Discussion with Konstantin Kisin on issues in Heterodox land (Video) *UNEDITED*
Added 2022-09-28 05:32:35 +0000 UTCWell, this was an interesting one.
Konstantin Kisin from Tiggernometry agreed to a debate/interview about the relative issues and problems in the heterodox sphere and the 'mainstream media'.
We covered political partisanship, Joe Rogan's covid content, vaccine and covid coverage in the media, the impact of personal relationships, the heterodox spheres potential bias toward the right, Triggernometry's promotion of the Epoch Times, and so on.
Will be interesting to hear people's feedback on this one. But I do think Konstantin deserves credit for his responsiveness and willingness to listen to replies/criticisms.
Matt wasn't familiar with their content and didn't want to interrupt the flow so he ended up playing the role of the Third in this conversation. I did check in during if he wanted to ask anything but he told me nope and to carry on.
Anyway, let me know what you think.
Comments
Really interesting conversation. One of the things many people who appear adjacent to the more extreme content creators do is say "I differ strongly from MrMissMrs on their stance on XYZ in respect to ABC". The unstated major premise being that issue 'XYZ' is a litmus test for whether or not criticisms of MrMissMrs either apply to them or that they have to take into account their views on 'ABC' in their interactions with them. It's a rhetorical trick that only needs to be played out in terms of qualities to see how fallacious it is: "Julie murdered her husband with a gun. I have never owned a gun. Therefore, saying that I am an accomplice just because I helped bury the body is silly."
Ymirsdreams
2023-08-18 06:29:09 +0000 UTCReally can't stand the false equivalence between 2020 election denying and Russia investigations in 2016/2017. Trump was refusing to concede and *was president at the time*-- how does that never seem to factor into these guys analysis. Cmon man.
Alex Nelson
2022-10-28 03:37:54 +0000 UTC"The threat from the progressive left, particularly in the reaction it would trigger from the right, is a far bigger concern than some of the other stuff" kind of sounds like a problem with the right...
Geoff Whiting
2022-10-14 13:59:49 +0000 UTCCheers Louise! And yeah he did seem to be getting frustrated at some points. Should learn to be more chill... like Matt!
Christopher Kavanagh
2022-10-14 04:48:16 +0000 UTCChris you have an admirable level of patience, especially as Konstantin was clearly becoming visibly agitated. There is nothing unreasonable about asking him questions concerning the nature of the guests he chooses to platform and what they have previously said in the past (it's all relative). I was growing increasingly annoyed by his refusal to recognise that Triggernometry does have a very clear bias towards guests of a specific political persuasion.
Louise
2022-10-13 16:27:30 +0000 UTCTotally agree. This is the abusive partner defense: “It’s your fault I hit you. If you didn’t make me angry I wouldn’t have to do it.”
Jennifer Nelson
2022-10-07 13:01:44 +0000 UTCThat was exactly the reaction I had as well! Konstantin focuses on the progressive left because he fears they will bring out the worst in the violent right. It sounds like he, as with Sam Harris, should probably pay some attention to the violent right and query where the violence comes from and perhaps blame them for it!
Chris Spanos
2022-10-07 04:18:07 +0000 UTCgod that was frustrating >__>
F
2022-10-03 12:09:06 +0000 UTCOMG I don’t know how much of this I can take. A few things about the 2016 election: Clinton conceded. A left-wing mob did not storm the Capitol. The Muller report did show evidence of Russian disinformation tactics on social media and proved contacts between Trumps’s team and the Russians. PAUL MANAFORT WAS HIS CAMPAIGN MANAGER. On the other side, while there were questions about various shenanigans (Comey letter etc), there was no far-reaching and influential left-wing ecosystem pushing the idea of a stolen election (plus he said that this narrative was pushed for 4 years. What?). Clinton didn't even ask for a recount, anywhere, even in the really close states! (The only person who pretended to ask for a recount was Jill Stein but in retrospect that was just a fundraiser.) After that election Democrats were mostly focused on blaming each other, with the Clinton side blaming Sanders for not conceding and the Sanders side blaming the DNC for running Clinton in the first place. Meanwhile after the 2020 election the Trump team was filing multiple lawsuits in court (losing almost every single one), mounting ridiculous recounts that were looking for Chinese bamboo ballots and stealing data from voting machines, all sorts of insane stuff. They have created a narrative totally unmoored from reality, and yet the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice said just a couple of days ago - under oath to a Congressional committee - that she thinks the election was stolen. This false equivalency nonsense is hurting my brain. It’s so frustrating that somebody who claims to be so centrist and fair minded has such huge blind spots to his own RW sympathies. It’s the old Overton Window thing, that RW positions become the “sensible middle” (reminding me of equally mind-bending convos I’ve had in the last week with people about how Italy’s new PM isn’t far right, she’s just saying "common sense" things). I'd like actual reasonable people, like our mighty GuruPod hosts, to speak specifically to this phenomenon of so called "reasonable" guys like this guest creating some false middle ground between the "left" agenda - which does not even exist in the way they imagine and basically amounts to a parade of moral panics - and what's going on on the right before our very eyes with armed and militarized conspiracy theorists.
