Dropping in on Peter Boghossian

I merely felt like I hadn't checked out any of the content Peter produces in a year or so, and had been doing so on a diminishing basis for quite some time. 

I am but a weak squishy human and lest you think I can't resist the temptation of watching Peter opine on something, I'm actually referring to my powerlessness in the face of Youtube's algorithmic curation. So I have this rule, which is, that if Youtube shows me enough thumbnails for it to become cognizant for me, that I don't want to watch something, I have a strong emotional reaction against watching it that is, I force myself to watch it. Otherwise I am purely engaging with a confirmation bias machine.

Probably because I watched a Glenn Loury show episode recently, the algorithm did a "people who like these guys tend to like this guy" thing.

Cool. Cool cool cool cool cool cool cool...I...have to go.

Some selection of these thumbnails had been bugging me for some time. I think it would be a fairly objective way to put it, that you may be able to makeout Peter's production team's 'attempts at humour' by using LLMs to variously present him as an Iranian Ayatollah, a uniformed Nazi of some kind, a pregnant man who has started showing, and Peter presenting as female. And like, of course I don't want to watch these videos, subjectively, these attempts at humour fall flat, and they communicate a target audience that would find this humorous

4 of those thumbnails are going to be a type of video Peter produces called "spectrum street epistemology" where street = vox populi, epistemology = do we know what we think we know conversations, and spectrum refers to a 5 point scale between "Strongly agree" and "Strongly disagree" and if you can make out the view counts, with all the power of the internet, they aren't particularly popular videos

A Diversion to Sam Harris

Former podcast guest of Sam Harris, Bari Weiss if you click on the link went from marginal voice to head of a major news division on CBS. The simplest inference was that she was selected for being Trump admin. friendly, in the same way that Steven Colbert was cancelled for being Trump admin unfriendly, with seemingly, the exact opposite results.

I don't listen to Harris' podcast interviews much anymore, again largely because of a lack of interest in what he now covers much of the time, shit like silicon valley and stuff. Also naturally, much as I stopped watching Seth Myer's "A Closer Look" segments when Biden was in office, the Anti-woke stuff got a whole lot less interesting in 2024 when as stated in a recent post and here I repeat myself, I think it's 10 year window closed suggesting it was ever going to take off and go mainstream. 

Like I'm currently retraining and my course has stuff that would certainly fit under the "woke" umbrella, like every session presentation begins with an "Acknowledgement of Country" that may predate the whole "woke" phenomena locally, but certainly in terms of becoming a standard practice in many institutions in Australia is for me, a largely inert vestigial mass I can certainly live with.

Anyhoo, yes for those unfamiliar, Sam Harris was cast by Bari Weiss in an article she wrote titled "meet the intellectual dark web" that featured Harris in it. Harris at the front of many of his podcasts has a section called "housekeeping" where he has in the past responded to conflict and controversies arising from being affiliated with conspiracy hacks like the Weinsteins, conspiracy megaphones like Joe Rogan and possibly others.

With Bari Weis being I think by most standards, grossly unqualified to run a serious news organisation (it would be like putting Mr Beast in charge of a real life Squid Game, can you imagine?) I was curious to see if Sam had distanced himself from Weis' more obvious dumpster fires, not only her appointment to CBS, but also the University of Austin she founded.

A search produced reddit articles, and it seems like Sam hasn't said anything about Weis since he interviewed her some years ago (pre-Oct 7th attacks on Israel) about antisemitism.

Boghossian is listed on said University of Austin's website as at writing as "Founding Faculty Advisor" and he published his resignation letter from Portland University on Bari Weiss' sub stack and so on, so he's arguably more affiliated with a Bari Weiss project, than Harris as being a subject of an article, having her as a guest on his podcast, and writing an article about mindfulness or the self-as-an-illusion for her sub-stack.

For me, there's an unambiguous test to observe, which is, the Trump administration is unambiguously an enemy of free speech, the 4th estate, heterodoxy etc. So if you are affiliated with Weis, and do not approve of what Weis is capitulating to, then we have this stooge/not-stooge test front-and-centre.

But...have I actually conducted that test? Like Harris, I just can't find anything where he responds or condemns Bari Weis for her career developments, nor specific actions taken in her current role like pulling the 60 minutes story that was embarassing to the Trump Admin that we've all seen because it ran in Canada and the world has the internet now.

It may exist somewhere, I don't know and can't be bothered checking, but as you'll see from when I eventually relented and dropped in to confirm/disconfirm if Peter was producing content I was so reluctant to watch, his inability to prioritise is a recurring theme.

