• 0 Posts
  • 4 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 25th, 2023

help-circle
  • It’s a pastime of liberal pundits to point out that the pro-life governor of some flyover state also supports the death penalty and so on and so forth. We get incredulous and infuriated at their blatant hypocrisy. We call them stupid, which really sets them off […] They don’t think of themselves as self-serving hypocrites or idiots who can’t keep their facts straight long enough to form a cogent argument in continuity with the rest of their ideology. We try to describe this as “cognitive dissonance” or other give other armchair diagnosis that doesn’t fully capture what’s going on. I’d like to give them more credit than that. They clearly believe in something, and in that context their words and actions would make sense, but it’s not what they’re self-advertising when you ask what they believe in.

    From still the best description of american conservative thought I’ve read: an essay by u/kin7es: https://wiki.dlma.com/belief-system-of-republicans


  • If he called himself Professor Dipshit, I would be happier. Not because I think he’s a dipshit, but because it would make clearer that the title professor is not to be taken seriously. I have taught at the college level for many years, and I have many friends who are tenured professors. I don’t call myself professor, and I correct people who do call me that (as US college freshman will sometimes do, since some of them think everyone teaching in college must be a professor) because I know very well what it takes to achive that title and I have a lot of respect for people who have accomplished that.

    In any case, it’s not his title that is the problem. It’s the low quality of his takedown. The Tyson video in the other comment accomplishes more in fewer words.


  • Terence Howard is delusional. But this youtube channel is also not worth watching. Professor Dave is a guy with a MA and has never been a professor. He gets some basic science and history wrong pretty quickly. In fairness, Howard gets it much more wrong. My advice is not to waste your life listening to either of them and instead to watch some Carl Sagan or Richard Feynman.