Jennifer Nelson
2022-10-02 16:56:43 +0000 UTCJust listening to this now, but did I understand correctly that he thinks the progressive left is dangerous because of the reaction it will provoke from the violent right? WTH kind of logic is that? It’s along the same lines as blaming a woman for getting raped because she wore a mini-skirt. Isn’t it the violent side of the equation that should draw your concern instead?
Jennifer Nelson
2022-10-02 16:47:06 +0000 UTCOnly 13 minutes in and the false equivalency is let loose. I need a break already! I suspect this fellow is a comedian in the same way that Joe Rogan is a comedian… will listen to the rest later when I’ve had a couple of Ardbeg’s! And a couple for Matt!
elcid
2022-10-02 08:32:41 +0000 UTCI didn't finish it either. Couldn't bring myself to continue listening to the insufferable smugness.
Treebee
2022-10-01 17:45:12 +0000 UTCI do not recall the mainstream media saying the 2016 election being stolen. Unduly influenced yes. My sources were/are the Washington Post, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the CBC. I would call this a false equivalence. Would writing a story on Hunter Biden have not unduly influenced the 2020 election? Much like the magically timed release of more of Hilary's emails just before the 2016 election. It seems to me that the heart of the problem with many of the heterdox thinkers is that they are not good students of history. Many politicians claim to love their country and that they want the best for it, including fascists. I think the issue is in how they define country and who is considered a fellow countrymen for lack of a better word.
Tim Tripp
2022-10-01 14:37:54 +0000 UTCSo the Guardian is less accurate than Fox? It would be nice to hear some examples. I think Fox is pretty mainstream in American, sadly to say. Right wing media is huge. Free speech trumps the right to life? To me that is what it boils down to in a pandemic. I guess I am not an enlightened centrist, gladly so if Konstantin is an example form.
Tim Tripp
2022-10-01 12:39:35 +0000 UTCHear, hear!
Christopher Kavanagh
2022-10-01 09:19:49 +0000 UTCTrying to fact check Gorka's purported claims about his children that Kisin signal boosted here. Reminder that the claims were that Gorka's son was attacked in a "national newspaper headline" and called a "traitor" and his daughter was almost forced out of school for being accused of racism. All I could find was an acknowledgement of a retracted article about his son from The Forward, a Jewish publication I'd never heard of before with a circulation of ~28,000 as of 2013, an article from Gorka's own website about being called a Nazi at his daughter's graduation, and a controversy that emerged at Trinity College when she was a senior over some inflammatory comments - that had nothing to do with Julia Gorka - made by 2 professors at the college. Anyone else able to track down anything more substantive? In any case, I take issue with Kisin's line - and it's a sentiment oft touted in the IDW/enlightened centrist crowd - that we need to be willing to entertain the notion that the people with whom an average lefty (it always seems to be the lefties getting lectured in this fashion... hmmm... curious) may strongly disagree with have a genuine commitment to the country and they care about it deeply (again, a sentiment that is curiously absent when the focus is on some individual on the "woke" team), it's just that they have a different opinion on how to approach certain issues and the best way to move forward as a country. That's probably true enough most of the time when you're talking about the average citizen, but you still have to be willing to draw some lines in the sand. I'm sure that Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert or Charlie Kirk would be able to sit down and have a charming dinner with any given person and craft a sympathetic narrative about their grievances and political opinions - this is the very point that Chris admirably tried to get across to Sam Harris in their conversation (alas to no avail) - and yet the political opinions of all three of these highly influential conservatives, two of them sitting congressional representatives, include the notion that the United States should be a Christian theocracy. They have aired this view publicly. There's simply no charity to give to a view such as that for anyone who values secularism. There's no acknowledging that they simply have a different view, but that they still care about the country when their conception of what the country is differs in such a fundamental way. Civility porn shouldn't trump the harsh judgement of individuals who espouse ideas like that. Ironically, people like Sam have been curiously quiet about these kinds of developments within the GOP in spite of his professed commitment to criticizing Islam on the basis of its encouraging systems of theocracy. American congressional reps are getting applause at national conservative conventions for openly advocating Christian theocracy and yet it's wokeism that remains the most dangerous ideological pathogen in America. It must be called out over and over again and its adherents (whether rightly or wrongly categorized as "woke") chastised endlessly for forcing the right wing to become dangerous lunatics I guess. The asymmetry in critical analysis by these self appointed intellectuals and "enlightened centrists" continues to be infinitely frustrating.
