AS238: Eli and James, Part 2

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 238, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Alright, you know what's coming. You know the drill. This is another long portion, but a very good portion of the Eli-James debate. I went slightly back so we could hear the last thing Eli said, and then we'll go back into James' response. And then the next cut is a little more even, because we actually transitioned. So sorry for that first cut. There was just no place where there was a good moment to stop, because Eli and James are very good at going back and forth seamlessly. So, sorry for that cut, but I will get you right back into it. No need to talk, because it's already so long, and I hope you enjoy part two.

0:01:20 Guest: And, and I don't hear any acknowledgement of the huge group that you're out grouping because of that. I apologize that you, that you don't get that, but that frankly is, is your decision and your problem. Um, that you have decided to shut out my voice because of something that you read that you didn't like rather than try to dig deeper is was your decision and that that's your hurt, not my hurt. Um, I don't know what will and will not trigger or offend people, but if you want to know why you want to know why I'm willing to speak out like that and say feminism, blah, blah. And I mean specifically a so-called problematic narrow fringe of extremists is the same reason why you just said that Christianity is anti-gay.

0:02:08 Guest: It's the same reason why we will point to Islam and, to quote Sam Harris, say it's the motherlode of bad ideas. It's the same reason that any religion that we might, as non-believers, criticize for, say, the Westboro Baptist Church, if it's Christianity and its behaviors and its actions, Notice that the vast majority of Christians hate the Westboro Baptist Church, but go to pretty much any atheist movement, if you want to use that phrase, go to almost any atheist publication that's been around for a little while and you will find them talking extensively about the Westboro Baptist Church. It's because they are a highly visible and highly issue-laden group that is promoting itself as the correct, true interpretation of that view for everybody, and they're making themselves very, very difficult to ignore.

And again, we can get to actual sociology that explains where this comes from and why this happens and what the results of it are and why this is the kind of problem that, not skeptics, but people who are concerned about the future of society and individuals, as a matter of fact, not just society, but the individuals within it, the individuals taking these stands, why this is bad for those people.

And that's what I really wanted to talk about today, because these things do a lot of damage of, I'll say, the unintended consequences kind in the pursuit of trying to protect whether or not people feel welcome or people feel hurt.

0:03:47 Guest: And I will not say dehumanized because that's not fair whatsoever in the majority of cases because to say that somebody says that trans people, for instance, I know they are often dehumanized, are badly or told to kill themselves or whatever, some stupid, immature, hateful shit. To say that all that happens, you're not hearing that from a single, thoughtful, serious person. You just aren't. So, James, I want to take you to task on that specific point because you are a serious, thoughtful, considerate person.

And yet you just, and we talked about this on Twitter, you just tweeted something from, and accidentally, and you took this down, I want to give you all the credit in the world, you tweeted an article from the American College of Pediatricians, which is a hate group listed by the SPLC with the quote, it's absolutely shocking that the American College of Pediatricians has to write this, which, which the statement that they released is called gender ideology harms children.

And it's just full of myths and lies and things that I certainly, and trans people certainly, certainly would identify as dehumanizing. And even after you took the tweet down, you doubled down on the statement that the company – that the group made by saying, and the actual thing I shared isn't quite insane and wasn't too far out of step with legitimate organization statements.

I mean, James, to me, that's a – I went and looked up the American Psychological Association's statement on standard of care for trans youth. And the standard of care is not identical to, and I don't defend the wording of the particular thing that the College of Pediatricians wrote, but the statement that the American Pediatric Association is the standard of care is very similar to what they advocated.

0:05:38 Guest: They advocate waiting to find out more because the majority of gender dysphoric children end up entering adolescents and decide that what seems best for them and what starts to match their identity as they go through that confusing time is to remain the gender that they are. And often they end up being homosexual. James, that is a hundred percent untrue. The APA cites that it's 80-something percent. So that's the, that's the Desistence Myth. And that study has been excessively debunked because the claim that they make in that study is gender-fused, gender-confused children, quote, eventually accept their biological. Eli, that's fine if the data show a different standard of care.

0:06:23 Guest: In the APA, the point, though, you can finish it, but the point is-- but it is relevant because you just said that this is something that's true, and I'm telling you right now that I've researched this and that it's not, and I am telling you that whatever is true is all that matters, I don't care which is true, which is truth is what matters. So, so whatever the studies come out to be and whatever the APA and the World, what is it, World Professionals for Trans Health decide is the correct standard of care over continuing research is the thing we should do. Right. So the thing that you put forward and the thing you just doubled down on right now, in this moment with me, is untrue. I'm telling you it's a harmful myth.

0:07:09 Guest: If that's true, then show me the, send me the papers. I'm trying to. I'm literally trying to do it. No, no, no. Not in a dialogue. Send me the papers and I will gladly defend whatever is true. That's all I want to do. That is all anybody thoughtful wants to do. Absolutely. Well, I am going to say what it is here and then I will happily send you the papers. And if I am wrong, same thing.

0:07:29 Thomas: I'll link them too too, by the way. I'll, yeah.

0:07:30 Guest: Yeah, exactly. We will link them in the show notes. But essentially, that statement is based on the desistance myth that claims that most gender confused children eventually accept their biological sex after going through puberty. But this is based on research that conflated children with gender variant behavior, i.e. little boys who dress up in dresses for tea party, with children who actually asserted a different gender. The children in those studies who desisted in their identities were the kids who weren't actually transgender to begin with. And in fact, on top of that, a recent study whose parents embraced their identities are as happy and as healthy as their peers. So it's entirely untrue. Now, look, you've got a bad source. And I, look— And you cited it, and I took it down, and I apologized.

0:08:18 Guest: Absolutely. But then you doubled down on it. That's what I'm talking about. To the best of my knowledge, it agreed with what the APA's standard of care—that's immediately what I did. I immediately went and looked up what the EPA says, as you indicated that they're not the same organization. I immediately looked at what they said. It is similar, and I commented upon that. That's the extent of my knowledge. We're talking about Twitter one evening. I won't apologize for it, but I was drunk. So I was actually drinking when all of those tweets went, and I still went and took the due diligence to look up what you said, check it, find out that it was true, change the point of view that I gave. And then right now I'm telling you, whatever is true, whatever is able to convince somebody, an organization like the World Professionals for Trans Health, and if I'm misquoting the name of that organization, I apologize, it's something like that, it has five letters.

0:09:05 Guest: Um, whatever the American Psychological Association decides, whatever they think is correct, ultimately I'm going to defer to their expertise. And I'm glad that there's research going on to find that out. There's nothing more to be said about that. The point of science is to progress along those lines. Exactly. And if people make a mistake and they move on from that, then that's what happens. So show me more having a bad source. To me, trust me, the listeners of this show know that I have plenty of bad sources and a history of them. And so this is a perfect example then. So here's what happens. I said something that was, we'll say, factually wrong. It probably was. And I got called on that in a polite way, sort of. I thought I was polite. What professionals do in these situations and say, hey, your information is incorrect in some fashion or another.

0:09:55 Guest: Double check this, check out that, and then they actually do the due diligence to follow up. It's impossible to keep up with all of the relevant research to all of the relevant topics. And so far from being marginalized and angry and saying, oh my God, then I can't be trans and be welcomed into atheism, whatever the hell atheism as a group means, because this person who wrote a book got a bad source that disagrees with something I think or know to be true, instead of being, here's an opportunity. And this is this is the difference. This is the core difference that we need to be talking about. This is an opportunity to reach out and say, here is additional information. But this isn't an opportunity to say, here's additional information, and until you agree with exactly this information, then you are wrong and hurtful.

0:10:43 Guest: This is-- here's information, you are an intelligent human being whose intellect and capacity I respect, and I would like for you to evaluate it, which is exactly what we do when we reach out or we're supposed to do. And we don't get mad at people when they do this to Christians, but we get mad when they're, you know, you have to look at this and exactly blah, blah, or else you're stupid. Nobody likes that. You bring up that example with your Bob Jones University story a lot, where if you went and just badgered Christians until they cried or whatever, that you would not be cool. And I know you're using that in a different context, but the point is there's an opportunity to create greater education. And so like with the Yale thing where you often like to, this is where you bring it to Bob Jones. You like to defend that that girl that screeched is not representative of a movement.

