New Discourses

New Discourses
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Jan 26, 2021 • 1h 5min

How Not to Resolve the Paradox of Tolerance

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 17 Repressive Tolerance Series, Part 1 of 4 We live in a crazy world today that seems to have gone off the rails. That's because it is being driven by a broken logic, and, for all the flaws on the right, that broken logic is centered in the no-longer-tolerant left. The logic of the left today is overwhelmingly rooted in a single essay published in 1965 by the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. That essay is "Repressive Tolerance." The thesis statement of this essay can be boiled down to "movements from the left must be extended tolerance, even when they are violent, while movements from the right must not be tolerated, including suppressing them by violence." This asymmetric ethic has been the heart and soul of left politics in the West since the 1960s, and we're living in the fruit of that catastrophe now. To help people understand this vitally important and intrinsically totalitarian essay and its relevance to our present moment, James Lindsay walks the listener through Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" in a four-part lecture series. In this series, he reads the essay in full and attempts to make clear how it is the logic underlying the present moment. The goal is to explain the essay as Marcuse would have understood it, in his own context, and to show how his own logic has become dominant and the monster that he believed he was fighting. In the first part, Lindsay begins by framing the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory to give background on Marcuse. He also explains that Marcuse seems to be attempting to give a solution to Karl Popper's famous "Paradox of Tolerance," which was provided as an aside in his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, which analyzed how fascism can arise and overtake liberal societies. Marcuse's answer to this conundrum is that a "discriminating tolerance," a "liberating tolerance," must be practiced that offers favoritism to the left and actively suppresses the right, as he defines them (from a perspective of Critical Theory). Join Lindsay as he contextualizes and then brings the first portion of this essay to life, and stay tuned for Parts 2, 3, and 4 to come! Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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Jan 21, 2021 • 58min

Antonio Gramsci, Cultural Marxism, Wokeness, and Leninism 4.0

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 16 If you want to understand the present moment, especially how similar Wokeness seems to Mao's Cultural Revolution, you have to understand the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci wrote a series of essays and books while imprisoned by the Italian fascists in the 1920s and 1930s that are referred to as his Prison Notebooks. These are the birthplace of Cultural Marxism, which James Lindsay argues has evolved into "Identity Marxism" since. Once you understand Gramsci, you can easily understand what is going on with our society at present and understand more clearly than ever why it must be resisted. Though he didn't coin the term, the idea fellow communist Rudi Dutschke would name "the long march through the institutions" in 1967 is ultimately Gramsci's roadmap to getting communism to take hold in the West. Gramsci identifies that the "cultural hegemony" of Western cultures prevented communism from having any chance of taking root, so he recommended a strategy that seeks to tear apart and capture major cultural institutions, including religion, family, education, media, and law. Mao understood this clearly and used it to devastating effect. The same thing is happening throughout the West today. Join James Lindsay as he explains the thought and relevance of Antonio Gramsci in today's Woke movement, which he aptly brands "Leninism 4.0." Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 http://bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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Jan 13, 2021 • 1h 13min

The Birth of a New American Mythology

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 15 We are witnessing the birth of a new national mythology in America, and it is not good news. Imperfect as it was, the old one was better, warts and all, and it needs to be fought for. This new mythology turns the story of America on its head, positioning it not as having been born in the pursuit of freedom and liberty in 1776 but in slavery and evil in 1619. It has mainstreamed itself since the 1960s but especially over the last five years as it used Trump's presidency as a foil to legitimize its pseudo-real description of America for millions, and now it has gained the beginnings of cultural hegemony (which it is already abusing). This magic narrative has been and remains the key to their power. This new mythology is using its own narrative about Trump's presidency and, especially, the events that took place at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as a pivotal moment in its story arc, where it finally gained the upper hand on more than 400 years of evil and could usher in a new world order based on equity, guaranteed by the "perfected" state apparatus and its corporate partners (especially in tech). The thing is, while the real American story genuinely is the story of freedom, this new alternative, of "liberation," is based not in truth but in alchemy, and like all such regimes, it will therefore end in catastrophe. Lead, as it sees our history, cannot be changed into gold, as it views our future through its manic utopian lenses, and drinking potions of cinnabar will not make people live forever but will slowly poison them into madness. Join James Lindsay as he tries to make sense of the events we have been watching unfold over the last few days and years, relying in an unexpected way, if you'll believe it, on the postmodern philosophers who in some ways saw this danger first. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#…nzwvdjjpd6gg3cmuy open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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Jan 7, 2021 • 1h 14min

