Plato wanted to ban music because it was a bad influence on the polity so maybe not the best person to predicate this argument on
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Imagine reading The Republic and thinking "this Plato dude's super chill about language and art. Also he thinks words are never signifiers to an absolute, transcendent Form"
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I think “Imagine reading The Republic...” is about as far as Pinker got.
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The amount of slippage between The Language Instinct and your new far-right rhetoric is jarring. Words are conventions - and calling someone "PC/SJW" tells us all about you sociolinguistically. It tells us about language contact, and power, and many other things - none positive
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In this tweet you explain the nature of words to Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct makes direct reference to Orwellian Newspeak, I recommend a refresher on both.
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So what is it, do words have power, a la Orwellian Newspeak or nah? That's not a very consistent position buddy
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False dichotomy.
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that’s not what that phrase means lol
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"do they have power or nah?" Is X or Y? I think you need a refresher on logic.
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Buddy, if 'Orwellian Newspeak' is real & important, that is ipso facto sufficient for the claim that words have 'power', what's more, in context, that's the central conceptual maneuver (words have no power) underlying Pinker's claim, which you defended.
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There is sufficient pragmatic referential & conventional context here to infer that the substance of my claim is about the characterization of words as Newspeak, which is a sufficiency claim--'sufficiency' could hold even in the concept weren't binary, but a spectrum.
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This is a disingenuous crock of shit and you know it, Psycholinguistic research shows that words *hurt*. Social psychology work find that slurs have definite behavioral, cognitive & affective effects. And the entire discipline of pragmatics is devoted to language as action.
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You're just mad you can't say the N word bc you're a typical charlatan, your analysis of 'Nietzsche' & the 'Enlightenment' is so risible it wouldn't even pass intro phil. Your 'Better Angels' actively ignores contrary modern research, the lynchpin source is from 22 yrs ago
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To wit, results from behavioral ecology, statistics, archaeology, anthropology, social psychology, political science, economics, sociology, neuroscience, history, and geography directly contradict the bulk of your theses, but you're so full of shit you dismiss them out of hand
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Take one of my favorites: the fact that you play down the importance of nuclear deterrence, the prison system, forced settlement, etc despite them being consensus. You cite the law of democratic peace but ignore its corollary--democracies go to war *more* just not with each other
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Research on forced scarcity and settlement is so robust, it's one of the few things that can be analogically replicated in ethology, primatology, sociology, psychology, anthropology & history without being reductionist but ofc you prefer skull science & phrenology.
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Like Harris, Peterson, Dawkins, and so on you play the same dumb game: you're the only logical factual person and if anyone contradicts you they must hate *science* or be unreasonable or be in bad faith, even if their expertise in the field surpasses your glib & pompous ass.
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A victim complex beyond belief--already in 2006 Pinkers teaching a class with alleged Jeffrey Epstein friend & proven plagiarist Alan Dershowitz, where he brings in Larry Summers in for the class on 'free speech'--of all the self important shit one could do.
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In Pinker's mythology, Larry Summers--architect of the largest single fall in life expectancy in history in the former USSR--was the true victim when he lost the presidency at Harvard after giving a talk on gender where a person he cited literally corrected him from the audience
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This excerpt is from The Republic, where Plato makes the case for expelling & limiting autonomy of poets.pic.twitter.com/uuOcg2edA5
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Is that from this quillet piece?
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I'm afraid so.
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Quillette is where old people go and whine about not being able to say the N word
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How much does White Twitter use the n-word?
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They seemingly spend fevered hours daily writing essays about why they should be allowed to say it
End of conversation
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