0:11:29 Guest: No, but what followed that and what preceded that is, which was making demands. So here's this information and you have to agree to it. No. No. This isn't correct. The ability to evaluate information and suspend judgment until you are able to draw the conclusions that are nearest to true is correct. Not, I demand you apologize right now or leave this university. Not here is this study that shows something contrary to what this other study shows. You must agree with this study, not that study. There's a matter of having to work through this. And this is that authoritarian element that you're seeing so many people work out against. And This is where the literature, the sociological literature points very clearly to how this arises. Uh, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning in 2014 wrote the seminal piece on this.

0:12:18 Guest: It's called Microaggressions and Moral Cultures, published in Comparative Sociology. They're following the theory of one of the more significant moral sociologists of the time, Donald Black, who put out a lot of excellent papers and books, including Moral Time in 2011, where they outlined this entire theory about how this new attitude has moved from a prevailing culture of dignity into a culture of victimhood. And a culture of victimhood is one that is going to make demands. And that's where your authoritarian element comes from. And it's extremely clearly laid out. I'm happy. I want to get into this. I wanna get into that, but I wanna jump back really quickly because I actually think this is really great because I do wanna get to this. But I wanna Jump back quickly because you said something important. You said, uh, you have to take this back.

0:13:04 Guest: Otherwise you're wrong and hurtful. And James, all I'm asking you to acknowledge is that when you write something like, it's absolutely shocking that the American College of Pediatricians has to write this about something that is wrong and hurtful. I do not think it's wrong for my friend Callie or my brother to say, hey man, it really hurts me when you disseminate this false information, because false information like that, which is a gender. Why should that hurt you?

Especially if the response is to take it down? Because, well, again, your response hurt me that you You made a mistake. Well, it's because that doesn't make sense. That's victimhood. That is a culture of victimhood. It's not just about making a mistake. It's about just pushing forward agenda-driven ideologies and not understanding that those once you put that out, look, it's fine to say I made a mystique. But it it doesn't become consequenceless just because you made a mistique, you know, putting forward those words as something that you support, court, again, when you take it back, it's fine, and you're allowed to apologize. And I know that one of the big problems of the left is people say, hey, I'm really sorry that I made you feel ostracized and I made you feel bad about that. And it's like, no, not enough. First, we must hang him from the ceiling by his toes.

And I know that that's a real issue, and I don't want to. I don't want to push that. So is demanding an apology. But by the same token, I do want to acknowledge the very real pain that is caused by being wrong about subjects like this, and that being wrong about subjects like this is agenda-driven. It's not like you went, I would like to learn about trans issues, and you went to a gender studies class and they gave you the ACP.

Actually, what happened, if you want to know, is I said about three months ago, I want to learn about trans issues, and I had seen the thing on something like the APA.

0:14:49 Guest: It was actually an interview with a doctor who works directly with this, and I read that this is the standard of care, blah, blah. So I went and found out what it was, and then I saw the thing from the American College of PDA, pediatricians, which I read thoroughly and said, okay, this is, you know, in law, I don't know what this organization is. This is in line with what I read as the standard of care, like three or four months ago when I went on my own to go. So you don't even know the story of where you think I just am agenda driven. Well, um, perhaps there is some of that we're human beings. We're, we're all apes. We're all doing the best that we can or assholes one or the other. And, It um. Was an in agreement with what I had already learned to be or presumed to be correct, given that it's coming from the operative expert in the field at the time, uh, on a pro trans situ, uh source that that was a standard of care.

0:15:39 Guest: It was in rough agreement with whatever I remembered. And so I was shocked that they even had to write such a thing. And so I expressed that opinion. I found out that the source that I shared was a bad one.

I, I moved on from that, but I stuck to what I already knew, which was and then double checked again anyway because I doubted it the second you raised the question, because I do that, I doubt things that I think I know are true all the time, and so I go back and I look and it's, as far as I can tell, the APA whatever it's based on, that's fine, but that's secondary to the point that, James, I'm not questioning how you behave intellectually.

This is the same thing that Nicholas Christakis did at Yale. He said, I apologize, and this is how how I feel. I apologize for any hurt that I caused you, but I don't apologize for the statement that I made. Do you see the difference? I don't want to hurt people, but I do want to express my opinion to the best of my ability. And demanding somebody apologize for more than causing hurt is

0:16:37 Guest: Absolutely not acceptable. I totally agree. Okay, then there was then this was 20 minutes largely wasted. No, it's because – I'll tell you why I think it's not wasted, because I think it's incredibly important for us to acknowledge when we hurt people. And I think a lot of the time, certainly on the videos – and again, I've gotten myself in enough trouble about the Yale thing. But certainly on videos, Christakis, when he's surrounded by the kids who are using snaps, not claps rules, right?

When he's surrounding by the – which is weird and totally intimidating and like so to not like trigger a PTSD person for the hurt bombs. No, you do snaps, like not clap, so that you're never drowning out someone, because if you applaud while someone has talked, then the person who's responding gets drowned out, so it's actually The people who hear the snapping thing are like, you completely creep out everybody who doesn't know what's going on. Like, yeah, it is, it is creepy the first time you're interacting, but no, it's creepy everything, it's never, it's ever stopped being creepy to me, uh, at least I've heard this many times. So I will never snaps not clap you, I promise, and I haven't blown an air horn once. But, but the point is this.

You just acknowledged something that I think is really key, that I don't – I think anyone who, after you say, "Hey, I'm really sorry I caused you hurt, I was wrong, it wasn't right of me to say that" and to admit – and again, I think intellectually you just behaved amazingly. More people like you in the world, less people like me. And so I think that's fantastic.

I do think though it's important to say, because we've sort of come back to this a couple of times, is when you talk about safe spaces, yes, you hurt that majority.

0:18:10 Guest: When you talk about feminists, yes, you hurt that majority in the name of attacking those, what you would call, creeping minorities. And I think that when you look at the world we live in that has bathroom bills being passed against trans people right now, our indication should be to be gentler and kinder to those groups. You know, when we have the rape culture that we have in the United States today, I think it should be gentler and kinder towards feminists, gentler, and kinders towards minority groups because of what the world we live in. Again, if there were cultural appropriation bills, I promise you, James, I would be on your side of the aisle. Let me state what is going on here in my opinion then. What's going on here is that I think something is so obvious that it doesn't need saying, that we should care if we hurt people's feelings to a reasonable degree.

0:19:02 Guest: This is so obvious, that I don't think it needs saying. Well, I promise you it's not. I promise you, because I'm a pretty smart guy. I'm not a dummy. Don't get me wrong, I'm great, but I'm not a dummy, and nothing I read until we had this conversation indicated that you had the subtle, intelligent, and more importantly, empathetic understanding of these issues that you do. I am so happy about this conversation, James, based on the amount of- So the question is, why do you assume something like that about me based on what I put on Twitter, whereas I feel like I should assume that people generally do have no ill will in what they're doing. And in fact, I subscribe strongly. I sent it to Sam Harris on Twitter yesterday. I subscribe strongly to Hanlon's razor, never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence, um, or stupidity as it's actually worded.

0:19:53 Guest: And so, but I don't think you're, that's the difference. I don't think you're stupid. And it's, it's not about ascribing, but I am, everybody's stupid. Everybody's ignorant of so much more stuff than they can possibly know. But when you use the term stupid in that sense, there are, there are genuinely dumber people. That's for sure. Uh, and may the ableist emails begin. Um, Right. But there are the term feminism and you don't say crazy extreme because I can tweet about crazy extreme feminism and get nothing. I could get on Twitter right now and be like, the thing with the EU astronaut was silly. Extreme feminism is problematic. And everyone be like Emma. Totally. But when you use the word feminism or when you used the word safe spaces, I take you at your word.