Devin Poore
2022-09-30 17:11:03 +0000 UTCI now understand why the heterodox call themselves centrists. They are meticulously incurious about the policy positions of groups like CPAC and Victor Orban's party. This allows them to be blind to the overlap between their own policy positions and the policy positions of those groups. The Epoch Times is distributed for free in my neighborhood. It's unashamedly Christian Nationalist, which I think is far-right. Unfortunately, few people who are sympathetic to the policy positions of Christian Nationalists would characterize Christian Nationalists as far-right.
languageguy
2022-09-30 16:53:16 +0000 UTCI gave him 20 minutes. Good to eliminate one of the too many voices on offer.
Tom McCool
2022-09-30 16:02:52 +0000 UTCIt really is fully this. I grew up with Bircher grandparents and when you look at the Epoch Times it’s the exact same bullshit that they have been saying for decades.
Kyle Wilson
2022-09-30 11:07:16 +0000 UTCI am in awe of Chris's patience - to sit through an hour+ of motte-and-bailey equivocation... The pain on Matt's face is real.
Tomasz
2022-09-30 06:41:51 +0000 UTCI’m speaking in the context of the American left and the American right. When I say mainstream left what I mean is the American politically relevant left, what some might call “neoliberal capitalist establishment” if they were further left than that. When I speak of mainstream right I’m talking about the politically relevant American right. Where you draw the line in your assessment of what should be left and right may differ but I think those categories are pretty defined. I agree that both the far left and far right ends of the spectrum have something like that message (and Rogan has shown he can be compelled by either) but you’re more likely to see it on the mainstream right (which is the far right currently) than the mainstream American left (which, whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing, is quite politically moderate). Not trying to say there’s nothing to the message that some groups are succeeding at the expense of others but especially the radical versions of that message lend themselves quickly to conspiracism where like moderate politics don’t.
Andy
2022-09-30 01:06:06 +0000 UTCI thought you did a great job Chris velvet glove iron fist style. You are right to acknowledge his gaminess I suppose simply because he probably hates that sort of charitable sentiment.
Conal dunn
2022-09-30 00:19:36 +0000 UTCIt’s sort of like: “When considering the reliability of a source, you have to account for how credible I think people should consider the source. So, in the end, all sources are equal [truism]. So the non-right-wing-media is worse because they’re more credible.” Such silly transparent rhetoric. (He said “maybe” or “sometimes” worse. Trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.)
Jesse Hodges
2022-09-29 21:40:11 +0000 UTCHe didn't say that Fox News and The Guardian were equivalent, he said The Guardian was worse. A pattern with the IDW types I noticed is that they hold a certain group to a much higher standard than the group that they are more aligned with. One minute he mentions how The Guardian lies so much and is full of misinformation, they should be doing better. That might be a little strong but I agree that they should do better. But, the next minute when they are questioned about why they don't hold Bret, Fox and other right wing media to those same standards, they bring up the card that we need to be charitable.
MaxPlan
2022-09-29 20:46:12 +0000 UTCThanks for taking one for the team, this is something that doesn't happen much in the IDW interviews
MaxPlan
2022-09-29 20:33:19 +0000 UTCsorry but how is that not already part of the progressive left’s message? You wouldn’t be conflating “the left” and neoliberal establishment capitalists would you?
Sebastian
2022-09-29 20:00:54 +0000 UTCYA I noticed his eyes practically bugging out of his head during the mandate discussion. I was worried matt (and I) would lose an eyeball!!
Sebastian
2022-09-29 19:55:52 +0000 UTCAgreed
Sebastian
2022-09-29 19:54:17 +0000 UTCEnlightened centrist 🤣🤣. Anyone who doesn’t recognize the Epoch Times’ content as warmed over John Birch Society bs is either willfully ignorant or disingenuous.
