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I find myself looking back on the history of YouTube anti-woke politics in light of the whole Charlie Kirk thing. Because I never really knew or cared who Charlie Kirk was, and my first exposure to him led to a reaction of "oh this is just Stephen Crowder but as a smug Christian."
This led me to reflect on the declining quality of human being in the...words fail me. Alt media? Internet political influencers?
I have a lot of nostalgia for The SkepticsTM and that entire era of YouTube talking head. (Often not even a head, just an avatar pic.) Now whenever I fish around for that level of quality, it simply isn't to be found. We are all infected. We are all dumber than we used to be.
Some of this is downstream of the YouTube algorithm in the sense that it incentivized shorter more quickly-produced low-effort content. Back in the day people used to make video essays, or cringe compilations. If they did something live, it was a Hangout, an informal podcast involving people who sure look like genuine friends having genuine discussions. Often with no live video feed. These days it appears to be some guy pontificating off the top of his head, repeating himself often, talking in circles. Kyle Kulinski now does the same thing that Tim pool was doing a few years ago. Hassan Piker appears to just be an LA nepo-baby himbo socialite, and he's very much a step down from whatever Vaush is/was, who was in turn a step down from Chapo Trap House (these are all things I dislike, but I note the decline in quality).
I've also noticed the trad motive decay. Originally, "based" was a punchline and no one pretended to actually be socially conservative, in the same way that Marilyn Manson isn't actually a Satanist, all the upside-down crosses are just there to trigger the normies. I suppose this shouldn't be surprising; the original anti-woke thesis was "look I'm liberal/democrat just like you, but you're so smug and obnoxious and factually wrong I find myself becoming conservative just to spite you."
(That was the original troll op: trying to make the point that the other party is so thin-skinned, fragile and unreasonable that they'll very predictably flip their shit over "it's okay to be white.")
In particular, Twitch seems to be full of fucking townies. No one talks philosophy or has a dignified intellectual persona. The era of Sargon, Dr Layman, Dev, Kraut, and Vee shooting the shit as genuine friends is long over, it's just influencers chasing clout all the way down now.
TL;DR: Asmongold is a shittier Sargon, and current-year Carl is also a shitty caricature of himself.
This is a rambling drunken phonepost, so forgive me. I mourn for the lost Internet of yesteryear. The only place on YouTube I see anything like that old level of genuine quality is EFAP.
The number of living humans who are actually interested in "talking philosophy" is minuscule. Even among people who are otherwise highly intelligent and capable. Even TheMotte these days is more interested in the concrete play-by-play of current events than anything theoretical. (Although frankly, this is probably not too different from the historical norm on TheMotte. Current events have always dominated the discussion. We went through an anomalously philosophical period around 2022-2023 due to the advent of AI, and since then have regressed to the mean.)
I would love to talk about theory, but I'm not sure interesting discussions of theory are available. The overwhelming amount of theory has always been apologetics - start with a desired bottom line, derived from vibes which were absorbed from or imposed by the environment, and reason backwards until a good theory that just so happens to prove the bottom line (or, "surprisingly", more of the bottom line than anyone dared to ask for before) is formed. I don't see how this could be avoided structurally - unlike scientific theories, philosophical theories have no ground truth to answer to, so there is no competitive advantage forward reasoning conveys. Even so, this could be fine for a discussion environment, as even if no individual theory-builder ever changed their mind due to theoretising, a number of theory-builders with diverse bottom lines could compete over theory-consumers on the elegance of their apologetics, and even on the aesthetic appeal of the bottom line that they already were living. However, this requires an actually diverse set of people willing to theoretise; and neither society at large, nor this forum in particular, has done anything to rein in the forces that compel people to just assimilate to one or another existing bottom line rather than hold onto their idiosyncrasies alone and weather hostility from all. As a result, the only innovation in theory we would be getting is different contortions reaching either a conclusion that we need between 1 and 50 Comrade Trumps, or 1 and 50 Comrade Hitlers, or maybe very rarely between 1 and 50 Comrade Mills.
Sure. But, what else is there to do but press onward anyway?
In order to get an actual understanding of the Culture War, which is this forum's raison d'être, you have to theorize about the psychological and material motivations of different factions and individuals, you have to produce a unified narrative of historical causes, you have to take an accounting of the ethics and implied metaphysics of different positions, you have to have some notion of the aims of political activity in general... in short, you have to do philosophy.
Without a theoretical account of the Culture War and its constitutive elements, the forum is reduced to simply giving a factual account of current events, along with perhaps some strategizing and some sentimental commiserating with people who are on the same "side" as you. In other words, you'd just be fumbling about in the dark without any understanding of what's going on. A mere subject of historical forces rather than someone who might hope to know them.
Science is not exempt from politics and emotion. Otherwise, empirical research into race and sex differences, or even just IQ, wouldn't be as touchy as it is. Researchers get invested in their own theories all the time even when there's no overt political content, "science advances one funeral at a time", etc.
We just went over this. It certainly seems to be the case that philosophical claims are either true or false, just like most of the other ordinary types of claims that we're familiar with. MTF transsexuals are either women, or they aren't. There are either mind-independent ethical facts, or there aren't. There is either at least one conscious entity, or there isn't. The ground truth that these claims answer to is the same ground truth that everything else answers to: the facts of reality.
Of course, there have been many attempts throughout the history of philosophy to show that individual philosophical questions or classes of questions are in fact meaningless (in the neither-true-nor-false sense), contrary to initial appearances. But these types of arguments too depend on their own non-trivial assertions about reality.
It's true, our present lack of intellectual diversity isn't really conducive to good discussion. But we still have substantial disagreements on this forum regarding AI, race and immigration, the ethics of sexuality, etc.
This seems like the worst possible example - “Are transwomen women?” seems to be a question where 90% or the disagreement about the meaning of the word “woman” and only 10% about ground truth.
If you exclude people who believe in intrinsically gendered souls (for whom the question, “Can female souls be incarnated in male bodies?” is meaningful even if the correct answer is unknowable with mortal technology) I don’t think you would get any disagreement on questions like “Does Caitlin Jenner have testicles?” or “Does Caitlin Jenner have a considered, sincere belief that she is supposed to be a woman?”
Oh but you would!
Mereological nihilists deny the existence of testicles because they deny the existence of compound physical objects in general (often because of the same Sorites-style arguments that people use to attack conservative ontologies of gender in the first place).
Eliminative materialists deny the existence of beliefs, so they would deny that anyone believes that they are a man or a woman.
So, it turns out to be rather difficult to cleanly divide sentences into two groups of "these are the nice empirical truths that we can be certain of" and "these are the nonsensical philosophical claims that just come down to verbal disputes", because it turns out that almost every sentence you can think of is ultimately the subject of philosophical disagreement.
If you think there is a ground truth of the matter over whether testicles and beliefs exist, in spite of the philosophical disagreement concerning their existence, then it's not clear why you wouldn't think that there is a ground truth of the matter over whether women exist too (along with, presumably, some sort of criteria for determining whether an entity counts as a woman or not).
... and mereological nihilists and eliminative materialists have negligible relevance to any actually existing argument about this subject. Certainly below the lizardman constant.
"I don't think you would get any disagreement on" doesn't mean "literally 0.0000 percent disagreement".
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