein
- Michael Shermer
- Camille Paglia
- Steven Pinker
- James Damore
Etc., etc., etc. You know, if you really wanted to compile a list of the worst people in America, the shallow populists who poison the discourse with conservative toxins and Libertarian lies, that wouldn’t be a bad start. These are not particularly smart or interesting people — they are good at inflaming other assholes and acquiring a following, but that’s about it. And now they’ve got a great big long article in the New York Times, with grimdark portrait shoots of them standing about in the shrubbery at night.
And just what is the dark intellectual foundation they’re trying to promote?
Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women.
Yes? So? No one argues against that. What we argue against is the idea that you can find consistent, biological differences in their minds, or that one gender is the lesser to the other.
Free speech is under siege.
Jesus fucking christ. You’ve got the NY Times spewing your bullshit everywhere, where is your loss of free speech? The whole basis of your sleazy legitimacy is that you’re a bunch of people with large followings!
Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.
Say the status quo warriors who want everyone else to shut up about their bigotry, while howling non-stop about their precious identity.
And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”
Uh, these are the people who named themselves the dark web. Not anyone else. Typical. They’re complaining about being victimized by their own term!
Quick, let’s start the Shiny Happy Web! All it takes is declaring yourself special, and people will think you’re a movement. Let’s pass on the dismal dishonest ideas, though, OK?
Oh, FSM: we can only pray that the public policy influence of this group is equal to the public policy influence of writings on the Dark Web …
… and that anything they write vanishes just as quickly as a Dark Web conversation during computer shutdown.
I noticed, a few years back, that for a poor or middle class person, or a person of colour, or a woman, or a member of any of the GLBTetc communities, seek to have input on any bill being considered by a legislative body, then they are considered, by the press, by conservatives, and by many liberals, as being too close to the issue to really understand what is going on. At the same time, legislators invite lobbyists and industry leaders to, quite literally, write the regulations and/or laws which are intended to regulate said industry.
Additionally, the actual victims of hate crimes (racist, misogynist, etc) are too emotional, too close to the problem, to actually understand what has happened so it is the responsibility of the oppressors to solve the problem (which (of course) becomes Problem? What problem?).
Tax cuts for the poor and middle class is class warfare; tax cuts for the rich is just common sense.
So, when I read
my Bullshit-O-Metre MkCCVI immediately pegs all the way up at 11. If people of colour identify as a group, that is identity politics. If members of the GLBTetc community identify as a group, that is identity politics. If women identify as a group, that is identity politics. But, if a group of white men (and a few women) decide to identify as a group, then that is not identity politics, but merely the way it should be (unless, of course, they are pursuing a progressive agenda, in which case is suddenly becomes identity politics (and thus is a BAD THING)).
I guess it is the same-old same-old: those with money make the rules, those with privilege make the rules, those with guns make the rules. Almost as if we were living in a fascistic democracy rather than a democratic republic.
I really want to be part of the Shiny Happy Web. In fact, I think I’ll put that in some of my bios/profiles.
Gad, what a host of regressive asses.
I could do with some Shiny, a la Kaylee (Firefly). Actually, it’s been a really shiny day for me today, and I could use more, so I’ll do my best to shine each day.
the thing about this take from the nyt that drives me the craziest is the framing of these assholes’ ideas as some kind of rebellious edgy suppressed speaking-truth-to-power kind of fringe beliefs instead of, like, the general consensus of probably more than half the country and the implicit if not explicit platform of one of the two major political parties. colonial cisheteronormative power structures have promoted and platformed the way these folks think everywhere forever. gah.
Ok. I went back and looked at the formatting. It looks right.
Caine @4:
you’re a big damn hero! :) :) and now i need to go rewatch firefly again.
Joe Rogan is an intellectual? A moon hoax comedian who does commentary for MMA fights is an intellectual. Fuck me.
@gijoel:
James Damore as well. I’m not even saying he’s stupid (Spoiler: he actually is, if by “stupid” we mean able to understand social dynamics and context, which understanding might actually be one important component of intelligence), but the guy was in no way an academic. He had a production-line engineering job which required a bachelor’s degree and he ranted about how women and dark people suck.
If a job that asks for a bachelor’s or equivalent experience + prejudiced ranting is all it takes to be an “intellectual”, then prominent intellectuals are stalking women by the water coolers of hundreds of thousands of different offices across the US.
