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The Weinstein Brothers

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Brett Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and his brother Eric is a mathematician; their combined IQ is about 854. Both men describe themselves as progressives, but both have been thrust into the spotlight after clashes with the authoritarian left in American academia.
If you don’t already know Brett Weinstein’s story, you should google ‘Evergreen State College – Brett Weinstein’. Once you’ve absorbed the surreal madness of that, the things he’s saying here will make sense.
This is a free-ranging conversation covering, among other things, education, economics, politics, evolution and drug-testing; it is just the sort of thing that television can’t (or won’t) do. Thank goodness that the internet allows us easy access to challenging ideas.
Even if you don’t watch the whole thing, you should fast forward to the last five minutes, when Eric provides the most succinct summary of how a thinking person ought to orient herself /himself within the realm of political ideas. I don’t think I have heard a more simple or eloquent statement on topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmXq97do-tQ

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  2. Thanks for posting this Raymond. I’ll give it all a listen later, but that last part about the three axes is very good, as you say. Eric is a bit intense, isn’t he?

    Seems to me a lot of time and effort goes into disparaging the views of others rather than stress-testing one’s own, and sometimes ideologies dictate morality rather than the other way round. I’ve seen this in a politically-active (i.e. shouting indignantly on Facebook) friend’s very different reactions to the President’s Club (every man there should be named, shamed and sacked) and the Oxfam abusers (you can’t damn the whole aid sector for the human frailty of a few).

  5. American politics bewilders and frightens me. Nobody is actually listening, are they. It seems that those opinions expressed in public arrive fully formed from an extreme point of view and are not amenable to reason.

    Listening to those Weinstein brothers, I feel they speak a different language to me. I struggle to relate to them. Besides, I don’t buy that they are polymaths. They may well be geniuses in their respective fields but their intellect does not make them experts on everything, no matter how loquacious their beautifully formed sentences are. I certainly don’t feel a desire to rally to their cause, whatever that might be. My attention drifted over the three hours, I confess, but apart from an absolute faith in logic, analysis and free speech, I couldn’t tell you what the fuss is about. I just think real human beings are far more messy, which may well explain better what is going on at Evergreen.

    • I did get the impression that the pair of them are not very well-socialised beings. I don’t think they relate very well, or see much need to relate, to ordinary people.
      There were some very interesting ideas expressed and some that I agreed wholeheartedly with, but it’s all a bit theoretical and in the intellectual realm they seemingly inhabit.
      I also got a strong whiff of self-justification and obfuscation in Brett Weinstein’s interpretation of the furore he has become embroiled in. In that discussion there seemed to be some careful skirting around what was actually said at the time by all of the participants.
      And the brothers seeming warm, fuzzy acceptance of the friendly overtures of the Right-Wing demagogues, given merely on the basis of the brothers rejection of the faults of the left, was rather troubling.

  6. Gah, it’s all too hard. Weinstein was naive in his reading of the situation; having a brain the size of a planet doesn’t necessarily stop you being stupid, indeed it quite likely encourages it in circumstances like this. He allowed an understandable bubble of irritation to escalate into a shitstorm, and the burgeoning anti-racism industry (for want of a better word) must occasionally seem burdensome to an academic schooled in the European tradition as I assume he was. But allowing himself to be interviewed by Tucker Carlson was a catastrophic misjudgment, and the consequences were plain to see – not least becoming the Right’s poster boy.

    But I found that HuffPost piece persuasive. It makes complete sense that the alt-right should be targeting liberal arts institutions where there are so many buttons to be pressed so easily – the process has begun in the UK too, as we have seen recently. A few minority students with a grievance is all it takes, and they won’t be hard to find.

    But there’s racism, and there’s RACISM. Woolly liberals comme moi like to think of ourselves as non- and anti-racist, but it’s easy to be brought up short when the unavoidable consciousness of racial difference trips us up. If I complain about my Gujarati neighbour’s curry smells, am I merely suffering from a situation cognate with barking dogs or loud house music at 2am, or am I being racist (or, as our erstwhile colleague would have said, way-cist)? It’s certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that I might be accused of such. RACISM, for the avoidance of doubt, is sending hateful frothy-mouthed messages threatening violence and death to Black female academics.

    As I said, it’s all too hard. I do know that the rise of the alt-right, with its toxic brew of highly intelligent and effective manipulators and angry people with utes and shotguns, is the most frightening political development of my lifetime. It’s absolutely necessary to disparage their views at every opportunity. In my opinion alt-right is the horse; antifa is the cart. How I long for the days when all we had to worry about was Thatcher and Reagan.

    • I agree. It’s the polarisation of politics I find most terrifying. Every view is taken to an extreme. Weinstein disagreed with the day of absence on principle and ended up being displayed as a white supremacist, which he clearly isn’t. There seems to be only extreme right & left and nothing in the middle. It’s everywhere. The middle ground in UK politics has pretty much collapsed. Even here in my locality, I am witnessing far worse behaviour than the Militant Tendency in the eighties.

      I hope there is some kind of peaceful swing back to sense soon, but that seems a forlorn hope at the moment.

    • An Up from me, too, Mike. And an Up for TL, re the messiness of humans. Messiness and nuance aren’t permitted by tribalists (Antifa and the alt-right), and that’s a huge problem right now with the echo-chamber aspect of the inter web.

    • Thanks chaps. Raymond set the bar pretty high today, on two fronts, and it’s nice to feel I had something to say on at least one of them.

      And: how odd that there should be two separate Weinstein media shitstorms. I wonder if Harvey has a brother?

  7. An excellent discussion, ladies and gents.

    Two observations I’d like to put to @mikethep.