0:20:36 Thomas: Wait, do you view, I'm sorry, do you view that situation guy as extreme feminism? Because that was a huge reaction. The guy had to come on and cry and give an apology.

0:20:45 Guest: Cry on television, on international television.

0:20:48 Thomas: And you're viewing that as like, oh, that's just a minority of feminists who caused that reaction.

0:20:53 Guest: That was the entire internet exploding. A nuclear bomb went off on that guy.

0:20:57 Thomas: Yeah. That was a lot of people.

0:21:01 Guest: If that's a lot of people, then we can talk about men's rights activism because it's nothing in comparison to, I mean, if we want to play the comparison game, again, it's about the world. Eli, this isn't about comparisons. This is about a nuclear bomb with the words, we are feminism, went off that day. And Made every, a nuclear bomb that says on it, "Hi, feminists." I can't help the fact that the people who painted "we were feminists" on the side of that bomb might be an extremist fringe or might not be, just like when, you know, an extremists fringe of Muslims blows up the World Trade Center. I can't help the fact that those people are Muslims that were motivated by their interpretation of Muslim ideology. I can't help that fact.

All I know is you had the entire world be like, "term, term," that's why we use the term Islamist, right? It's why that's, it's why, that why we used the term Islamists as of 2015, 14 years after that happened. And that's why we had this enormously confusing period of time in between in which we couldn't even start to have these conversations.

So what we've done now is we spent an hour and a half discussing why what we need is some succinct term that clarifies the difference between the feminists that you don't like and the feminists that you you take as representative and, or that different people are going to see different groups as being representative.

0:21:16 Thomas: Yeah, yeah,

0:22:15 Guest: So when I say something like, uh, some of these tweets about feminism, I take it as assumed, given the prevailing culture that's going on, in the prevailing cultural discussions that are going on that are motivating the tweets in the first place. They don't come out of my ear. They come out me looking at stuff on the internet that's happening that the people who are reading are, my assumption is they're intelligent enough to to roughly, and informed enough to roughly know what's going on that might have triggered that, or mature enough to ask me what triggered this, what made you say that if they're not sure. And so, like, right, you wouldn't accept that logic about atheism. You wouldn't except that logic. If I said math is absurd, you'd be like, "What are you talking about? You can't long divide." And I'd be like, "Oh, Terry ology. Now that first conversation, that first conversation is on me to be a better communicator, not on you to glean my meeting, to be talking about the tiny, tiny minority of mathematics.

0:23:13 Guest: But here's the difference. The tiny minority of mathematics is not making the New York Times or it's not making the front page of the cover issue of The Atlantic. There are tons of tiny minorities that, yes, first of all, tiny minorities make the cover of The Atlantic all the time because extremes make the news. Just the same reason as people send Anita Sarkeesian death threats, make the news, but they don't represent all anti-feminists. They don't represent all people who have problems, or gamer gators, for instance, right? I've had a bunch of conversations with gamer gaters now, some of whom have really interesting points about ethics and video games. But when you say gamer gate, we think of people who threatened to kill Anita Sarkeesian and doxed her and publicly announced her name, right.

0:23:58 Guest: I don't. So I think of the entire thing that's going on with its problems and with its, it's not, but it was in the New York times. But what you just said is, is, isn't it? It's wonderful. You just said that When we think of Gamergate, we think of the extremists. When we Think of Feminists, we Think of the Extremists. Okay. But we shouldn't do that. And if I were to say video gamers are all misogynists, Salon Magazine, if we were to say video games are all video gamers were all misogyny or atheists are all misogny, Salone Magazine, we all go, that's terrible. Right. There are atheists who are misogyny. There are athiests who say incredibly terrible misoginistic stuff. I'm not even talking about any specific one. I'm sure there's a guy out there somewhere right now who's just like, lady parts are made from the, well, not the devil, but made from flying spaghetti monster or whatever it is.

0:24:45 Guest: There's got to be a misogynist atheist out there. And I've seen plenty of misogyny among atheisms. And yet both you and I agree that that god awful article in the National Geographic was just incredibly problematic, was just incredibly offensive and wrong. So when you use that term, OK, I don't actually see it as offensive, by the way. I just see it is wrong. So this is offensive, we keep coming back to this point of offense. And this is where that whole mentality of victim culture, and that's where the whole social justice movement gets its legs. And this is the elephant in the room that we're orbiting around and never talking about, other than the other elephants of the room, is what are the effects on people who are, – should these become mainstream?

0:25:32 Guest: And they are on many campuses. They are getting administrative support on many campus. Let's go into this because you've mentioned it a couple of times and I've kept hopping back to the other thing. And I appreciate your patience on that because I've been trying to do that. But before because I think what, what, you're gonna be talking about when it comes to victim culture., I'm very interested in talking about the other side, or the other opinions when it come to that, and relates back to what we said at the very beginning, which is about the difference between students wanting their college to be a safe space, and wanting their college to be a safe place and what the difference between those is. But first, why don't you talk a little about the paper? Because that sounds really interesting. And I sort of want to jump off of that. Okay. So there's the seminal paper discussing the culture of victimhood, which is titled Microaggressions in Moral Cultures.

0:26:22 Guest: It was published in 2014 in Comparative Sociology. It's by two sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning. And they illustrate that there is this growing trend and they focus upon microaggressions, but these are immediately germane to this expanded notion of safe space. And if I call it a safe space mentality, please, I'm trying not to do that for your sake and for the sake of clarity in this discussion. I want to call that a campus censorship, maybe. I don't know exactly which- I think campus censorship is a great term. A campus censorship, it's harder to say, mentality. And so we're talking about a particular mentality or a emerging moral culture. And so you've read my book, you know, that I've studied moral psychology a lot. This is moral sociology.

0:27:07 Guest: My book talks about the way the different moral groups, like I specifically talk about religious people, are trying to meet certain psychological and social needs by their moral frameworks that they've adopted, and the religious ones are a particular kind of that, and then there are others. What Campbell and Manning document is a change. They start out more historically from a culture of honor, in which everybody, everybody's hypersensitive to insults, but the way that they settled insults was to fight. Uh, if somebody insulted you, you came and and shot them or you beat them up or something like that. It's an honor culture. We still have lingering honoring honor cultures in various religions, in various parts of the world, in different parts of the, not even religious. For instance, the Chinese have a stronger honor culture, although it's not totally an honor culture, than we do.

0:27:55 Guest: They still have such a strong concept of face in the way that they operate their culture. Well, in the West, roughly around the time the United States was becoming a nation, but kind of over the century that followed that, it transitioned to of more of what's called a culture of dignity. And so what I grew up in is a culture of dignity for certain, in which what's most important is that you kind of ignore slights, you try to build your own character. It tends to be relatively robust. It's characterized by self-restraint and nonviolent responses to social conflict. What's arising now is, as they document, a culture of victimhood. And that's where you're very sensitive to slights but you don't respond to them with violence.

0:28:41 Guest: You respond to them by reporting them to third parties who are either sympathetic or that you hope to gain their sympathies. And so it tends to be very, very sensitive to slights, and it tends to be censorious. It wants to make the slights go away without directly either working them out by mediation, which is what a dignity culture would do, or ignoring them. When we say thicker skin, we're talking about a dignity culture. Dignity culture values thick skin. A culture of victimhood values third parties coming to the rescue. And they often move towards censorious behavior. You can't say that because it's hurtful. The thing is, is these arise under very specific conditions, which is what Campbell and Manning demonstrate. They arise only in highly egalitarian settings.

0:29:28 Guest: They have to have a lot of diversity and they have to have access to some kind of an authoritative administrative body or to a mob, one or the other, because a mob carries its own kind of partisan authority. The internet provides access to a large number of like-minded partisans, so you have that. University administrations provide an authoritative body that will often take your side because of a variety of reasons that we don't need to get into, but are going to be one of the the major crises in the next decade, is trying to sort out how to fix what corner the universities have painted themselves into in this regard. But the point here is that you only will have a culture of victimhood arise when you already have a highly equal society.