Alex Bowers
2022-09-29 17:28:04 +0000 UTCAll I can say is that Matt must be my spirit animal. I do believe he and I rolled our eyes at this fellow at the same rate.
Mike Nelson
2022-09-29 14:00:19 +0000 UTCI have nothing else constructive to add that hasn't been said, but goddamn was this frustrating to listen to. Chris, you have the patience of a saint.
Ryan Goss
2022-09-29 03:28:49 +0000 UTCThat’s such a silly way to interpret his arguments. He’s constantly doing everything he can to not engage in substance
Curtis Kofoed
2022-09-29 02:55:49 +0000 UTCCheers. I did watch a lot of Triggernometry to prepare.
Christopher Kavanagh
2022-09-29 02:46:51 +0000 UTCI agree that in the US the mainstream right is much more conspiracy prone than the mainstream left but I’d argue that’s downstream of the populism. Joe would happily vote “left” if the left’s message was something like “the elites are screwing you and the mainstream sources of knowledge are conspiring to keep you subservient to them”. I don’t see why that message is necessarily right wing. So not only do I think using words like populist and anti-establishment are strategically more useful, I also think they’re actually more accurately getting at what you don’t like about him, his content, and his ecosystem. Epoch times is more obviously right wing partisan but again I think that would be more acceptable if the mainstream right weren’t into every stupid conspiracy under the sun which as I said I think is downstream of the populism not the conservatism.
Andy
2022-09-29 01:59:21 +0000 UTCI understand the strategic value but I also think it’s ok to call a spade, a spade. Joe is mostly a walking receptacle for right wing conspiracies. His politics for years now has been consistently leaning to populist right. Having to tiptoe around the topic feels like a significant double standard given how the antiwoke characterise the woke/progressive sphere as being far too sensitive and refusing to accept labels. It isn’t hard to see the ecosystem Triggernometry is in. Just look at the guest list and topics or use google and see what the similar suggestions are. The algorithm knows where people are located often much better than they do.
Christopher Kavanagh
2022-09-29 01:54:56 +0000 UTCTo be fair I was trigger by a KK tweet a few days before listening to this. He said: “It's fascinating that people who claim to be tolerant are extraordinarily intolerant, people who claim to be kind are so frequently unkind and people who claim to care for others will be absolutely merciless the moment you disagree with them.” This is so gross to me. It’s an intentional conflation of tolerance and lack of boundaries. His words could as easily be used to defend drunk driving or any other extreme ideology as social difference worthy of tolerance.
Jesse Hodges
2022-09-29 01:47:14 +0000 UTCI’d push back on some of this. The issue isn’t with being friends with people who you disagree with substantively. It’s with avoiding criticisms or difficult conversations, especially on public platforms, because of prioritizing personal relationships and focusing instead on shared points of agreement/enemies. Konstantin in his interview with Bret on Triggernometry offered extremely weak push back on his stance and completely avoided any questions about the topic when interviewing Heather and Bret about their book. A request that others who interviewed them said was a condition of doing an interview about the book. This is not something most mainstream journalists would accept nor does it fit with the ‘we go were others fear to tread’ presentation. Furthermore, while Konstantin refused to agree with Bret on his strong anti vaccine stance and emphasized his lack of expertise. That’s really all he did. He did not criticize Bret or any of his anti vaccine arguments or claims. His core argument was Bret should not expect him to take a side. So to me this is like being good friends with Andrew Wakefield, inviting him on your show and letting him talk about how persecuted he is, then saying you don’t know enough about vaccines to comment on the validity of his claims but you know he is a very principled and honest person. Bret and Heather are anti vaccine advocates now and pseudoscientific conspiracy theorists more generally. You can be friends with whoever you like but when you give people a public platform and mostly offer them softball pushback it is deserving of criticism. I also think that counter to your framing, Konstantin’s position is not centering the arguments but rather centering the person, his assessment of them as good people, and being indulgent. If you wanted to properly address a book you should also focus on criticisms, such as the review from Stuart Ritchie (a strong critic of contemporary scientific practices) who correctly pegged their book as being essentially an endless naturalistic fallacy and promotion of pseudoscience. Giving Bret and Heather free reign to promote their book is acting like a publicist for hire.