The Nature of Pseudo-Reality

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay - Episode 14 In a recent long-form essay on New Discourses (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/12/psychopathy-origins-totalitarianism/), James Lindsay explained the origins of totalitarianism in a single word: psychopathy. There, he explained that totalitarianism arises from people who cannot cope with reality as it is, and yet who are content to manipulate others, constructing a "pseudo-reality" in service to a vision of the world that serves their needs. That pseudo-reality holds as its North Star a Utopian vision that aligns with artificial resolutions to their inability to cope with reality as it is, and it thereby attracts others who have similar issues. By constructing a false logic (a paralogic) and a false morality (a paramorality) to define and enforce the pseudo-reality, they can gather supporters in a cult-like fashion. In the end, those ensnared lose the ability to distinguish reality and pseudo-reality almost entirely and become functionally psychopathic, and if they gain enough social, cultural, economic, and political power, they can hold hostage entire societies that are, in effect, on the march to totalitarianism and, eventually, total catastrophic collapse. The essay is an important read, but it is also a difficult one. In this episode of the New Discourses podcast, James seeks to explain the essay in easier language and to flesh out its ideas one by one. He sees this process of unpacking the essay as his next major work, and in this podcast, he begins the process of linking the concept of "ideological pseudo-reality" to more familiar examples, not least Wokeness. Critical Race Theory, for example, is a pseudo-reality that positions racism as the ordinary state of affairs in society, not an immoral aberration from them. Queer Theory is a pseudo-reality in which being normal with regard to sex, gender, and sexuality is a problem while being in some way deviant (which is not the same as being gay or even trans) is elevated as normal. Communism is a pseudo-reality that deems socially engineered command economies as effective and efficient ways to maximize human flourishing. Covid-19 is a pseudo-reality built to enact control around a genuine and serious virus called SARS-CoV-2. These topics and more are presented in this episode of the New Discourses podcast to help people understand and, hopefully, able to see reality for itself again. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#…nzwvdjjpd6gg3cmuy open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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Nov 30, 2020 • 55min

The Next Chapter of the American Story

Human beings think in stories. We understand ourselves and the world, societies, social groups, and contexts we live in that way. One type of story is a national story, and in this episode of the New Discourses podcast, James Lindsay makes the case that Americans have, by and large, forgotten the totality of their own story. This has happened by placing too much focus and too much emphasis on one valuable and important part of the American story, which is equality. All men are, in fact, created equal, at least so far as liberal ethics should understand men, but this part of the American story exists in some tension with the other parts, especially the liberty part of the story, which is threatened by an overemphasis on equality in the same way that equality is threatened by an overemphasis on liberty. The truth is, even on a perfectly equal playing field, liberty will produce unequal outcomes because people will behave in unequal ways, and this form of inequality of outcome is just, even if inequality of opportunity isn't. In this podcast, Lindsay argues that Americans have mistaken the equality part of their story for the whole story, and in that the equality part of their story has been largely but not perfectly fulfilled, Americans now find themselves retelling the story in ever more tendentious ways, including Critical Social Justice. That is, Americans, in seeking to understand themselves against their own story, which they have misunderstood, are telling a kind of genre fiction on the equality story, trying to resurrect its themes in new ways to give themselves meaning and personal and social context. The Critical Social Justice, or Woke, story is comprehensible as a certain type of genre fiction on the equality portion of the American story, one that inverts the very values it claims to espouse in the pursuit not of further equality but of equity, which is a type of enforced equality of outcomes, regardless of behavior, talent, and merit. In the end Lindsay urges Americans to remember the totality of their story: liberty and equality in balance with one another, government with the consent of the governed, and a place, at least one place in the world, where these values can be kept alive. The American story has not been fulfilled, although it is not necessarily clear what its next chapters are. This podcast hopes to start finding the next parts of the American story. In that, Lindsay urges that Americans today are called to be keepers of the flame of liberty in a society that values and has, in largest part, achieved equality. They are also encouraged to offer their balanced model of federalism and anti-federalism, individual and national sovereign liberty, in this case, to the world as globalism increases with technology. Should the world refuse, Americans should not turn their backs on their story but should, instead, keep the flame of Americanism burning bright for any who should want it. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#…nzwvdjjpd6gg3cmuy open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2020 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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Oct 21, 2020 • 55min