0:30:13 Guest: So the fact that this is an issue on college campuses is, in the Western society more generally, is actually proof, according to the well-accepted model of moral sociology preferred by Donald Black, that those, those places, college campuses and broader Western society, already exhibit extremely high levels of equality, egalitarianism, tolerance and inclusiveness. Otherwise, these things could not arise. And that sort of undermines the whole driving ethos behind really, really hard social justice activism, because you're fighting for something that can only, you're finding for something in a way that only arises when you already kind of have it. And the reason is because when there is less stratification in society, you have a tendency to have over stratification insults taking place in a circumstance of a very small slights. And, the current campus environment is It's actually perfect for this to have evolved.

0:31:18 Guest: The researchers, Campbell and Manning, cite, for instance, not speaking to campus, but generally to Western culture, that in cultures, to make you understand how this works, cultures where, for example, for instance, men beat their wives, which still exists on this planet. This is patriarchy. This is-- in patriarchy, usually everybody involved, sadly, accepts the situation. And so even what they call macroaggressions are not considered deviant. You can only have microaggressons becoming deviant when you already have so much equality, and they cite women's rights and women's equality reaching such a place that you have to become almost hypersensitive to perceived sexism for it to arise. And the hallmark, and this is the huge problem with the social justice movement, besides the fact that it's self-defeating, they can only arise where it's least needed.

0:32:10 Guest: Hallmarks of social justice victimhood culture or this campus censorship mentality is that it fosters what's called moral dependency, and moral dependency is the outsourcing of your ability to solve conflict, social conflict, to third parties. Now, if we want to dip into developmental psychology for a second, and we can, we have a theory in developmental psychology, or I'm sorry, a developmental phase that's come about just recently called emerging adulthood. This is 18 to 25. Typically, this is college students.

And one of the core challenges of emerging adulthood, one of the core developmental goals of emerging adulthood is to reduce childhood and adolescent dependency and increase adult independence and autonomy, and so you have an environment in which that's not happening, and what's arising is a culture that values victimhood because victimhood paints the victim as somebody who's blameless, who deserves help, and paints the the the perpetrator, the the other people, the the less kind people, as it turns out, because these slights are often micro in nature, whether they're cumulative or not, they're often micro nature. It paints these people as being oppressors and privileged and blameworthy. It's not a friendly place. The problem is that victimhood cultures foster moral dependence, and moral dependence causes a lot of problems. These are all cited problems that come with it.

0:33:44 Guest: For instance, one is victim and trauma centrality. Your mindset becomes It becomes one where you actively are looking for ways in which your society or culture is causing slights. That's where the hypersensitivity to racial or sexual or gender or sexuality-based slights comes from. You become hypersensitive. And victim and trauma centrality of your identity is a major problem. It's how major. There are papers written, for instance, Donald Robinaud and Richard McNally, who are PTSD experts, wrote in the Journal of Traumatic Stress in 2011, 11, a paper called Trauma Centrality and PTSD Symptom Severity, that the more central trauma and victimhood is to your identity, the more likely you are to get PTSD and the less curable from PTSD that you are. So you're actually, by taking this mindset on in order to combat socially generated trauma, you're creating more socially generated trauma.

0:34:38 Guest: You're predisposing people to fall into it and not be able to get it out of it. It also very reliably, based on the psychologist, the work of psychologist David Lay, creates what I call grievance jockeying. I know you guys are big fans of Gad Saad, and he called it the oppression Olympics. The technical term, I didn't know the technical term until recently. I called it grievance jocking, but the technical terms is competitive victimhood. The psychological response to being, uh, labeled an oppressor, the, is being labeled an oppressor, as it turns out, is a trigger, and the response, most frequent response, is to assert that you also are a victim. So why is the men's rights movement ascendant? Because the social justice movement is, uh, attacking them and calling them oppressors, whether they are or not is not material to the fact that you end up in this vicious cycle once you start getting into grievance jockeying.

0:35:34 Guest: It also causes hypersensitivity to slights and hypervigilance to look for them. And that leads to what's called catastrophizing. If you can exaggerate, and there are documented examples of people exaggerating. I can give you one that just happened near where where I live if you want one where where people uh exaggerate exaggerate the uh the circumstances to gain more um victim status can lead to what's called catastrophizing where something small like having an email sent to you that that is upsetting about whether or not something to anything to do with with with Halloween costumes, it doesn't even matter what it what what the circumstances are. If that causes a complete meltdown, chances are pretty good you're catastrophizing. It also leads to socio-political balkanizing. You know how you can say conservatives, disconservatives, social conservatives, blah, blah.

0:36:22 Guest: MRAs, I hate them, blah blah blah. Just talking to them wastes my time. Social justice, ah, same thing. That's called socio-political balkanizing. These are groups that have split apart that are unable to talk to each other. They're named after the Balkan states, which are political failures. There's a reason why we don't want socio-political balkanizing to take place in a democratic culture like the United States. Victim culture encourages their development. It actually increases anxiety and depression and paranoia. That does create a chilling effect on spontaneity, creativity, and civility. You literally will start to have people who are training themselves to think, if you've ever thought in Facebook statuses, which I know I have, you're like, you're walking around and you're like, wow, that would be a good Facebook status or whatever. And you'RE like looking at things He's like, I could take a picture of that, put it on Facebook.

0:37:08 Guest: So you're thinking in terms of like social reward for your, your, your action. If you get social reward. For promoting how you were victimized that day, you can already see what's going to happen. You're in. And if you can get social award for telling on, you know, you won't believe this huge offensiveness thing I saw today. And you can document that, or you can promote it. It actually encourages a mindset where I'm not saying it's equivalent to the secret police, but it is a slope that has been demonstrated to be slippery. If you wonder how the secret Police came about, it is because of that exact kind of mentality. Hey, tell on your neighbors. Hey tell on neighbors. Once the authority that you're appealing to, the institutionalized authority that your appealing to gains enough power, that's exactly what happens.

0:37:56 Guest: That's how that occurs. I'm not saying that's what's occurring now. I am saying that is how that occurs and so a a victim culture is a stepping stone in that direction on a slope that has been demonstrated to have a lot of slipperiness. You don't have to slide down a slippery slope. It's just slick. You also outsource your social control mechanisms, which stunts the developmental phase of emerging adulthood. So it's bad for individuals. It tends to being bad for societies by balkanizing grievance, jockeying, uh, a chilling effect in, on, on speech and spontaneity. If if you're afraid that people around you are going to insult you, you have people who are afraid to go out in public. You have people qui are afraid to say anything lest they – I know as a straight white man, here's a reality of being a straight white man that I have to guard my words almost all the time extraordinarily carefully lest I offend anybody.

0:38:48 Guest: I'm not saying that this is necessarily a terrible thing. I think we should be a more kind and sensitive society. I say this all the time. Time. Kindness, sensitivity, and charity are what are needed. But the problem is that is still a chilling effect. You still have this idea of a creeping control. And I don't want to say over free speech because free speech in this case, we're really thinking of like legal free speech.

But again, once you end up with an institutionalized authority, like you have on university campuses where you have professors who are afraid for their jobs if they say the wrong thing. And, I know on this podcast in the past, you've said such professors need to suck it up, but that only demonstrates to me that you have never tried to get an academic job, you don't know what that environment is like because even 15 years ago the the competitiveness to get an academic job and the difficulty made it so that professors junior professors live in almost actual terror of student reviews and just student reviews, we're not talking about student complaints about them saying inappropriate things in class or something, like we're talking about negative student reviews, getting less than all fours out of five, which should be impossible on their teaching reviews at the end of the semester. And so they bend the way they teach specifically to it.

I mean, this is a very competitive environment and there are problems coming out of that too. So this is huge problem. When I say there are problem coming out, those are documented as well. You have Jenny Suk from Harvard, Alan Dershowitz from Harvard. I know he's a controversial figure. Eugene Volokh from UCLA, all reporting that in the profession of law, law, you have this major problem.