Christopher Kavanagh
2022-09-29 01:41:38 +0000 UTCI don’t understand how a conversation continues after someone claims that The Guardian and Fox News propagate equal quantity and equal magnitude of disinformation. This should be a conversation stopper. If someone says this to me, the conversation is over. There is no use continuing discussion. That’s not to say that The Guardian gets everything right or even that they should be relied upon. It’s to say that Fox News is many orders of magnitude worse, and it’s incredibly obvious to anyone with half a “centrist” brain.
Jesse Hodges
2022-09-29 01:23:38 +0000 UTCIt was uncomfortable listening, as the best conversations tend to be! I don't personally agree with all of Konstantin's positions, but I do appreciate his adherence to the principle of "attack the ideas, not the person". That is, he can very good friends with Bret and Heather, but still disagree with them. Our culture generally seems to equate being on friendly terms with implicitly offering partisan support; this is terrible, as it essentially eliminates the ability to actually talk about real issues to find the common ground which usually exists. Neither side of any issue should really get what they want, with the compromise in the middle being the ideal choice (which sucks least to all concerned). While I understand why Chris was continuing to bring up the people he "platforms", it's also true that his show doesn't tend to go easy on their guests. The questions aren't necessarily softballs, though obviously they're not as hard on people who they tend to agree with. Overall, it really was a good discussion. If you guys talk to Konstantin again, it'd be worth focussing more on the positions he and Francis hold. And how about a DTG on Triggernometry itself? Do they count as gurus?
Jason Etheridge
2022-09-28 23:39:33 +0000 UTCOh man, my aversion to conflict was really triggered by this one; I couldn't stop internally squirming. I need to listen to more people strongly disagreeing to rid myself of that - conflict and disagreement are a part of life. And maybe get into more debates myself, hah!
Treebee
2022-09-28 20:48:05 +0000 UTChttps://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1422181544161128450.html get ready to read some of the dumbest stuff you’ve ever seen
Curtis Kofoed
2022-09-28 20:06:22 +0000 UTCYou make a good point too - Kisin is just being purposely obtuse by pretending the most cartoonish Trump Russia claim was core claim
Curtis Kofoed
2022-09-28 20:04:07 +0000 UTCWhy won’t public health officials justify their cost benefit analysis to this satirist and podcaster???
Curtis Kofoed
2022-09-28 19:39:50 +0000 UTCWell it’s also a fact that there were numerous contacts between the trump campaign and Russian sources, including emails from Don Jr - that’s to say nothing of the DNC email hack or Russian troll farms. Anyone who argues there was nothing to the Trump-Russia story is a fool.
Curtis Kofoed
2022-09-28 19:37:43 +0000 UTCChris deserves a lot of credit for this. He had the the receipts. And those receipts take a lot of time. I think when these people get called out, they know that people usually don’t have examples ready to go. It’s an easy dodge. He tried to get out of Chris’s examples but he was squirming.” It was odd how he had no problem, not knowing anything about his guests controversial beliefs. But he expected you to know every nuance of his stances. I agree with the other Sam Harris comparisons.
privateer
2022-09-28 19:24:08 +0000 UTC* Sam Harris voice- 'that incredibly controversial thing i endorsed and would clearly get asked about? oh, i've only given it a cursory glance- too busy to look at everything. But let me tell you about this headline i saw about the thing that confirms all my biases about the other side ...'
Brainbiter
2022-09-28 19:16:57 +0000 UTCYeah it’s so annoying when people take ‘centrism’ as evidence that they are free from bias… equivocating CNN and Fox News shows that one is not critically engaged with either networks content, and you are giving a giant pass to Fox News.
Heath Lancaster
2022-09-28 18:56:27 +0000 UTCAs someone who thought there might be a little truth to Russia-gate at the time, the main focus was that Putin might have something on Trump. Or that Trump wanted a Moscow tower. I don’t recall anyone claiming the election was stolen. Influenced perhaps, but that was never the main contention of Russia-gate supporters.
privateer
2022-09-28 18:55:01 +0000 UTCKisin: when have I not been critical of someone? Chris: Sebastian Gorka, Douglas Murry, Bret and Heather Weinstein. Kisin: that doesn’t count.