The Video

The video has an anti-clickbait category of "Peter Reacts" and a title of "Why can't they answer the question?" with a crappy AI thumbnail which, you might at this point expect Peter in blackface but it's just him standing in front of a row of African looking gentlemen in front of an early-learning center of some kind.

If ever I was tempted to title something "I watched blah so you don't have to..." it might be for this, and the reality is, no viewing is obligatory and you are welcome to make your own choice. 

The thrust of the video is, Peter yells out to some guy to play and pause videos of governmental inquiries of some kind. 

The two queries that justifies a plural "they" and that Peter reacts to are:

1. Some guy grilling someone from Minnesota about how many Somali immigrants are on welfare vs. "native" Minnesotans.

2. Some guy responding to a claim that there has been some quantifiable increase in racial hatred (in the UK) and asking someone "where does the racial hatred come from?"

First Quality Test

For all the people out there, who cannot answer direct questions with direct answers, to pick from why such obscure examples over non-issues?

Peter characterises the clips he is reacting to as 'viral' the Somali-line-of-questioning one has 345k views as at writing and was posted may 2nd, US time so...it's about 5 days old and only getting older, and the "Racism where from?" viral clip has about 175k views and was published May 1st.

So firstly, we can rule out from the principle of charity, that Peter is responding to these clips from a looooooooong backlog and that is why he isn't responding to one of the numerous viral clips of some Trump admin official being unable to clarify whether the US is at war with Iran, if the "whatever" is over or ongoing, what the "whatever" was supposed to accomplish etc. etc. You know, the thing Trump broke that threatens to destroy everything dependent on fossil fuels in the world.

Spoiler, Peter appears to, without any adherence to a Socratic-method, sound epistemology and seemingly with just a full lean-in to rhetoric, arrive at the conclusion that the inability of the two subjects of the 'viral' clips to answer direct questions that Peter just asserts are reasonable and valid, that they have to be captured by an ideology:

If you cannot name one statistic supporting your position, you do not have a position. You have a feeling you are too afraid to examine. [...] Ideology does not just distort thinking. It replaces it.

But picking these clips about relative nothingburger issues is it's own kind of statistic that supports Peter's position, as it applies to himself. 

Now, my characterisation that welfare dependent Somali immigrants in Minnesota, and that recent high profile attacks on Jewish targets in the UK (A shooting at a synagogue and an attempted stabbing that resulted in an arrest) as nothingburger issues, comes from a subjective actuarial viewpoint. 

For example, the price of gasoline in the United States approaches $5 for whatever a gallon is. By PBS news reports, this is up 50% from prior to the start of the Iran "Euphemism" of choice. That's a 50% increase in a major expense for likely hundreds of millions of US citizens, just the US citizens a nation where the most common occupation is driver. Do you think, a single member of the Trump administration, could answer a simple direct question about a war that needs funding, and has depleted the stockpile of warheads and munitions, could answer a simple direct question about whether US military actions resulting in Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, made the US stronger or weaker?

I don't think they could. And I think it would be too generous to even state the administration as having something as complex and flavourful as an idealogy. I think it's just stone cold cowardice job preservation.

By contrast to the indirect tax of shutting down a quarter of the world's oil supply, and the direct taxes of financing the misadventure and the fact that Iran is thus far, owning the US Military from a strategic standpoint, Somali immigration in Minnesota, concerning 6,000 people (80% of 8,000) in a state of 5.7 million (or 0.14% of the Minnesotan population).

This isn't even piss on shoes, when due to a completely dysfunctional political institution in the US executive branch, rules based global order is being stressed toward breaking point. 

First Question

The first question is less interesting, one of the most interesting things about it, is the preamble commentary given by the X user Peter linked to as a 'viral' clip:

Dinesh D’Souza didn’t just “let his daughter marry” anybody.

He let her marry Brandon Gill.

If you are unfamiliar with Dinesh D'Souza, to call Dinesh D'Souza a fucking clown is an insult to clowns who practice an artform with skill, often at McDonald's for minimum wage. Dinesh D'Souza is a serious and legitimate argument that institutions like Dartmouth be able to revoke "dishonarary" degrees if someone demonstrates through their practice, a complete absence of understanding of what they were taught.