0:40:19 Guest: Kim Chimbompen wrote in the Chicago Kent Law Review last year about crisis and trigger warnings, reflections on legal education and the social value of law. I really want to bring her up because she advocates for trigger warnings which I don't think is a good idea. And Jenny Suk, Alan Dershowitz and Eugene Volokh as far as I can tell don't advocate for them. But the problem here is now you have documented cases. So

0:40:41 Thomas: Well, I think I want to butt in before we go off on another thing because it's been 15 minutes without letting you, like, go. Well,

0:40:44 Guest: Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Well, I want to, I wanted to really let you sort of talk because I think, well, first of all, I, I think what's fascinating is I completely agree with your diagnosis. I just disagree with the disease and I want To come back to, and I've been making notes on my post it as quietly as possible over here on my side. Um, I wanna go back to the idea of dignity culture. Cause I think that's so fascinating. And then the idea of egalitarianism, because what's fascinating about that is that those are both cultures where when you live in a position of absolute privilege, you would have no reason to complain. Dignity culture is easy when no one ever threatens your dignity, when no one ever questions whether or not you should be able to use the pronouns you want to use, when no one ever questions whether or not you're actually a rape victim, when no one ever questions whether or not you're the gender that you feel you are.

0:41:39 Guest: Dignity culture obviously works for us. Again, I've lived in dignity culture my entire life because no one has ever questioned my humanity.

0:41:48 Guest: What's interesting is, yes, when it comes to an egalitarian space, that is when those groups can speak up, just as an abused wife needs to make sure that she can get herself out of the situation of abuse before she can talk about saying mean things, right? So for instance, you know, I would never put my hand, never have, and I would never would put my hands on my fiance, which means that because we're in that egalitarian thing, if I'm snippy over breakfast, she can be like, "What are you doing?" Right? So while I completely agree with everything you're saying informationally, I think your diagnosis is totally wrong. And I think what we're seeing is we're saying in these egalitarian environments, a generation of LGBT, minority, and otherwise oppressed students being bad and harmful ideas for the first time.

0:42:39 Guest: And the previous generation, as it always has, as it did in the 60s, as it did in the 50s, diagnosing the next generation as oversensitive. So while I completely agree with pretty much everything you said about what's going on, I would disagree about why it's going on. And I would say that what I would, uh, I, I hear what you're saying. I don't, I'm, I don't know about culture. I don't claim to know about culture. I'm quoting from the literature. And so Campbell and Manning wrote exactly this, right? It isn't In settings such as those that generate microaggression catalogs, though, where there are the oppressed, it also raises the moral status of the victims. This only increases the incentive to publicize grievances, and it means the aggrieved parties are especially likely to highlight their identity as victims, emphasizing their own suffering and innocence.

0:43:34 Guest: Their adversaries are labeled privileged and blameworthy, while they themselves are pitiable and blameless. So when you bring up the idea that there's this privilege concept, they explain where that comes from. And what we're debating here is the value of two different moral cultures. One is a culture of dignity and one is a culture of victimhood. And what I'm trying to clarify is – we'll get to it. I'm sorry, I'm going to -- let me interrupt you. I'm saying that a culture is superior in terms of outcome for individuals in the society itself to a culture or victimhood, and so what we should be trying to do and what social justice activists should be trying to do is trying to find ways to steer away from a culture of victimhood into a culture of dignity and to achieve the benefits for the people without relying on victimhood to do it.

0:44:20 Guest: And I have a perfect example for you. It is, I've talked about this on this podcast, which you'll probably have listened to at this point and will think is very controversial, about the gay pride movement. Now, I disagree with the name, as I've mentioned, but I don't disagree with the ethos. It could have been called Gay is Gay, which I think is a really freaking creative name because gay means happy. It also means like I'm gay being myself. And it's a beautiful name.

It could have been called the Gay is Gay movement instead of Gay Pride movement, whatever. This was a movement of dignity. And when you think of gay rights and the struggle for gay rights, it is the first thing you think of. It is gay pride. You think of gays having LBG, not T, because sort of T, it wasn't quite there yet, um, historically speaking, although nobody was really, I don't think the the LBGT community emerging was was that evil to to to trans, um, but they were specifically LB and G at that point, primarily.

The gay pride movement, as it was coming, was one where they were going out and, instead of asserting their status as victims, they were asserting their status as proud, as as dignified human beings. They were making themselves visible via dignity. And the result is that they now are almost at the very fringes of the enemy on the forefront of social justice. You have the exclusion of not just cis straight white, cis hetero or whatever white males, but also gay males are being excluded now because, "Oh yeah, we've heard your story. Move on. You guys, guys have lots of privilege now, too."

0:45:51 Guest: In fact, you can get away with murder. You can do things that even straight people can't do -- more privilege or, you know, or whatever, because gays have become more accepted. And the reason they became accepted was because they promoted themselves via a culture of dignity. And the culture of unity does not set itself up for these problems that are reliably follow from a culture or victimhood. So I'm not saying that people shouldn't shouldn't be able to voice their feelings. I'm saying that if they're using a culture where victimhood has – so victimhood always has some moral currency. But where it becomes the dominant moral currency, you But James, this is actually a perfect example. This is why I want to jump in with you here because dignity requires – a culture of dignity by its very nature, the capacity to ignore slights against oneself, requires the privilege to be able to ignore those slights.

0:46:40 Guest: But that's the point. Every adult has that, that every anti-gay advocate at the time before gay rights made it to where it is and today identified gay rights as a victim culture. You still hear it today when you open up Breitbart and someone talks about how gays don't want rights, they want more rights. They make themselves victims, etc., etc. I mean you hear them talking about gay rights in terms of – you hear people who are – you cite their – you cite their people that are trying to motivate a particular group in a highly partisan way to be against it. Yeah, but they're – the gay pride movement, by its very name and their – if I say gay rights movement in 1990s, the first thing – I guarantee you the first things that comes to your mind is the gay rights parade. Is it?

Well, actually the first think that comes in my mind is Stonewall Inn, but – OK, so but is it possible, though, to think for maybe five minutes these parades where gay people being like, you know, screw it, I'm sick of being told that I'm not good enough. I'm going to go have a parade and be frickin' fabulous. And that's what we're going to do. And but you understand that before that, they needed Stonewall. Gay pride parade doesn't happen before Stonewall. Stonewall is the quote-unquote culture of victimhood. And again, I encourage anybody listening to this to go back and listen to the anti-gay rights moderators and speakers during Stonewall, because it's exactly this categorization.

You're right, gay rights has moved forward enough that they can now have a culture of dignity in certain places, right? Gay rights moved forward enough, it's a mainstream enough that it's now a culture of dignity largely, but the first thing that needed to happen was riots, and again read any of the right quote unquote.

0:48:22 Guest: Riots are not necessarily a culture of victimhood. Asserting yourself as a victim and making wide publications to third party authorities and outsourcing your moral dependence is a culture of victim hood. If they -- they weren't going to get currency, not much currency by asserting themselves -- they got some, but not much -- in a hostile culture is by asserting themselves as victims. What we have now, according to Black's model of moral sociology, is we have a society that's already egalitarian, tolerant, and sensitive enough, inclusive enough. It has to reach a critical threshold or a culture of victimhood cannot arise. We already have one that's far enough along where I I can't guarantee you, but I'm almost positive that if people took their movement, the social justice movement took its various cases and presented itself as a movement of dignity.

0:49:14 Guest: And I mean, I would the semantic argument or whatever about pride aside, dignity and pride that they would they would have detractors. They would have people yelling. They would have Breitbart still be losing its mind, and Fox News would make fun of them. But the thing is, is those people are relatively easy to ignore. It's why, for instance, I find it very easy to ignore conservatives, but the social justice left drives me nuts. So, James, I just I just want us both to acknowledge here that we all know that what happens is first there's a culture, what you would call a culture of victimhood. What I would say is speaking up in an egalitarian environment when it comes to Jim Crow laws in the the 1950s, when it comes to freeing the slaves with the amendment. I mean, there's always been a moment where someone goes, ah, they're just, you know, they're making themselves victims.