As for Rogan, I have no idea what his background is, but even if he had a fucking PhD in sociolinguistics with a dissertation on the semiotics employed by and in support of racialized power structures in 1980s Philadelphia, if what you do with it is sexist MMA commentary, you’ve kind of abandoned any links you ever had to any community of intellectuals.
UNABLE to understand social dynamics and context.
Sheesh.
If you are trying to put me off my dinner with that list of Dark Dork assholes, you are succeeding.
You lost me at Sam Harris! But what a rogues’ gallery. It is like those lists you see of guests for the “ideal dinner party of all time”, except that this would be a list for the worsst dinner party of all time.
Simple Desultory Philip:
:D I think I need to rewatch too.
I had a movement this morning, just like theirs. I treated it with the same consideration as I do theirs.
@Simple, Desultory Philip:
Ain’t. She. Just.
Lawks! I saw a cable TV interview with the reporter who assembled this intellectual Heath Robinson contrivance. I couldn’t decide whether she was incurious, uninformed, gullible or disingenuous. It’s possible she’s all of those things in varying measures.
In the end I didn’t care, so I didn’t watch the whole debacle.
nomdeplume @13
Not if they were on the menu instead of the guest list.
@18 Eeeuuurgh!
“To Serve Sam Harris”
The only thing Joe Rogan has in common with the rest of the people on that list is that he likes to have them on his podcast. He certainly isn’t an intellectual of any variety, and to be entirely fair, I’m not even sure he would call himself that. If anything, he likes to style himself as an everyman helping to make the ideas of those “intellectuals” more comprehensible to the common public.
His podcast with theoretical physicist Sean Carroll is actually well worth listening to (mostly down to Carroll, though Rogan plays his everyman role pretty well here), but then he treats ignorant paranoiacs like Alex Jones with the same amount of credulity, awe and deference, so his discernment is absolutely atrocious.
Interesting company. But remember, anyone who claims that Steven Pinker sympathizes with the alt-right is a horrible liar.
At the risk of creating a huge ruckus it will take multiple posts and much gnashing of teeth to extricate myself from the wreckage with the jaws of life, I would not put Pinker and Nawaz into the same category as the others. Yeah Pinker does an annoyingly optimistic overreach with his recent books and has probably said questionable stuff that ruffles feathers, but he throws so many things at the wall hoping they stick, that his books are a wide ranging comprehensive treatment that is at least interesting if not balanced with fairly presented counterpoints.
Nawaz seems an interesting person given his former Islamist background who now advocates for reform within Islam. That he is associated so tightly with Harris does him no favors. His regressive left concept has been appropriated by the prevailing lecture circuit juggernaut for people they despise. Nawaz didn’t seem to me to deserve being lumped by the SPLC with many of the others on that infamous list of unsavories. It would be interesting to see him spar or dialogue with Reza Aslan instead of Harris.
Harris has already gone beyond the pale, but just keeps going further and further into oblivion. A shame because podcasts such as “What is and what matters” where he had a decent discussion with Rebecca Goldstein and Max Tegmark are what he should be doing more of instead of going down disturbing paths that ruffle feathers.
I figured this was just a humorous dig, but then I scanned the article and no, if anything it was understatement. I didn’t bother reading the article, but the hilarious absurdity of the portraits made my day. What is it with the right and and hiding in bushes?
hemidactylus@23–
You might wish to maintain a distinction between Pinker/Nawaz and the rest…but it’s a distinction Pinker and Nawaz didn’t think worth maintaining when they chose to join the group.
Their name reminds me of the Dark Enlightenment, aka neoreactionaries. I’m not be the only one who made the association; at the top of the Wikipedia article on Dark Enlightenment, it says “Not to be confused with Intellectual dark web.”
I’m half-expecting a few of the people on their list to jump ship. I mean, it’s kind of a who’s who in awful intellectuals, but they aren’t all equally awful, and surely some of them have standards?
I thought the requirement for a movement was to get 50 people to walk into a recruiting station and sing Alice’s Restaurant. Man, how standards have fallen these days.
Never mind the rest: Steven Pinker alone has accomplished far more important science than you can even aspire to. Could there be a touch off jealousy, or perhaps insecurity, in your attitude?
I’m a bit grimly amused to think that some of them are thinking “I don’t belong on a list with those losers.” Perhaps there will be deep rifts(tm) or something, it’s definitely a case of “I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club with such low standards that they’d have me.”