I don't know anything about Brandon Gill except for this clip here, where he appears to simply be wasting every bodies time. But I am familiar with Dinesh D'Souza, who employs the crappiest rhetoric to routinely embarass himselves in public spectacles going back to when Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens were doing New Atheist book tours, and more recently just embarassing, shit running down the leg performances when put under the question by Destiny and Alex O'Conner. 

D'Souza is the definition of a party hack.

Brandon Gill asks a question Peter Boghossian characterises as 'fair' or 'reasonable' or 'valid' or something to that effect, but rhetorically it would be called a 'false' or 'bogus' dilemma, does the (not even number, but proportion) of Somali immigrants on some kind of welfare make the state stronger or weaker?

So I have a question for you: Does the proportion of US Corporations, receiving some kind of welfare from the state, make the US stronger or weaker?

And furthermore, whoever the guy is answering the first question in the clip, answers it. So it's not even a "They can't answer the question" the guy clearly answers "certainly, stronger."

Then this hard on Brandon Gill tries to reframe the question because he doesn't get the answer he likes in this reductive view that something like 80% of Somali immigrants receive some kind of welfare, and that only drops to 74% after 10 years of living in the US and only 50% can speak English well.

But what if, none of those stats are worth giving a fuck about? 

I couldn't find the clip, but I'm reasonably confident that on "Jubilee" the 1 vs 20 debate format that Jordan Peterson famously imploded on, but when Destiny appeared on it against a bunch of MAGA whatevers, there was a participant that thought they had this slam dunk argument to confront Destiny with, which was a list of homicide victims of illegal immigrants, and when Destiny revealed that he didn't give a fuck about a list of names of people killed by illegal immigrants, the person just couldn't fathom it.

They also got voted out in under a minute by their peers, because I think most MAGA people couldn't understand how someone could think that a 'gotcha' because the context is so obvious - now read the list of all the people who are killed by US citizens, White US citizens, killed by drunk drivers, killed by breaches of workplace health & safety, killed by someone who swore to love and protect them in a religious marriage ceremony.

"These people receive welfare <sarcasm> so obviously that makes us weaker </sarcasm>" is stupefyingly reductive. Firstly, this is the US being talked about, so just because large proportions receive welfare does not immediately apply that they aren't fulfilling essential job roles, employers like Walmart and Amazon can pay their essential workers so little that it doesn't amount to a living wage, but the employer's profit margins are effectively subsidized by state welfare in food stamp programs etc.

Then I literally won't get started on corporate welfare, I will end it here - Brandon Gill - given that some of the wealthiest corporations in the world, reside in the US and sit on some of the largest cash reserves in the world - does the government giving them tax credits, and tax cuts and lending them money at negative effective interest rates not so they can develop innovative technology, but so they can buy back their own shares make the country STRONGER or WEAKER?

Peter for me, first started straying way out of his lane when he decided to champion national debt as the number one issue nobody was talking about. Reagan's famously fictional Welfare-Queen and the real phenomena of poor marginalised people propped up by the social safety net, have always been, a fucking rounding error. Peter needs to react to this clip if he wants to start having honest conversations. This is as nothing compared to the proposed half-billion dollars Lindsay Graham wants earmarked for the ballroom, that I increasingly suspect needs to have complicated security features built into it, just because obviously the next democratic administration would tear down any ballroom and restore the heritage East Wing.

On top of this, and this is what a lot of people miss, Somalia produces so much emigration because it is an unsafe country. Many of these immigrants I will bet, are going to be refugees. Minnesota is taking them, and with it's below replacement birth rate, immigration will most likely make Minnesota stronger. I mean does an ageing population make Minnesota stronger or weaker Brandon Gill? Obviously, the answer is weaker. Have a peruse of my governments official travel advisory website for Somalia and this is the fucking problem that we get with refugee migration - it's not illegal, and it isn't economical, it's humane. 

That context needs to be factored in to say of course you are going to get people who don't speak English good and have low employment prospects for a couple of generations. But I'm sure New York saw plenty of Greeks and Italians, Mexicans and Jews who helped contribute $$$ to the cultural draw that is New York, and who lived and died without ever learning English, spoke Yiddish, Spanish, Italian, Greek etc. etc. from the day they arrived to the day they died.

Every wealthy, relatively stable democracy in the world, is going to get people fleeing war, drought, famine and pestilence. These people have a legal right to claim refuge, and then often for countries like Australia it is actually illegal for us to subject refugees to mandatory detention, temporary protection visas, and especially remand children into mandatory detention. On top of that, from the Australian experience, it is pointlessly inhumane to manage the sensibilities of an uninformed and xenophobic electorate, by trying to act like Australia will ever be so 'tough' as to be less attractive than the origin points refugees are fleeing from. We've just pointlessly built these detention centres, and offshore processing and it has all been a shit show, and refugees are still a rounding error on Australian immigration.