0:50:00 Guest: I mean, you could read speeches from the 1950s and 1960s. I recommend reading any of Reagan's anti-Vietnam protester speeches to hear how similar they are to anti-social justice speakers today. It's always the same pattern. You point to a group of people that has now reached a level of of egalitarianism enough to speak out against the other smaller slights which they endure. And you say, "That's a culture of victimhood. They've gone too far. Everybody's too PC nowadays." That's not what I'm talking about. But that's exactly, I'm not saying that's what you're talking about, I'm telling you that's not exactly what I mean. That's what I am saying is that there are demonstrated problems with evolving a culture of victim hood.

And a culture victim hood is one that has placed its primary moral currency in victimhood and oppression as opposed to using it as -- no, no, no, because victimhood, I just said it a minute ago, always has moral currency, and if you are a victim you, in all cultures, accept very hard honor cultures where it's frowned upon, in cultures of dignity you, it happens, people say, "Hey, look, you guys are victimizing me," and if it's bad enough you appeal to authorities and this is all fine, but when you are primary -- I'm sorry, I want to stop you on that, I want to point out that every time you just said that's all fine.

And so you agree that even in cultures of dignity, at some point, someone has to step up and say, "Hey, you are victimizing me." And I just want to acknowledge that every time that happened has happened throughout history.

0:51:31 Guest: They might not have used the term culture of victimhood, because that's a relatively new term, but they have turned around and said something along the lines of, "That's too far. That's too much. Enough is enough. You've gotten what you've gotten." And they've immediately started to say you can't ask for X, Y, Z that way. Way. What I would propose to you is that what you're seeing with this quote-unquote culture of victimhood is simply a generation that is done talking about solved questions. That's where no platforming comes in. It's a generation done having arguments about solved question. It's a generation ... no, no, no. It's the generation that's done having conversations that they assume are done because the social circumstances change constantly. We all agree that there are certain questions that are solved.

0:52:18 Guest: And we, and people in positions of privilege and power – and I'm jumping forward a bit, so feel free to drag me right back. But people in position of privilege in power always decide that the decisions that they think are still undecided are worthy of talking about, like the gender wage pay gap or rape culture or whether or not Milo should speak at a university. You know, whatever it might be, trans rights. There's a million things today that yesterday we all now agree, "OK, you know what, Holocaust denial, we don't need to hear from them." When James teaches his class, we don't hear from Terry. I'm going to bring, bring up an example because this happened just a couple of years ago when the Westboro Baptist Church kind of hit its little pinnacle and they were protesting the funerals all over the place.

0:53:03 Guest: Everybody was morally outraged by this, as is probably correct to be. The president, Obama, was forced to make a statement about this. And one of the things that they were talking about proposing was a limit to protests that you couldn't do so within 200 feet or yards of a funeral. And this was denied on free speech grounds. So there is no substantial argument that says, you know, we shouldn't allow somebody like Milo to speak on a university. Why not? If he's wrong, that should be easy to demonstrate. Hearing the ideas should be an opportunity to refute them, not a – that's an argument that you hear quite a bit. And the problem is that you've actually already, and we've all universally, drawn lines for what we want to hear.

0:53:52 Guest: And there's a difference between being exposed to ideas and giving ideas equal time and space or any amount of respect that they don't deserve. And I use Holocaust denial as an example. Holocaust denial is very important, right? It's good that we teach it in history class, right, we should -- we should have a part of a Holocaust course or a Holocaust section where we say, and by the way, there's this group of people who we all know are wrong and crazy. And they think this, rather than just saying, okay, we're going to have someone come up who's a expert about the Holocaust. And then we have David Icke on the other side, who's going to tell you that the lizards faked it. And, you know, because the problem that comes from that, the problem that comes from that even though it's a very silly example is that -- it is a very silly example, of course -- throwing, throwing all the information at the wall and letting what sticks stick doesn't work.

0:54:46 Guest: It's why Trump's going to be the Republican nominee -- exposure to information. If expo -- all it took was exposure to information, um, then we'd be fine. Then everyone would be smart and would be right about everything. A university's job is to filter information. That's what education is. It's not just to present information, it's to filter information as well, which is why you teach math and not teleology, right? And you don't think teleology needs its due. You don't want to have a speech by Terrence Howard at your university, right? The purpose of a university is to, this is well established. Going back to the Authentica Habita in 1155, the Magna Charta Universitatum from the 80s, papers from the 1930s by Samuel Alexander, the statement within the American Psychological Association.

0:55:40 Guest: The purpose of a university is almost universally recognized, but the Yale University statement of academic freedom of expression all say the same thing. The purpose of a university is to create prepared minds. And so a prepared mind needs to be able to understand why Mr. Icke with his lizard, lizard Holocaust denial is wrong. They -- whether the university wants to have -- whether whether some student group, whether anybody is willing to invest in bringing such a person to the university to speak is another matter. If somebody is willing to bring a speaker to campus and this person is not generating the kinds of speech that are not protected or that don't directly violate some law and some group has sponsored that person to come speak, then that speaker can speak.

0:56:37 Guest: That's all there is to it. And then if that person is wrong, it is an opportunity to engage with their arguments and to defeat them. It is an opportunity to hold a protest without disrupting the talk at the same time outside. It is a peaceable protest. It is the opportunity to write a scathing rebuttal in the campus newspaper the next day or a scathing rebuttal and submit it to the New York Times the next day. It is opportunity to take that idea and shame it on its face. To say that somebody who, let's say it's an outright racist or white supremacist, to say that such a person can't speak. David, I don't care who it is. To say that such a person can't speak is to imply that the people don't have the capacity to see why their arguments are wrong.

0:57:23 Guest: Well, let me ask you a question because I want to show you the other side of this thought process. I want to expose you to it. And I want to say – I've said it on this show before, but I want to say I don't believe in no platforming because I'm a scrapper. I want to fight everybody. I'm like, yeah, bring Milo on. I'll talk to Milo. I'll write a scathing this. I'll write a scathing that. But that's, again, because I am in a position of privilege. My humanity is not being questioned. My question for you is, is it in any way part of a university's job to filter the information that is given on their campus and when they allow someone like Milo, who calls trans people mentally ill, who denies rape culture, who denies the wage gap, who has said – I mean, I could go on and on about Milo. He's my favorite subject in the world. Isn't it a university's job to not turn the volume up on voices like that instead to direct students towards truth?

0:58:17 Guest: I don't think so. I think it's the university's job to give that opportunity for students to engage with that. But maybe this is a matter of opinion.

0:58:26 Guest: Because I don't think that those – I want to say – I want to be very clear and I'm going to get a million tweets anyways from people who disagree with me. But I want say I have absolutely no problem with being exposed to terrible ideas. You know, I read David Ickel's books, A, because I'm a masochist, and B, because I wanted to have a full grasp of the crazy. But I read it in the context of having a proper training in anatomy, history, etc. If my father had just said, here's Howard Zinn, and here's David Ickle, figure out history, I or my high school had done that, it's not telling me the right way. It's not educating me. How stupid do you think college students are and their professors? Well, they seem to be stupid enough to continually invite someone like Milo back to their university to deliver really malicious, dehumanizing lies.

0:59:18 Guest: So, I mean, that's how stupid, you know, and a college needs to take a little bit of the credit for that. You know, they'll invite a Holocaust denier. They'll invite, I means, we can talk about people that we agree on. You know, there are, I'm sure we can find a college group that would happily invite David Ickel, you know, and have him come and speak at a university. And the reason why we all universally agree that teach-the-controversy in elementary schools and in schools in general is entirely inane is because part of education is filtering information. I mean, you don't believe in teach the controversy, right? I believe in teaching controversies where controversies exist. Oh, sorry. Sorry, I meant teach the controversy about evolution, the creationist catchphrase. Like teach the controversy, where people are like, we should teach evolution and creationism in the schools. Okay, so frankly, this

1:00:06 Thomas: Isn't this a distinction between hiring a teacher who's pro, you creationism versus allowing a speaker to come because a group requested them? I

1:00:15 Guest: Is the distinction between that, yes. So the difference is when you as a university- This is the description between a math professor deciding to go off about politics or about Zionism for five classes instead of covering calculus. Right. So the, the difference, and look, I want to say that like, again, I'm talking about, I'm I'm talking about what a university implicitly condones by allowing certain speakers, right?

