I officially register an objection to the term ‘intellectual dark web’. It’s not dark. They aren’t intellectuals. They’re sophists - selling second hand phrases and sayings, packaged to make those buying them feel good. We should call it the car boot sale of conservative opinion.
-
-
People’s motivations are not at issue. It’s about genre and social relationships. We don’t distinguish between a sermon, a sales pitch, a political oration or a philosophical discourse with reference to motivation.
-
What Jones or Shapiro or Peterson or Carl Benjamin do - in its form and its social function - is not, for good or ill, intellectual. It’s part of an expanded form of the op-ed form and shaped in large part by what it’s market demands.
-
It’s self-designation as ‘dark’ is part of that - acting as if ‘edgy’ and out there when much of what they say is mainstream, regularly said in national newspapers and recycled from well known sources.
-
But always adapted to make its adherents feel good about themselves - to blame others for their problems, and to affirm that they are the righteous who should inherit the earth. That’s not truth-telling. It’s not science or philosophy. It’s creating a market.
-
I'm not sure what or who you are talking about. This sounds a lot like the conservative talking point about responsibility and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps usually aimed at progressives but it probably isn't.
-
It’s a point about the commodification of knowledge, reducing it to a trade in opinions which people then mistake for intellectual activity and defend because the opinions flatter them.
-
OK. People tend to do that, certainly. Lived experience and emotionally-resonant narratives seen as truth and objective knowledge denied. We see it most in the populist right and the intersectional left. This is why treating people as individuals is important.
-
Can you explain your reasons for deriving the final sentence from the previous two? They would seem to me to be contradictory.
- 6 more replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.