@28- joebiohorn
Not sure who you are talking to. PZ? He does everyday bench science, not juggernaut promotion of a hyperdarwinian viewpoint that bulldozes criticism.
Pinker is an advocate of evopsych and though not as obnoxious and banal as many of that ilk he is one of the flag bearers hoping to stake a claim against the bogey of the much maligned Standard Social Science Model (can we now burn an effigy of Durkheim for fun and effect?). There’s only just so much of the modules explained by facilitating sprayed haploids bequeathing eventual grandkids bullshit rinse/repeat one can listen to before reverting to the relative sanity of proximal causation.
It would be slightly more concise and much more precise to call them The Dim Web.
or that one gender is the lesser to the other
FWIW, even if that were the case, so what? A fair society would take that into account, adjust, and carry on. So, I guess these thinkers (some of whom think they have something to say about ethics) haven’t thought it through: a just society is one in which fairness of outcomes is important – it doesn’t simply wash its hands of any member who is different, either superior or inferior.
I like Rousseau’s way of breaking it down: there are natural inequalities, and social inequalities. In both cases, a fair society will do what it can to lift people up to be equal; it doesn’t pull the superior down. An immoral and unfair society would be one that says “well, it’s an accident of your birth that you’re a member of a class that we get to abuse” or “you were born with a disability, so everyone gets to shit on you, ha ha!” People who are arguing against ‘political correctness’ are arguing for social inequality based on the luck of the draw; anyone who thinks about it for more than 0.02 seconds ought to be able to figure that out.
@chrislawson From the website there is no indication that any of these people actually “choose to join the group”. An anonymous person
made the website based on a Weinstein tweet https://twitter.com/ericrweinstein/status/951896899115630592, that was also Weinsteins’ brainchild he humbly bestowed on himself and then promptly promoted on the social media channels of others listed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTWCl32j8jM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5HN-KT9rj0
Don’t expect anyone who makes a living off of spouting their opinions in front of audiences to turn down free publicity by being put on this webpage.
Hemidactylus,
You should have waited for me to say that. All hell would have broken loose!
But you forgot Bret Weinstein.
Oops…wait…let me retract that…
Doubt it.
PZ can, of course, speak for himself, but just because people are accomplished in one aspect of life doesn’t mean that they don’t spout ignorant, unproductive shit about many other topics. Sometimes even about the same topic in which they actually have expertise.
Look at Schneiderman, the NY AG. He went around publicly stating that he was supportive of a number of principles that are important to feminists and feminisms (among other people and justice movements). But then we have good reason to believe that in private he was calling women of color “brown slave” and choking women in violation of the very law that he wrote and promoted in the NY Assembly to punish strangulation. If a prosecutor takes Schneiderman to court on charges related to this behavior, you really think that it’s relevant that the prosecutor hasn’t held as prestigious a legal position as NY AG? Then why the fuck would it be relevant in a criticism of a biologist that some other biologist hasn’t held as prestigious a faculty position or published as influential a paper or twelve?
I didn’t realize at first that these folks didn’t ask to be put on the list, and that does have an effect on what meaning I take from their presence (e.g. I can’t assume that they’ve consented to be represented as someone who embraces the ideas or ideals said to unite the list’s members). Nonetheless, to the extent that people are acting like self-important jerks, they should be treated like self-important jerks without controversy. This is true for Schneiderman, who apparently quite commonly asserted “I am the law” as a justification for breaking it, whether or not the critic was a lawyer, whether or not that critical lawyer was ever a legislator or AG.
It is equally true for Pinker or Harris or anyone else on the list, your tu quoque notwithstanding.
@billyjoe:
Say something reasonable, we’ll treat it as reasonable.
Say something unreasonable, we’ll treat it as unreasonable.
Say something equivocal, we’ll adjust our treatment of the statement according to the totality of the context, one aspect of which includes our impressions of the source.
Steven Pinker has quite nice hair.
@10 I missed that moron’s name.
I suppose one shouldn’t be surprised that a parochial little town newspaper has such a limited frame of reference, but as I read that piece I kept thinking “why does he keep talking about ‘the left’?” The USA doesn’t have a political left! It has one or two scattered left-wing intellectuals, who are thoroughly ignored by the mainstream, but really the closest it gets are people like Bernie Sanders (who would be considered centre-right in Britain and a moderate right-winger in continental Europe). How can “the left” be ostracising these people for their odious views when there isn’t an organised “left” to do anything of the sort?