Heath Lancaster
2022-09-28 18:49:47 +0000 UTCNote to future pandemic planners: Carve out an exception for allowing comedians to perform. Their fragile egos need to be stroked regularly. Sure they might kill the people dumb enough to show up to their act. But they can do a lot more damage with their podcasts.
privateer
2022-09-28 18:49:38 +0000 UTCAn ignorant and/or disingenuous schmuck redefining the far right while defending his far-right advertisers and lecturing Chris that words have meaning 💀 “The Epoch Times is a far-right international multi-language newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement.” —Wikipedia entry, sentence 1
Rasterisk
2022-09-28 18:42:45 +0000 UTCYou have a link for that? I’d love to read it.
privateer
2022-09-28 18:42:41 +0000 UTCKisin is a master at bad faith false equivalence. His conflation of 2016 election coverage and 2020 election theft stuff is really telling.
Curtis Kofoed
2022-09-28 18:30:55 +0000 UTCHi Chris - I seem to be the only one who thinks this was a good conversation! If I was interviewing Konstantine I would have talked to him about Ukraine. How was it for him to watch his hetrodox friends and associates put out their hot takes? Also, it is interesting that when he actually knows about something deeply and intimately he in rather in line with the main stream journalists. I think there is something lost in the way he thinks which has much to do with his cultural homelessness.
Nina Davies
2022-09-28 18:19:39 +0000 UTCI’ve never heard anyone repeatedly contradict themselves as egregiously as this clown did.
Kyle Wilson
2022-09-28 14:54:35 +0000 UTCI use Firefox browser on phone, set to desktop mode and can multitask while stuff plays in background... But it's easy to lose your place etc, much easier with audio stream or just not on youtube basically!
Paul Sees
2022-09-28 14:52:20 +0000 UTCSomething interesting struck me about the topology of this conversation ;)
Nick Wiebe
2022-09-28 14:26:06 +0000 UTCHe wrote a long thread setting forth a series of really dumb excuses for conspiracism around COVID. He’s not a serious thinker at all.
Curtis Kofoed
2022-09-28 14:21:14 +0000 UTChahaha. I listen to youtube vids and just keep the phone in my pocket like it's a podcast. I don't have premium, but it also does a picture in picture on my phone for some reason, but some people say that's only a youtube premium function so, I'm not sure. If it doesn't do picture in picture, you gotta leave the screen on while you listen
Chris (The Rewired Soul)
2022-09-28 14:17:24 +0000 UTCMan. I'm glad you pressed him, but I think he was using this strange strawman strategy to avoid what you were actually asking. You weren't asking him to defend the views of these other people. But he kept saying, "ask me about me and not other people". That's what you were doing. This guy isn't known for going around with his own views. He's known for running a podcast that HAS PEOPLE ON. And he defends a lot of people. You were asking him about HIS justifications and rationalizations for HIS behavior talking with, defending, and associating with these people. It was just oh so frustrating to watch him dodge this stuff because wtf else were you going to talk to him about? What else does he do aside from associate with these people.? It's difficult to explain, but it was like a genius strategy on his end, but we all could see what you were actually asking and how he chose to interpret it.
Chris (The Rewired Soul)
2022-09-28 14:15:13 +0000 UTCWhen is Chris going to let Matt go home, surely his community service requirement has been satisfied by now… ;)
Peter
2022-09-28 14:09:44 +0000 UTCKisin is such a poorly informed sloppy thinker. I’m genuinely embarrassed by how bad the guy’s takes are.
Curtis Kofoed
2022-09-28 14:00:11 +0000 UTCWho is this guy? Why am I listening to him?
Bronwyn Snefjella
2022-09-28 13:30:32 +0000 UTCIs there an audio only version? My boss preferrs if I at least pretend to work while he's paying me...
Paul Sees
2022-09-28 12:45:46 +0000 UTCWell said, Kisin has certainly many similarities to Harris. However, I can't believe I am saying this but even Harris is a lot more tolerable compared to Kisin. Yes, Harris is an ardent defender and supporter of Douglas "Death of Europe" and "Camp of Saints is lurid but uncannily prophetic" Murray but at least he won't shill for Epoch Times or talk about how government mandating people to get a vaccine for a contagious disease is as unethical as forcing people to get a vaccine for obesity. Harris is terrible, but Kisin is much much worse lol.
