Night Owls discussion on 2/16; Ezra and I talked about political polarization: what it is, whether it is bad; in the second hour we field questions from the audience.
In the field of discourse analysis, the Howard Dean ad exemplifies what Ernesto Laclau called an "equivalential chain" held together by an "empty" or "floating" signifier. If one or both of you haven't read his /On Populist Reason/, I strongly recommend it, as he carefully and clearly explains why it is a kind of category mistake to inquire into the logical connection between various "cultural" signifiers and a "political" persona. Trumpism is, of course, a paradigmatic case of "populist reason" as Laclau formulates it. But the underlying discursive structure he outlines is also enormously helpful in analyzing all sorts of political phenomena.
Aptly at 41:50, Agnes asks whether or not internet expressions of anger correspond to actual anger in reality; but I rather wonder whether internet expressions of anger are perceived or not (more or less) as anger by the reader, regardless of whether the text itself has any truth correspondence to reality. I'm asking whether or not their might be an exponential social affectation amongst users of these mediums; and whether or not it's akin (to use a pop culture reference) to the so-called ' Rage Virus ' of the 2002 film titled: 28 Days Later? Thank you for your civic service here, Klein and Callard.
@@moomoocowsly But there is the other side of the coin: How much are we wasting time with listening to positions and ideas we ourselves have already moved far beyond? In Hegelian terms, if someone offers the anti-thesis for my thesis I'm more than willing to learn but if someone does so while I'm a couple of syntheses past that point..
@@moomoocowsly Well, we can very concretely look at the available evidence: The pod is 2 hours long and it probably, like any podcast, takes a while to get to any substantial point. So that is the potential cost. And it is reasonable to assume this person has imbued the company he founded which is infamous for its non-nuanced and surface-level political bias with his own ideas. We will know them by their fruits.
@@moomoocowsly Degrees in probability is all we have as evidence. I'm more of a pragmatic epistemologist. And yes, I don't expect someone's ideas to wildly differ from how he puts them into practice.
Agnes, you should start a discord server if you haven't already... I think content and conversation like this is very important...
HEY great video, love EK on polarization
In the field of discourse analysis, the Howard Dean ad exemplifies what Ernesto Laclau called an "equivalential chain" held together by an "empty" or "floating" signifier. If one or both of you haven't read his /On Populist Reason/, I strongly recommend it, as he carefully and clearly explains why it is a kind of category mistake to inquire into the logical connection between various "cultural" signifiers and a "political" persona. Trumpism is, of course, a paradigmatic case of "populist reason" as Laclau formulates it. But the underlying discursive structure he outlines is also enormously helpful in analyzing all sorts of political phenomena.
Aptly at 41:50, Agnes asks whether or not internet expressions of anger correspond to actual anger in reality; but I rather wonder whether internet expressions of anger are perceived or not (more or less) as anger by the reader, regardless of whether the text itself has any truth correspondence to reality. I'm asking whether or not their might be an exponential social affectation amongst users of these mediums; and whether or not it's akin (to use a pop culture reference) to the so-called ' Rage Virus ' of the 2002 film titled: 28 Days Later? Thank you for your civic service here, Klein and Callard.
15
😑 Promo>SM!!
Knowing this guy co-founded Vox I'm afraid I'm going to have to skip this one. Too much culture-war bias.
@@moomoocowsly But there is the other side of the coin: How much are we wasting time with listening to positions and ideas we ourselves have already moved far beyond? In Hegelian terms, if someone offers the anti-thesis for my thesis I'm more than willing to learn but if someone does so while I'm a couple of syntheses past that point..
@@moomoocowsly Well, we can very concretely look at the available evidence: The pod is 2 hours long and it probably, like any podcast, takes a while to get to any substantial point. So that is the potential cost. And it is reasonable to assume this person has imbued the company he founded which is infamous for its non-nuanced and surface-level political bias with his own ideas. We will know them by their fruits.
@@moomoocowsly Degrees in probability is all we have as evidence. I'm more of a pragmatic epistemologist. And yes, I don't expect someone's ideas to wildly differ from how he puts them into practice.
you humbled the most arrogant man on twitter. lmao. good. the sheer terror on his face when he realized how out of his depth he was...