Then I remembered that Sam Harris once got his arse handed to him on a plate when he tried to bother Noam Chomsky. That’s probably what most of this is about.
We’ve seen this crap before. At a certain point children are expected by the adults around them to stop yelling “f*****” and “n*****” at people on Call of Duty, grow up, and start thinking critically about how to be a mature adult. But there’s always the ones who sneer and go “Oh yeah how about I NOT do that?”. Then they start wearing black clothes with chains and quoting mainstream movies that ohhh NOBODY’s ever seen like The Matrix and Fight Club and other trite crap that’s been around forever but most people TRY to grow out of. They think they’re such rebels.
I’ve got a better name for them: How about the Intellectual Edgelords.
paxoll@33–
From the website itself: “If you’re on the site and don’t want to be, please let me know.”
So, yes, they do have the ability to distance themselves from this website if they choose to.
From your comment: “Don’t expect anyone who makes a living off of spouting their opinions in front of audiences to turn down free publicity by being put on this webpage.”
If it’s all about the free publicity, then I guess they should be equally happy to be quoted enthusiastically on Daily Stormer.
Why were all the pictures taken at twilight at somebody’s garden party?
But then how will we justify treating other people like shit?
I’m not that familiar with the term but isn’t the dark web supposed to be something that’s esoteric, hard to access, and has things on it that aren’t mainstream and are shunned by society?
If so, how can those people be considered dark web when their ideas are firmly held by society at large and the effects of their ideas are felt across the world (racism, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia, etc)?
Heh. Meatspace me got asked to contribute to a podcast recently; when I found out that one of these listed individuals had also contributed, I declined, and explained why. Happy ending–the podcaster is no longer going to use the named individual’s contribution, and I am back on the list.
Am I the only one who noticed that in Sam Harris’ portrait, he looks like a phallus surrounded by two testicles?
Laurie Penny’s excellent piece from 2017 is circulating again in response to the NYT garbage: https://thebaffler.com/war-of-nerves/you-are-not-a-rebel
“Being shamed, including in public, for holding intolerant, bigoted opinions is not an infringement of your free speech. You are not fighting oppression. You are, at best, fighting criticism. If that’s the hill you really want to die on, fine, but don’t kid yourself it’s the moral high ground. I repeat: You cannot be a rebel for the status quo.”
@28
The only thing Pinker is superior at is pandering to deplorables and the alt-right.
I’m surprised nobody’s commented yet on Shermer being on that list. I don’t have the energy to read the NYT article, but did Weiss bring up why people have a problem with him? It’s certainly not because of his ideas. Unless you mean his ideas that have to do with a woman’s right to consent.
Pierce Butler: “It would be slightly more concise and much more precise to call them The Dim Web.”
So stolen. That is the perfect description for these poseurs.
Actually, Pinker’s technicle ouvre is pretty lightweight. He’s done some moderately interesting work on psycholinguistics, but has spent a lot more time on popularization than actual science. His embrace with evolutionary psychology resembles an adolescent crush–all encompassing but extremely shallow. His Just-So stories justifying the status quo are the opposite of science.
I think it’s more of a fansite than a genuine group. See http://intellectualdark.website/about/
“these are the people who named themselves the dark web” –> I really don’t think they did, although some of them might now.
I think I’d be proud to be on any list with Alice Dreger on it. I don’t know so much about the other folks, but some would inspire, er, different feelings in me. PS Her take on being included: http://alicedreger.com/IDW
@Tabby Lavalamp:
Shermer is mentioned in only two paragraphs to note that he appears on MSM shows like Oprah, he is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, he is a middle-aged science writer, he rides a bike, and his is the publication most associated with this movement. That’s it.
In his later books, though our nature may be malevolent ala Hobbes, Pinker leaves our stone age minds way behind quite progressively. So we are actually quite malleable as we read our Emily Post on proper etiquette? The upside of Pinker is his focus on what has been gotten right as time marches on. Is that so bad? But he overwhelms with a barrage of info that one would need to be a highly trained specialist to see if he’s bullshitting himself and us.