SHOUNAK SARKAR
2022-09-28 12:25:31 +0000 UTCSo far as this can be said of anyone who looks up to Bret Weinstein, he's clearly not a total idiot (edit: I said this at around the 40 minute mark and retract the claim after finishing the ep), but as is common, appears blind to the blindness that's innate to his own massive industry. In the end, people like Konstantin are all about emotion and affect and personal relationships. This is fine in a deeply human sense (it's hard not to be!), but it ignores how his clique's ethics and aesthetics are one and the same. Wittgenstein pointed this out in general. Almost by definition, reactionary conspiracy mongering is seen as honest and brave truth-seeking, whereas mainstream media (or any public health office for instance) consists of decadent and manipulative professional liars. No difference between Fox and Guardian besides their preferred narratives. Do I have a narrative? Of course not! Am I a product of my audience or relationships? No, I just love truth and hate liars! How do I know I'm telling the truth? I know I'm not lying! How do I know they're lying? I know I'm telling the truth! There are two different standards here: truth-tellers are judged by the abstract personal impression of how honest they appear as human beings, even friends; journalists, doctors, scientists and such are judged as a totality and systemic failure by the fact that some of them potentially exhibit the same personal features and biases as the previous group. The former, even when talking total bullshit, is speaking the language of a deeper truth. The latter, even when providing their audience with facts, is doing so in the context of the Big Lie. The ultimate crime is to think of the heterodox sphere as any kind of collective with an ideological leaning or agenda: they are all individuals with genuine faces and voices and thoughts and feelings. Chris' failure to toe this line genuinely triggered Kisin at multiple points. A similarly terrible mistake is to imagine that anyone can be afforded the status of an individual without first having dinner parties with the podcasting class. Wouldn't it be more accurate to call this the homodox sphere? Helen Lewis made the point that there is something deeply American about how the supposed con-men of our media ecosystems are more or less the regular people who stare at a computer screen and have meetings, eight hours a day, for a proper middle class salary, whereas these intrepid truth-magnets fly private jets to celebrate their cancellations and silencings with some best compensated speaking gigs in the world. There is no dynamic that corrupts the latter, certainly not any human factors (Game B! Enlightened centrism! Meditation! and so on). There is nothing that could redeem the former. This is prosperity gospel: for honesty and bravery, just follow the the richest televangelist you can find.
Exai
2022-09-28 12:16:51 +0000 UTCyes- far right and heterodox doing too much heavy lifting. also populist as a term is complicated if you listen to Tom Frank and in UK where biggest , with US, gap between richest and poorest in developed world ( 6 times cf 3 times income difference compared to equivalent countries) someone better start paying attention to the population.
Brainbiter
2022-09-28 11:57:48 +0000 UTCI mean the way he came across on Rogan was an obvious embrace of US libertarianism , anti- political correctness, and tbf fairly down on European / British mindset. However, as he , cleverly demanded examples for all your criticisms you struggled to make your points, despite fact the 'vibe' as Matt would say is clear. I've listened to some of their stuff and it's cringe- the way they misrepresented Harris in their promo clips, ringing endorsement of Epoch times on adverts and weird wish to get back to the 1970's British comedy. i have to say - i felt a lot of civility porn at work on your side- easy for him as he was in the hot seat and genuinely think these conversations need Matt involved who gives a different perspective above the culture war stuff but very perceptive on bullshit and not UK/ US tainted and one of reason the blend of show works well. Currently former Tories are calling this UK govt budget 'far right hijack' so yknow theres economic right wing thought not just trains running on time and uniforms. Again danger is people listening to this will have got wrong impression imho on what Triggernometry is . Brexit has been taken over by economic right , far or not, helped by Farages lies and check out how that's going . Johnson lied, Truss lied just ladt week and again just degrees different from what is expected from other side. i do agree left, far left. right etc has become meaningless so if you do keep going in these culture wars ( in same way as everything is stories, everything is people ...) everything is politics no matter how hard you try to avoid it.