Biden Is Not The Room

James Lindsay recently said on Twitter that he will vote "unhappily" for Republicans including Trump in these troubled times after seeing an argument that the left should work to abolish the Constitution. Join him on this episode of the New Discourses Podcast for an explanation of his thought process on this issue as it has unfolded over this tumultuous summer of 2020. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#…nzwvdjjpd6gg3cmuy open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2020 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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Sep 25, 2020 • 1h 2min

Understanding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

We live in an era of unprecedented pressure for ideologically based organizational trainings: anti-racist, racial sensitivity, unconscious bias, cultural awareness, and, perhaps most commonly, some combination of "diversity, equity, and inclusion." We're also rapidly waking up to the fact that in this era, the basic terminology describing and informing these training programs cannot be trusted to mean what it seems to on its face. What's needed, then, is clarity around these terms and these ideas. In this episode of the New Discourses podcast, James Lindsay walks the listener through the concepts of "diversity," "equity," and "inclusion" so that listeners can understand what these terms mean in the context of the Critical Social Justice ideology and thus be better informed to deal with their infiltration into our organizations. Join in to learn more! Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#…nzwvdjjpd6gg3cmuy open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2020 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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Sep 4, 2020 • 41min

How Social Justice Silences | Peter Boghossian

Follow Peter at twitter.com/peterboghossian Support New Discourses: patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#…nzwvdjjpd6gg3cmuy open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2020 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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Aug 14, 2020 • 1h 39min

Two and Two Make Four

We have to talk about 2+2. Unfortunately. Most unfortunately. This is because what looks like a simple and profoundly stupid Twitter fight must be understood in the full context in which it is playing out. This context is, in fact, the most important and least reported part of the origin story of the Great 2+2 War of 2020, and few realize that this ridiculous discourse didn't come out of a vacuum. It arose in reaction to something James Lindsay posted on Twitter, as has been reported, but more specifically it is the product of a Washington State Ethnic Studies program director, Shraddha Shirude, jumping into that fray with a request to make 2+2=5 "into a true statement" in order to defend her Ethnic Studies education program in that state (and beyond). This "ethnomathematics" program has deep ties into the academic literature within the critical study of mathematics education and is now currently being implemented in Washington and may spread to California and New York soon, and from there, beyond. It is also part of a deliberate attempt to destabilize our ability to identify and name objective truths so that the activists pushing these agendas cannot be criticized and so they can advance their agendas unimpeded. Join James Lindsay on the New Discourses podcast for a deep, sometimes emotional dive into the real story of the 2+2 discourse. Support New Discourses: https://paypal.me/newdiscourses https://patreon.com/newdiscourses https://subscribestar.com/newdiscourses https://youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Ipc3rvw364nzwvdjjpd6gg3cmuy open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2020 New Discourses. All rights reserved.
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Jul 20, 2020 • 1h 15min

Saying No to Critical Race Theory

I want to explain Critical Race Theory to you. I just want to help you understand it, so I sat down with my microphone and no real plan except to talk through the claims, history, and thought of Critical Race Theory, highlighting where it came from and why it's a terrible way to think about race and racism, in its own ideas. So, this episode of the New Discourses podcast is a little different. It's just me sitting down with you through my microphone to make a seemingly complicated thing clear. I hope it helps. -James Lindsay Support New Discourses: https://paypal.me/newdiscourses https://patreon.com/newdiscourses https://subscribestar.com/newdiscourses https://youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#…nzwvdjjpd6gg3cmuy open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2020 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

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