We have to be aware that when a university says, yes, Milo is worth inviting, this club has asked Milo to come and we are going to give him a space and he's going to speak and he is going to take a Q&A and it's going be well attended, etc., etc., they are implicitly saying what he has to say has value.

And the fact that there happen to be enough people at this point in time who want to hear Milo to university the way that 50 years ago, there might happen to me enough people who wanted to invite a KKK member or a Holocaust denier does not make their, what they have to say any more worthy of our attention. And as institutes of education, we just like teach the contra, we all agree teach the controversy is ridiculous. No, actually no. No, teaching creationism is ridiculous. Teaching the controversy is a brilliant idea. Right, but you would never say, for instance, that elementary schools should have their teacher who's not a creationist, who teaches biology, and then in the middle of the year, a pastor comes in and teaches, you know, gives a lecture on creationism.

I mean, this seems to me that you don't actually know how teacher curriculum works. When you're hired to teach biology, especially at the high school level, it's delineated exactly what course material you're supposed to cover. And so your job is to cover the course material you are -- you are paid to cover.

1:01:59 Guest: Specific course material. When I taught, uh, calculus last, the job was you are to cover these exact topics in calculus. That's what my job was. But I'm talking about, I didn't decide what in calculus I was going to teach. I was. Maybe it's different when you're a tenured professor, but by then you've proven yourself. I want to point out I'm the child of two tenured professors, so I, I know the universe. I'm, I'm talking about why we agree that that would be a bad idea, right? We would be – we know how teaching – I don't think it's a bad idea to invite – if there is a student group that will invite a speaker and fund it and that speaker is not saying anything illegal, then the matter is a simple one. You either go to the talk or you don't. If you go, then you are engaging with those ideas and you may agree with them or not agree with him.

1:02:48 Guest: But by the time you enter a university, remind -- I'll remind you, you are now old enough to be drafted to war if the country were to need to reinstate a draft. And if you're a man, you've signed up for it. And the Republicans just actually and women soon, maybe, maybe I don't think it'll fly. But at any rate, yes, women soon. You're old enough. My point is, so so you would actually agree with like an elementary school having a biology class. No, I just said a university. Oh, so it has to be at a university level. So at a university level, the experience of education stops being about filtering information and putting information in context, which, again, I'm never against presenting information. I'm talking about filtering it correctly. I'm not talking about a class. I'm talking about a student group or another group on campus inviting a speaker with particular views one way or another.

1:03:35 Guest: This is different from covering material in a classroom. In a classroom, the job is to cover the material that the department has decided is the appropriate material for that course. You get some flexibility and leeway when you get to the upper division courses and then you get into graduate school. But those courses at that point are dealing with people who have matured to the college mindset already for a few years. My question for you is, when does education stop being about filtering information or presenting information in a term of what is true and what is not true? And when does education become about throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks? Because we both know and we both agree that throwing everything wall, we got a question. I'm going to answer the question.

1:04:21 Guest: The question I'm going to answer it, not in my words, but by reading directly from Yale's website, Yale's commitment to freedom of expression means that when you agree to matriculate, you join a community where the provocative, the disturbing and the unorthodox must be tolerated. When you encounter people who think differently than you do, you will be expected to honor their free expression even when what they have to say seems wrong and offensive to you. That's the statement at Yale for what is expected once you say, hey, I'm a Yale student. Once you agree to matriculate, you join a community where that, including the disturbing, the wrong, and the the offensive are to be tolerated and engaged as academic topics.

1:05:06 Guest: And James, all I'm asking you to acknowledge is that as two white guys, we have never, ever had to be, have our, we've never had to have our humanity questioned. Really? Why haven't? So, like, sorry, I should say -- you're right. So for instance, when I go and I see the promotion of a particular, very fringe feminist who says that all men should be locked up in an institution used for breeding purposes only and going to have no rights, or all men should be exterminated once we figure out how to make babies without men by using genetic engineering. I don't have my particular, I don't have my personal humanity diminished. And should I want that person speaking at a university? If they're qualified enough to be invited by a serious group to speak, which qualifications do matter. If they're qualified enough, they're going to be able to speak. And if they're not, they'll be invited by the serious group.

1:05:52 Guest: If they do not, then yes, bring them. Let me engage with those ideas. Let me take them on. Let -- I think bad ideas should be platformed all over the place because -- because sunshine kills them. When you expose rot to the light, that's how you figure out that it's rotten, get rid of it. So this person, literally this person exists. I'm not making this person up. This isn't a made up person. This person, I don't know. I don't know. But the point is that this person is, is, is vastly more offensive, vastly more offensive to the humanity of all men. And some of these people are even offensive to the notion of straight women. So when they say that all sex is a contrivance by the patriarchy, a trick on women, all heterosex is a contrivance or is rape.

1:06:37 Guest: This is denying the humanity of heterosexual women as well. So these are people that are vastly more denying of the humanity of people. Whether or not they have been invited to a university is immaterial. They could be. If there was a group that was serious enough and bringing their ideas to light to bring them, then I'm saying, yes, bring that person to the university. And if I don't, if I'm at that university and I don't want to go to that damn talk because she's insane, I'm not going to go. And I want to engage with it. Then I'm going to go. So I know you're talking about now and I DON'T remember her name. She's -- but she's -- I -- she wears the giant overalls every time she speaks. And I know exactly who you're talking about, but first of all, not only does she represent a huge outlier, but if she were invited to... That's beyond the pale. Whether or not she is an outlier is whether or not she should be allowed to speak is the question.

1:07:23 Guest: You have to talk, but the reason is you have to talk. The reason I bring that up, the fact that she's such an outlier is in order, we as white, sorry, I shouldn't say we, I should say I. I, as a white man, my entire experience through college never underwent the experience of having her speak. And in fact, we had to go with her, right?

We had to reach really far, really far into the extreme because she's also said, crazy stuff like the vagina should be sewn shut and the man. We don't have to go very far to the extreme to find people who do this to social conservatives or Christians. We don't have to go anywhere near the extreme to find people who do this to social conservatives and Christians. I DON'T KNOW HOW MANY BLUE COLLAR.

I know you're from Binghamton, but I don't know how much blue collar, blue-collar social conservative libertarians that you know, but I'm friends with a large number of them and they feel like their humanity is denied every day by pretty much what amounts to mainstream feminism, if you want to know what they think of mainstream feminism.

1:08:19 Guest: Now, I'm not talking about feminism in the sense of the dictionary definition that 85% of the population agrees with. I'm talking about what they see as -- what they think of as mainstream feminism, which we have agreed is something of a fringe. They feel like their humanity – you can see, there you go. They're wrong. There we go. Okay, they're wrong, their humanity doesn't matter. No, no, no. I didn't say their humanity does matter. We just, I just wanted to clarify, we agree that their definition of, of feminism is wrong. So what they think they're being attacked by is incorrect. When they see a feminist, be that a man or a woman stand up and say things like all men are rapists, they have their humanity diminished too. And the social justice movement does not acknowledge this unless the group is is one of the ones that has got favored victim status.

1:09:11 Guest: This is why, and this is well documented, this is why when you have a culture of victimhood, you have a diminishing majority of people who are seeing themselves not as victims because each group wants to gain the special privileges, the special rights, the special ability to speak and be represented that being victimized confers. This is an ethic of victimhood. If you are a victim, you have more right to speak than other people. But aren't your libertarian friends who are saying they're being victimized by feminists also engaging in a culture of victimhood? I didn't say they're being victimized. I just said that their humanity is being reduced. No, they said their humanity is being denied. Isn't that a culture of victimhood? Well, they don't subscribe to victimhood because they think victimhood is weak, so they don't do it.