There are things such as vaccination we take for granted and as conditions of existence improve expectations rise. But Pinker becomes part of the problem if his unbalanced portrayal induces complacency in the general populace to the detriment of the unfortunate and disaffected. Media representation deadens the pain of inequality and exploitation. I think that was a talking point of the Frankfurt school.
@Tabby Lavalamp, #49:
Okay, I just wrote this long thing, then I went back to quote you to set up my conclusion and I think I’ve misread you. Now I think you’re not saying that Shermer doesn’t deserve to be on the list. Now I think you’re saying that people are misperceiving why Shermer is on the list, even though he really does deserve to be there.
Is that correct? I’m cutting and pasting my original comment to save for a few hours in case my new interpretation of your comment is wrong.
According to PZ, the term “Intellectual Dark Web” came from Eric Weinstein. They are officially affiliated with the International Network of Poseurs.
@56 a_ray_in_dilbert_space: It’s from the nytimes article: “…the Intellectual Dark Web, a term coined half-jokingly by Mr. Weinstein…”
I recently listened to a podcast where the ‘intellectual dark web’ was brought up and the presenters then pointed out that the dark web is where one goes to download child porn or hire a human.
*Hitman.
Damned predictive text.
chessnutbovey @52
Considering that many of those would be lists of transphobes, maybe you shouldn’t be proud of that.
Crip Dyke @55
Now I’m confused by what you’re asking me, but I was alluding to the accusations against him. Certainly he has fucked up ideas about plenty of things, but the biggest issue with him isn’t his ideas but that he’s a predator.
Okay, I finally went and looked at the photos. That’s a compleat primer on how not to take portrait shots. That’s a whole world of suck. I fell over laughing on the Heather Heyer one, did she think she was posing for a bodice ripper? And Sam Harris…he has unfortunate ears, they really stick out, the first feature you notice, and all the light is haloed around those ears, while the rest of him is in the shrubbery. Yikes.
And Shermer, gad, he looks like he should be stuffed into lycra-spandex, with a cape rippling, he’s off to save the world!
So. Much. Bad.
@Tabby,
Yeah, okay. I get it now. Thanks for clearing up my thick-headedness. At first I thought you were saying he doesn’t deserve to be on the list.
In regards to Alice Dreger, I had many good experiences corresponding with her and interacting with her at conferences when we were focussed on intersex issues, and she was one of the few people that I’ve ever interacted with that could correctly and consistently use “gender” and “sex” on the fly to describe the different phenomena and schema that they’re supposed to describe. So I had good impressions of her for a long time, even, apparently, after she had started speaking more about trans folks publicly and thus displayed some really fucked up beliefs I hadn’t realized she’d held. I’m now embarrassed that I hadn’t noticed those when we were in semi-regular contact, but I did learn a significant amount from her about the history of medical conceptions of “hermaphrodism” and “intersexuality” and some other categories that have been used over time. I also had productive conversations with her about ethical reasoning and how we might productively and rationally justify anti-sexism work in a way that has the best chance of gaining public acceptance. It’s sad to me that she really does hold those fucked up anti-trans beliefs.
Just shows what a complicated mess of good and bad we humans can be.
@Crip Dyke
Oh gods no! I’d never be a Shermer apologist!
Which is why my first reaction was what it was – writing a big long thing and wondering what the hell had gotten into my beloved lavalamp.
I figured it out in the end. I guess the tea just hadn’t kicked in.
Paglia?
Good grief!
Crip, Tabby was surprised no one had actually become positively apoplectic at the mere sight of Michael Shermer’s name on that list. I understood right away…because I was similarly surprised (and pleasantly – there may be hope for this blog yet!)
Yeah, the thing is that I don’t know very much at all about whatever it is he spends most of his time on. I don’t read him regularly enough to know anything about his philosophy or what certain feminists would call his standpoint*1. Given that, it’s theoretically possible he’s written things about Paglia’s work sucking or Harris’ apologia for torture and murder being bunkum, which might make him seem at first blush to be an odd fit for the list.
Given my ignorance of his work, at first I didn’t know how to take Tabby Lavalamp’s comment. But as I said, Tabby helped me figure that out.
====================================
*1: The meaning of this term in feminist theory is related to but not the same as the colloquial usage.
Interesting that the article calls out Candace Owens and Kanye West as . Supposedly, , but Ben Shapiro, who once showed up to a college campus wearing a diaper, gets a pass. I guess it was a very intellectual diaper and darkened with knowledge.