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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Can you explain your reasons for deriving the final sentence from the previous two? They would seem to me to be contradictory.
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Tribal groups take on metanarratives which suit them, whether postmodern or post-truth or religious or whatever. That's why I don't like the idea of an 'intellectual dark web.' These are very different people & should be evaluated as individuals.
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You use the word ‘tribal’. What makes one set a ‘tribe’ and one ‘’different people’, to be ‘evaluated individually’?
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Is it not possible to see individuals, identify common features and then conceive of them as a group or class?
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Yes, of course. I'd say these people don't fit that in any meaningful way but then I evaluate people by their principles & epistemologies.
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Indeed. And we can see where those come from (they didn’t invent the ) and what they do (their uses and effects). Which is why the Jungian mystic and professional atheist belong in the same group.
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