1:09:59 Guest: So no, they are not using victimhood as their moral currency. They're saying that, they say literally in their words, that's bullshit. But the trans people say the same thing. They say my humanity is being denied. They don't say, I mean, maybe some of them say I'm a victim, but you brought these people up men's rights activists and your average blue collar guy are not the same people. Men's rights activists are the people who have gone into the victimhood culture with the same point of view. And you just pointed out repeatedly that you hate these people. So maybe not hate in that sense, but you know what I mean? I did not say, hey, okay, fine. You say you hate this. But if I were to say, If I were to say right now, well, when I talk about men, if I were to say, you know, men are sexist pigs who harass women and rape them and are murder, horrible pieces of garbage and what are you talking about?

1:10:45 Guest: I would go, well you should know I'm talking about the very, very small percentage of misogynists. You should have had, you should have not thought that I meant something bad. You should have assumed that I mean something good. And what's interesting is you just told me that about you. And yet you have these feminists on the other side who are making the same generalizations, James, and you don't give them the benefit of the doubt. Eli, I give everybody the benefit of the doubt. I don't know how you've missed it. So those feminists that say all men are rapists, the benefit of the Dout, they only mean men who are rapests. Yes, I gave them the benefit of the doubt in the sense that I want to know what the hell they mean when they say something like that, and then take what they mean on its face and decide if what it is makes sense. Yes, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.

1:11:30 Guest: When you use them as an example? The benefit of doubt means that maybe they meant something other than that horrible thing they just said. That's exactly what the benefit of the doubt means. Right, but you didn't just use them as an example as someone who gives them the benefit of the doubt. No, I said that they are a group of people who engage in speech that denies or diminishes the humanity of another group of human beings based on intrinsic characteristics or creed.

But James, we both just agreed that if I said that about you, that would be – and I'm not, by the way. Eli, I'm almost positive you've missed the point completely. No, but I'm trying to point this out.

James, if I said that about you, right, if I said James denies the humanity of other people because of the trans information that he put out there or because of the anti-feminist tweets he put out there, we just went over the fact that you would say to me, you should have taken the time and given me the benefit of the doubt. Out. Now you're turning around and doing the exact same thing to these feminists. No, I'm not. I'm bringing them up as an example -- I'm bringing up, in fact, the men as an example of people who have their identity brought into question, their humanity brought into question, by a set of speech that actually isn't no-platformed. This is a set of speech that is given. Now the libertarian movement, if it's characterized by freaking anything, is certainly not accepting victimhood as a piece of moral currency.

That's not what they're after. They, most of them, suck it up, ignore it, and just write those people off. They don't listen to them anymore. Libertarians, for the most part, are upper middle class to middle class white men. What are you talking about? They are not.

1:13:09 Guest: Upper middle class. Like I just asked you, how many blue collar social conservatives do you know? I know a tremendous amount. I grew up in upstate New York. Yes, I know. Binghamton. Yeah, I know Binghamton. I've been there. I'm sorry. I also am from upstate New York, as it turns out. Where? Messina. All the way upstate, you loser. Oh, you win. Yeah. All the way. A. So Messina people get the joke, A.

1:13:37 Guest: Yeah, so yeah, it's Canada. So anyway, the point that I'm trying to make is that more than one group denies people's humanity, but you will not find a libertarian who's trying to prevent those people from speaking anywhere. That's the whole point of libertarianism. The question isn't whether or not there exists a group or a statement or a person or a viewpoint that diminishes somebody's humanity and whether or not that needs to be attended to or brought up with more kindness, sensitivity and charity.

The question is whether or not that person should be blocked from speaking, whether that person is, we can just conclude that what their point of view is, is immaterial. Entrepreneurial, and like I said, the group of those, not necessarily libertarians, but the group of men who have their humanity diminished who then act in a culture of victimhood are exactly the people you call men's rights activists. That everything you hate about men's right activism is what you hateabout victimhood culture except you can't see it when it's your own own side, because as Jonathan Height wrote in the Righteous Mind, morality binds and blinds, it blinds you to the fact that it happens in reverse. And we can talk forever, although it's it's at this point ridiculous to keep going too long about structural racism and structural sexism and the differences there.

Those are, are, aren't important concepts, but the difference that I would lay between the difference, that I wouldn't lay between men's rights activism as an example, or anything between X and Y is the world that we live in. Again, we live in a world of bathroom bills. We live in a world of anti-gay bills and don't make cake.

1:15:08 Guest: And we live live in a world where these things are repeatedly just completely shut down. These things lose, like they win temporarily and they lose and then they lose again and then I lose again. That doesn't mean that, but that's why, that's way the complaint we live in, the MRA's makes so little sense, you know. Every every valid complaint of a men's right, of a feminist, sexual feminism, and and the complaints of a feminist who think all sex is rape are also completely to be ignored, but they're not. There are people that are invited to speak at universities on this exact kind of topic. And this diminishes people's humanity as well. What I'm saying is this diminisches somebody's humanity is not a sufficient reason to bar somebody from speaking in a public forum.

1:15:55 Guest: If there is somebody who thinks they're credentialed enough, legitimately credentialed, enough to give a speech and they haven't engaged in a legal speech. And now we're talking about speaking to adults who are are at a facility that is among the safest kind of facility in terms of physical threat and mostly in terms of even mental and emotional threat, safest kind of facility on the planet, a western university is. And these people are facing these problems in an environment that they signed up for intentionally in order to grow intellectually and emotionally. And so I cannot stand with any point of view other than bring them on, these adults who are trying to become better thinkers and more prepared minds need to deal with being more prepared minds.

1:16:40 Guest: This is how you do it. That's how we do it because we're in a position of privilege. I think people have a right to occasionally step forward and say, no, I would not like yet another speaker at this university who questions my humanity, just as I think it would be perfectly fair for men or blue-collar people to step forward to say, yes, any feminist who wants to come come to the university and say, all men are rapists or all men should be kept in cages and used only for breeding, has no position in a university. There's no place for that dialogue in a university. We don't teach teriology and we don't need to hear from her about why you and I need to be kept in cages and milked on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There was a pretty big difference yet again, between teaching and letting a student group invite a speaker to present a speech to people that voluntarily attend it or don't. Yeah.

1:17:34 Thomas: Think we need to either move on or figure out what we want to do. I think you guys both

1:17:39 Guest: I Agree, I agree with you actually, Thomas. Yeah, thank you.

1:17:52 Thomas: Well, there you have it. Part 2. Part 3, which is Trigger Warnings, will be on Monday. Now, if you would like to hear that right away, don't forget you can go to patreon.com/atheist. And it appears as though I have a lot of impatient listeners, and that's a good thing, because I'd like to welcome to Patreon Sean Barber. Thank you, Brian Manzoli. Thank You, Kristinn Theodorsson. Sorry if I mispronounce any names. Thank you. Thank Michael Jones, Simon Tanner, Mike Paps, Cock Ness Monster. I like -- I like when people have funny names on Patreon. It's kind of funny. It makes it all -- makes it all fun to say. Thank you, Cockness Monster. Thank you, Mick. Thank you, Reese, Jason. Thank you, graydingo, Sylvia Brenner, Ian Rozzano, WarBanjo, Ross Balmer, Jon, Sean Pitty, Gruff Thomas, Hugh Hansen, and Lumber.

1:18:43 Thomas: Lumber, that's an interesting one. Thank you to the inanimate object, Lumber, and then of course I gotta thank my all-time greats. That's Al Lehman from the Inciting Incident Podcast, Kaylee Reiser, Zimu Zinu Jr., Adrian Borshoff, Jonathan Moyet, Jay Aldenwalt, Bangs Naughty Bits, Peter Skelton, Brian Gearford, Dale, Matt Garrett, Ian Rozzano, and Lizzie. Thank you guys so much for pledging. It is very much appreciated. Makes the show go round, as I like to say. So you can find part three right away, and if not, that's okay. It'll be out Monday for you. Thanks so much again to Eli and James for a very, very thoughtful and fascinating debate. I'll see you next time.