Angry Thinkers, Hungry Handsome Birds and Tea With Alice Salon 33 Details (U.K. time)

Hallo Darling Patreonites

Thankyou for all the lovely messages as always.

This bird was eating the flowers out of a local garden, which was extremely cute. Though I know cockatoos can be very destructive, I find it hard not to be charmed by their brash confidence and fancy hats.

Sydney lockdown wends onwards with various people all over the country having extremely strong opinions about whose fault it is, all of which I find intolerably annoying to engage with. I’m just sad I don’t get to visit my twin and his babies, my niece and nephew in Queensland. We’ve missed two or three planned trips/visits at this point, and every time they come up on my calendar, I want to curl up in bed and self medicate with a novel.

I’ve been having some nice chats with Professor Twin Henry Fraser on the phone though and thinking about co-writing an article about rhetoric and the Intellectual Dark Web.

INITIAL THOUGHTS ON THE MATTER

There’s a clear attrition rate among well meaning “good thinkers” in the centrist/conservative/intellectual dark web community sliding off the rails into conspiracy thinking.

The sort of mechanism of that ‘sliding off’ process is fascinating and complicated, but part of it is definitely that we’re in a period in public intellectualism, where basically all public feedback/criticism on meaningful topics is so extreme and violent that people can’t get good quality pushback on speculations or loose hypotheses.

So there’s no regulatory mechanism. The dialectic generative back-and-forth part of ‘the discourse’ is impoverished to the point of being useless.

This article has some good points: https://areomagazine.com/2021/08/12/on-bret-weinstein-alternative-media-ivermectin-and-vaccine-related-controversies/

Henry and I have slightly different angles of view on the whole area (my feelings are fairly well laid out in CHRONOS if you’ve seen it), so it’ll be interesting to write with him about it: I think the core problem of them conceiving of themselves as rationalists is that they don’t factor peer pressure into their own thinking.

They think they’re above these tides of approval and kicking back against disapproval and reflexive group-identification signalling, dismissing that as identity politics, when in fact their IDpol lies in their self-identification as part of this ‘logical’ educated class, above such things, and so their biases become invisible.

The academy and academic thinking is predicated on the frame that it is possible to hone ideas in discussion, with the intellectual integrity of the process being guaranteed by how it is open to all comers (who are capable of addressing the arguments in good faith and at the required level of expertise). Without that forum with its delicately balanced combination of democratic openness and elitist expertise, the quasi-scientific process of ideas testing in the lab of discussion collapses and the data you get out of it becomes dangerously useless.

I see a lot of these clever angry logical people have a tendency to insist on what they “actually” said, rather than the implications, the leading-ness of such questions, stopping short of the ‘logical’ next steps doesn’t necessarily mitigate the the impact of those thought-lines, or how they are received by their audience.

And to point out such technicalities is all well and good. (I only asked the question! I never said that was what I believed! I did say it was only a possibility! I was pointing that out as a cultural norm rather than an ethnic trait!). It IS important to be precise about what you did and didn’t say, what is explicit and what is implicit and what you deliberately come up short of asserting. As a lawyer, I know that.

But, as a comedian I can’t insist a joke is funny if nobody ever laughs at it. There’s a sliding scale between “this dumb audience just don’t get it” and “this arrangement of words isn’t doing what I think it is”. Meaning has to meet somewhere in the middle of intent and interpretation. Neither extreme being useful if communication is the goal.

As ever, no conclusions, but I’ll be interested in thinking more about it and writing something up with the Professor Twin. If we can’t hang out together because of the ongoing disaster of spreading disease and despair, we might as well do the grown up version of arts and crafts at a distance. I remember making ‘potions’ in the garden during long summer afternoons, in a beaten up old saucepan. This feels a bit like a more mature version of that.

Though a zoom arts and crafts afternoon might be fun if any of you are interested?

ANYWAY! This week’s salon!

The details are:

Time: Aug 17, 2021, 09:00 PM, London GMT+1

Aug 18, 2021 06:00 AM Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney

link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85926056441?pwd=aTFOK1ozeTFNK0pVMlJKLzNRLzhCZz09