I found it stimulating in its mix of studied knowledge and dorm room speculations at 2 AM, but the Dorm Room discussions are of this moment rather than my ancient one.
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I dunno. I watched the first sixteen minutes or so. Rudyard Lynch sounds a bit like a combination of New Gingrich and a fourteen-year old who just read some Ayn Rand and thinks they understand everything about history, psychology and economics. Or, as someone once wrote as a review of a Tears for Fears album, “it sounds like they read a lot of important books… and misunderstood them all.”
He thinks “leftists” foolishly believe in the perfectability of humans? I can’t think of a single politician in US history (of either party) who assumed we would achieve perfection, as individuals or a society. References to “a more perfect union” were only meant to convey that any society not trying to move the ball forward will inevitably risk allowing the ball to move backward.
He thinks Greek philosophers time traveling to the present would be suprised by our abundance of autism and schizophrenia. He states that we have very few records from the pre-industrial age of cases of these ailments. He states the mental illnesses occuring in a society are due to the neuroses the social structure injects into society. It couldn’t possibly be that the high incidence of these illnesses is due to living in an age where we have the scientific and medical expertise to diagnose them and are permitting an obscene concentration of wealth that starves public systems of the funds required to provide known-good treatments or (heaven forbid) correct or mitigate some of those social ills known to “cause” those illnesses?
WTH
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Yeap, WTH summarizes most of the form of the stooopid part well.
I had forgotten how common this sort of semi-educated coocoo-ness is. Watching it for me was useful, refamiliarizing me with “Impressive Shallowness” even done without marijuana….
Gosh, this form of “thought” dominates the world.
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I was at a dinner party last weekend, talking with a libertarian candidate for office. He couldn’t clearly explain his platform. Something about freedom through prosperity, less licensing, and he didn’t like animation because it glorified super heroes. So, yeah, we’re in interesting times.
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A lot of fun with ideas.
He has an answer for everything according to himself.
He sees us as unable to attain individual perfection. I am not disagreeing. His point is well taken but his entire talk is his fallacious assumptions in a perfect package.
Bismark was the beginning of modern society and Germany the center fo those deaths. It was the opposite in the US. We are the entirely fallable white bread of social planning. We desperately wish one day to do better. We aspire. We do not have any conceits of perfection.
He is now talking econ and misses the point. We bottomed out supply-side economics in 2020. His thoughts on our future economics are completely inside out for the day. He has it wrong.