Is there a recording of this? That sounds hilarious.

White supremacy is by nature anti-intellectual so that’s not surprising

an atheist woman wrote an article about sexism in atheist spaces in like 2011 (including a story about some man aggressively hitting on her in an elevator at some atheist conference, y’know, a super enclosed space). this was too much for a huge proportion of the atheists, including dawkins. they dragged her name through the mud and basically did a proto-gamergate-type tantrum about it. because how dare a woman say sexism exists in atheist spaces when they’re not actively murdering women or making them wear hijabs. calm down, sweaty.

it was gross, and the only reason i didnt get sucked in (i was younger and stupider then) is cos i found out about it on PZ myers’ blog and he had the correct reading on the situation, IIRC.

Someone asked Rebecca Watson, an atheist YouTuber and public speaker, up to his room in the elevator at a conference. She later (without naming names) said “Hey maybe don’t do that” and it caused a huge meltdown.

Edit:

Others have already explained it better than me.

There is an evolutionary process there. There are leftwing anti science people. However being successfully anti science is expensive to do properly. So left wing people tend to leave the movement when theh cant afford hospital bills

Lenin was just wrong and it is his poor philosophy that either must devolve into idealism or into complete nonsense.

Modern day “physicalism” (I do not consider to this be materialism) is a complete disaster because these “physicalists” refuse to let go of dualism. They still desperately want to cling on to the belief that there is a gulf between what we perceive and reality, but as Feuerbach correctly pointed out, if you belief such a gulf exists, you cannot bridge it later without contradicting yourself.

This leads to the rise in the mind-body problem and the so-called “hard problem of consciousness,” which “physicalists” these days don’t even bother to try and rebut it anymore, saying things like, “I agree with you Mr Idealist, you are completely right there is a hard problem of consciousness. I have no idea what the solution is, though. :)” Do you think that convinces anyone over? No, it just drives them into the camp of idealism.

Many things we observe we observe indirectly. Some things we observe indirectly with the use of tools. Some things we observe indirectly through a logical chain of reasoning, such as, piecing together evidence at a crime scene and then conclude that, under a counterfactual scenario, if you were in the room, you would have perceived a particular person commit the crime, even though you did not directly perceive it.

However, these tool-indirect and counterfactual-indirect statements are uniquely distinct from transcendental-indirect statements, where one tries to posit the existence of an ontology that is fundamentally unobservable under any counterfactual and even with the use of tools, but, like the hand of God, acts upon the world from outside of it to manipulate the things we can empirically observe.

If everything we perceive is part of some “veil” that blocks us from seeing true reality, then by definition true reality is fundamentally unobservable even in principle. It cannot be perceived indirectly with the use of tools. It cannot be perceived under any counterfactual scenario. It can only be derived through “pure reason,” and thus through transcendentalism.

Transcendentalism is incredibly abstract as it usually involves reifying certain logical or mathematical forms, yet these logical and mathematical forms are part of the language we use to describe the natural world, and to reify the language is to reify something socially constructed, and thus the ontology becomes ambiguous based on one’s social setting.

We see this throughout the disaster that is the current state of physics academia, for example, where physicists constantly reformulate the same mathematics of the same theory so it makes all the same empirical predictions, yet believing they are inventing new ontology, despite the fact there is nothing empirically distinguishable between their formulation and many previous ones. This has led to a situation where nobody can agree what objective reality even is, and so academics have adopted a stance that it’s just a personal opinion and anyone’s opinion is just as a good as anyone else.

Transcendentalism will always devolve into postmodernism.

Bogdanov was trying to caution against this by rebutting the very basis of dualism, the very claim that we do not perceive reality for what it is. However, Lenin, completely incapable of letting go of Kantian metaphysics, misinterpreted Bogdanov as claiming that we should believing in the veil but reject the reality beyond the veil, i.e. to devolve into idealism, when Bogdanov’s actual position was to reject that such a veil even exists to begin with, as the starting point of materialist philosophy.

Indeed, the path towards idealism is always the same. “Physicalists” insist upon Kantian metaphysics, which inevitably devolves into transcendentalism, which is inevitably arbitrary. People then realize it is arbitrary, and so they begin to reject all transcendental-indirect claims entirely, but do not drop the Kantian framework. They still hang on to the belief that what they perceive is the veil and “true” reality is beyond it. They call the veil “phenomenal” or “subjective” or “conscious,” or as Lenin did, “reflective.” Thus they come to reject “true” reality, only believing in the veil, and devolve into idealism, as an attempt to escape the arbitrariness of transcendentalism.

Yet, “physicalists” have no weapons against idealism because their philosophy genuinely is arbitrary, and so they drive people to idealism in droves. They genuinely cannot grasp that Kantian metaphysics might just be wrong, and so they straw man anyone who rejects their dualist foundations as an “idealist” themselves because, in their mind, the idea that what we perceive is not reality but a veil that blocks us from seeing reality is an entirely unquestionable gospel truth. If you say that you do not believe in a transcendental reality, they therefore come to believe you are claiming that you reject the existence of material reality, and that you only believe in the “veil” of “the Idea,” and therefore must be an idealist. Their straw man comes not from dishonesty, but a genuine lack of mental ability to grasp the very idea that someone may reject transcendental reality and the veil at the same time, and thus believe in reality, which is not “beyond” our ability to perceive but is the direct object of study of the material sciences, which is driven by empirical observation.

Nowhere in Marx/Engels works do they talk about this dualist split, and it baffles me that anyone can read Dialectics of Nature and not come out with a takeaway that it is cautioning against transcendentalism and taking a direct realist stance. Lenin’s poor philosophical writings have been a disaster upon materialist philosophy, causing it to merge into incoherent “physicalism” of bourgeois academia, and the philosophy has entirely stopped developing and is stuck in the 20th century. Physicalism is the introduction of transcendentalism into materialist philosophy justified through dualism, which is not only the route bourgeois academia has taken but is the route even many Marxists have taken influenced by Lenin’s poor philosophical writings.

Indeed, I have found stronger criticisms of idealism these days not in modern Marxist writings but in those of the Wittgenstein school, such as the contextual realist works of Jocelyn Benoist, as Marxist materialists these days have merged with the physicalists and have deviated so far off course of reasonable philosophy.

“Physicalism” is incredibly weak as you believe in the phenomena and the noumena, yet admit the noumena is something you take on faith, and so naturally, if someone questions taking something blindly on faith, then all you are left with is the phenomena, and hence it quickly devolves into idealism upon scrutiny, or just believing in random bull crap based on personal feelings, and thus into postmodernism.

Philosophers like Bogdanov and Benoist actually attack the very notion of the phenomena. Something which physicalists like Lenin could not grasp letting go of. Bogdanov’s attack was not on the noumena to leave the phenomena intact, but to dismantle the entire dualist split of Kantian metaphysics. The abandonment of materialism for physicalism has been a complete disaster.

Somethingsomething translation error from the original aramaic.