    You say that Weinstein “allowing himself to be interviewed by Tucker Carlson was a catastrophic misjudgment and the consequences were plain to see – not least becoming the Right’s poster boy.”

    Weinstein’s view is that his world was being turned upside down, yet nobody was covering it or indeed showing any inclination to cover it; in that sense, Tucker Carlson threw him a lifeline. The subsequent mainstream coverage came in the wake of his Fox interview.
    And I can’t, for the life of me, see Brett Weinstein as a ‘poster boy for the right’ (in the way that, say, Milo Yiannopoulos clearly is).

    • I was being a bit glib, perhaps, in my choice of words. What I was getting at was Fox were the prompt for Breitbart and others to take an interest in someone apparently being denied his First Amendment rights and start unfurling the anti-antics banners. I still think going on Fox was a mistake, however ignored he was feeling.

        • Doesn’t that question presuppose the idea that he has a right to be listened to?

          I tend to agree with the idea that going on Carlson was a misstep; people, especially in America, will judge your message by the medium it came from. Rachel Maddow – automatically tagged as Liberal. Carlson is in the Bill O’Reilly slot and showing the same tendencies.

          Perhaps a better question is that if no-one is wanting to give you a platform except Tucker Carlson, perhaps there’s a problem.

          • Doesn’t everyone have a right to be listened to? And if not, if you can’t hear what he has to say, how would you know whether he had a right to say it?

            • Isn’t that the opposite of freedom of speech? Everyone should have the right to speak and everyone should have the right to not listen, Either of those not being the case is decidedly odd.

              You don’t honestly believe that do you?

              ps – I toyed with the idea of not replying thus making the most subtle joke ever. But it was just too subtle.

            • No, people have a right to speak. That in no way correlates to the right to be listened to.

              Your right doesn’t confer an equal obligation on me.

              In America, your right to speech is protected from infringement by the Government; it isn’t protected from private citizens, and it isn’t imposed on an unwilling audience.

              Isn’t that how it should work?

                • No. As I hoped I made clear in my earlier post, he absolutely has a right to speak.

                  Does someone have to give him a platform? No.
                  Does someone/people have to listen to him? No.

                  The only right is that to speech. To go beyond that places obligations on others, and that’s a step too far.

                  • I would suggest that when there are two sides to an argument, or two versions of the same set of events, there is an obligation to listen to both of them. Otherwise it would be very hard to form an objective opinion.

                    • It depends on context, doesn’t it?

                      In a court of law, we get the right to defend ourselves. That’s the right to be heard. It’s a legal and moral imperative.

                      If you’re in the pub and someone wants to explain to you that the moon is made of green cheese then you don’t have to listen to them. There’s no legal or moral imperative to do so.

                      The problem under discussion arises because some people are now very keen to treat anyone who even faintly disagrees with them as if they were trying to explain that the moon is made of green cheese. Which is a gesture of bad faith that only acts to the detriment of everyone involved. But also makes it a lot easier to navigate a complicated world without risking getting your robes dirty.

                    • Ain’t that the truth.

                      Somewhere between the day in court and the moon of cheese examples, there’s a context where someone who has been accused of being a racist says, actually I’m not a racist. And in that case I’d have thought the only response would be to say, go on then, we’re listening. That’s the right to be listened to.

                    • Nope. Couldn’t disagree more. No right for a platform or to listen. Even if what’s being said is absolutely correct, if someone doesn’t want to listen, they don’t have to. There are plenty of stupid people doing this every day. It is their right as is it their right to be stupid.

                    • There’s an anomaly here.
                      Under US law, you have a right to express yourself in order to put your point across. As long as it doesn’t fall foul of the various legally-defined exceptions.
                      But even if there are people who wish to hear you do just that, there is no right to be heard attached to your right of free speech. Unless you can prove, to the US legal standard (not even nearly the same as in the UK) that you have been slandered or libelled, in which case you have a right to redress.

                    • “I haven’t heard what you say, and I defend to the death my right not to listen to it”

                    • If I want to engage on a subject, I have an obligation to myself to inform myself as fully as I can.

                      It’s a hell of a stretch from that to him having a right to be heard – I can pick and choose my sources on either/any side of an argument. Insisting that there is a right to be heard strikes me as being a way of controlling an argument.

  8. I’m sorry if this fits a stereotype of the polorising nature of politics today but if you feel the need to go on Tucker Carlson because he “threw you a lifeline” you really are f***ed up aren’t you.

    • Isn’t this how politics works? You end up making an alliance because you are not making enough headway on your own. You either make a good decision or not. I suspect, long term, he made a poor decision going on a Tucker Carlson show. But others may differ.

  9. Personal niggles and pedantry are seldom argumentative hills worth dying on.

    There’s an Irish journalist, Kevin Myers, who’s schtick in trade for years was to be, for want of a better description, Jeremy Clarkson but with a rather nifty turn of phrase.

    Anyhoo, he was described on RTE some time back as a “holocaust denier” and he complained to the Broadcasting Authority about this portrayal, stating that, really, the original meaning of holocaust was death by intense fire and, well, what happened in WW2 was many things, but Jews weren’t killed by intense fire and, accordingly it shouldn’t be called a holocaust.

    Now he might, pedantically, have a point – rather like the person who picks you up for saying “decimate” when what you really meant, actually, was “obliterate”.

    Accordingly he wasn’t denying that a whole load of people were murdered but rather that the word used to describe the event was wrong.

    Once you’re explaining that sort of McGubbins, you’re on a hiding to nothing. You might be right. You might be entitled to state your point. But if insisting that such a point is one worth going out on a limb for, you’re an idiot. No matter how nifty your turn of phrase.

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