Brainbiter
2022-09-28 11:52:00 +0000 UTCWell well well! I found Kisin to be a smarmy, smug humourless prick who takes himself way too seriously. He contradicted himself multiple times within the span of a single sentence or paragraph. Plus also committed numerous logical fallacies. 1) Stated that he’s a classical liberal and that to him the fact that Fox News is propagandistic & not reliable is a given. But In the next breath, added that publications like Guardian are actually more inaccurate than Fox News. 2) With regards to Joe Rogan, said that based on Rogan’s current rhetoric he would classify him as centre-right but in the very next sentence stated that it would be wrong to label Rogan as a conservative. WTF??? Isn’t being centre right equivalent to being a moderate conservative? After all people like Charles Gimson, Andrew Neil, Tom Nichols, Charlie Sykes refer to themselves as being a conservative and on the centre-right side of politics. 3) Also came up with the usual Bernie Sanders & Cornel West defences for Rogan whilst ignoring the many far-right guests like Gavin Mcinnes, Molyneux, Alex Jones, Milo, Owen Benjamin, Sargon, Ted Nugent etc on his show. 4) Kisin equated vaccination for Covid-19 with obesity. Stated that forcing people to take vaccination for Covid-19 is as unethical as forcing people to take a vaccine for obesity!!! Well obesity is not contagious you fucking moron, so people not taking vaccines for obesity are not harming other people. 5) In one breath, suggested that he doesn’t approve of what Viktor Orban is doing and in the very next breath said that he doesn’t know anything about Hungarian politics. 6) He also made false equivalencies between the left’s reaction to the 2016 election and the right’s reaction to the 2020 election. Not a single Democrat campaigned in 2020 on the basis that the 2016 election was stolen and not a single popular progressive channel on YouTube said this either. I could do this whole day. This dude is just a more refined version of Tim Pool (but equally unlikable) and he got exceedingly defensive and agitated through the course of the interview. Credit to Chris for his measured and surgical pushback, which allowed just enough rope for Kisin to hang himself. He certainly was very vocal about attacking left wing people and media, but got weirdly defensive about Nigel Farage, Seb Gorka and the openly propagandistic Epoch Times etc. Also lol at Matt for sitting there and looking bored and tired through the entire interview 😂! Honestly, Kisin is hands down the worst and most insufferable podcast guest in DTG history. Just another arrogant, reactionary culture warrior asshole pretending to be tribeless.
SHOUNAK SARKAR
2022-09-28 11:04:37 +0000 UTCThis guy is the king of false eqvivelance. This was an exercise in willfull ignorance and pretending that far right politics is centrist
Klas Bergholtz
2022-09-28 10:44:20 +0000 UTCThis guy seems similar to Sam Harris. 1. Strategic disclaimers 2. "I'M A CENTRIST! MY VIEWS ARE NUANCED AND COMPLEX!" 3. Mentions personal relationships with Joe, Brett, Heather, as deflection 4. Still re-litigating old media grievances 5. TOTALLY out of touch with experts on the ground in entire fields he criticizes (with Sam it's politics/academia, with this guy it's medicine) 6. Keeps citing mysterious anonymous sources in his life that confirm his particular viewpoint... 7. Palpable and borderline corny need to brand himself as contrarian (kinda goes with (2) but worth pointing out again). 8. Used his own ethnic background to suggest he's untouchable on a certain topic. Sam cites Ashkanazi Jewish heritage as though it makes him immune to endorsing white supremacist ideas. This guy did a similar thing with Russia/Ukraine, but didn't really elaborate... don't these guys hate identity politics?? 9. Dinner parties 10. "We need to be able to have these conversations." Pro civility-porn. Not alienating people you disagree with is of civilizational importance. Suggested cultural importance of the conversations being had on his podcast. 11. Fear mongers about censorship 12. "Being anti-immigration doesn't make you far-right." "Far right = Neo-Nazis and open fascists." 13. January 6th was the straw that broke the camel's back, not just, you know... Trump in and of himself 14. Audibly triggered by Chris when things get uncomfortable... hehe Hmmmm... I wonder if he, Joe and Sam are a member of the same... nah couldn't be. Sam doesn't fat-shame
Sebastian
2022-09-28 08:19:38 +0000 UTCI think if you characterized some of the people you call “right wing” or “far right” in this convo (such as Rogan or the Epoch Times) as either populist or anti-establishment, you might have an easier time connecting with people on that side of the spectrum as they’re more likely to identify with those labels. It also has the bonus side effect of explaining why someone like Rogan might endorse a politician like Bernie Sanders (the elites are conspiring to screw you over is a popular sentiment on both political sides and if you’re prone to that kind of messaging it might not matter which side is pushing it). Anyway, loved the convo and I hope you do more confrontational-style interviews in the future. The ones you’ve done so far (this, Robert Wright, Sam Harris) have been some of my favorites!
Andy
2022-09-28 07:03:44 +0000 UTCThanks gents for having him on. I listen to Triggernometry and find the guys hilarious despite not agreeing with all their politics and endorsements. Looking forward to this
Alex Anderson
2022-09-28 06:35:05 +0000 UTC"Tiggernometry" is absolutely something I'd listen to. 🐅
André Alessi
2022-09-28 05:37:03 +0000 UTC