Peter's reaction renders him, close to, objectively a moron. The guy answers the question straight away "certainly stronger" and then Brandon Gill is like "that's not the answer I want, waaah waah waah" and tries to set the only criteria for consideration to be some decontextualised welfare statistics - the trap is obvious, I don't know why Peter can't see it, probably because there's a feeling he has become afraid of facing, or ideology has displaced his intelligence under his friend James Lindsay's "ironclad law of projection" 

I thought Peter had experience with the socratic method, with debate, with dialogue and rhetoric. The presumable democrat he tries to get Brandon to clarify what he means by "Somali" versus "Native" given that the overwhelming majority of Somali Minnesotans are born in Minnesota, it genuinelly makes the statistics Brandon is citing confusing. Are you talking about the 108,000 that have Somali descent, or just the 8,000 that have immigrated from Somalia in the past 10 years?

Are you suggesting that cutting off welfare will make these people less prone to crime? Why are we even talking about this? This is not an existential threat to the great state of Minnesota. The San Antonio Spurs are, can we talk about blocking Victor Wembenyama's entry to the state for games 3 and 4 of the conference semifinals?

The Second Question

The second question Peter reacts to, is more interesting but I hopefully have less to say on it. 

Again, contrary to Peter's video title, an answer is given, but Peter, betraying Socratic dialogue and opting instead for the rhetoric of an appeal to personal incredulity, won't accept the answer.

Anyway, let's frame it, because it's in that category of "I don't get, what you don't get" kind of impasses, let's look at the commentary offered by the X user that posted this 'viral' clip:

Boy oh boy oh boy…

This just about sums it ALL up…

Man asks clear question.

I'm cutting him off there, because the question isn't clear. This is a mischaracterisation of the exchange. Now to lean into my own whiteness, paleness if you will, it may actually be hard for Peter to react to these videos with insight, because I personally can't exclude the possibility that Peter is autistic, and perhaps he can't "read the mind in the eyes" to the sort of basic level that people are good intuitive readers of expressions, tones, body language.

The clip comes from BBC Question Time, Australia has it's own version of the show called Q&A and these shows are generally painful and actually bad for democracy because often editorial policy of broadcasters like the BBC skew towards equality of outcome, rather than equal opportunity. Nevertheless, it's not really a bad thing that a meathead can ask a question of a boffin or professional politician.

This guy asks "the lady from the green party, you've said you've seen a rise in racial hatred in this country, could you just specify where that hatred is coming from?" 

We see the lady he asks' facial journey reaction and here the moderator, which the X poster characterised as 'panicking.' 

What the ladies face states, is confusion, and in the moderator's voice we don't hear panic, but confusion the moderator, whom the green pm looks to, says "errm I'm not sure what you mean..." 

What we are seeing here, and I'm going to emphasize this is somebody stupid asking a question that stupefies somebody knowledgeable.

I had a guy ask me "what's wrong with making money?" this is stupefying because it strips out all context. The man's 'clear' question, is hard to parse grammatically.

Let me pose Peter an equivalent question:

"You've said, you've noticed an increase in rainfall. Could you please specify, where that rain comes from?"

And this seems to be how the greens MP parses the question, it's not a sidestep, but she tries to clarify that her statement was a statement about an observed phenomena, it is a statistical reality, a matter of data. 

So, another equivalent question would be:

"The lady said there's been an increase in smoking in the last 5 years among 16-24 year olds, could you specify where the smoke is coming from?"

I would look to the moderator - "is he asking if the smoke comes from their mouths?"

The question by Peter's analysis, is presumptive without being leading, allowing Peter to simply assert that a clear and strong inference was 'dodged' by appealing to "everybody knows" and I forget Peter's words, something like Islamic extremists, or fanatics or idealogues. 

There is an inference, that Peter assumes that 'honest' conversations cannot be had about immigration because people are afraid of sounding racist, and because he is connecting these two clips, that the two clips are about the same thing, a fear of discussing immigration in terms of nationalism or creed or race or whatever.

But so long as your mind isn't primed to make the inferences Peter seems to believe are not only there but generalisable if not universal, her answer is perfectly coherent - the rise in racial hatred is a biproduct of the deteriorating economic circumstances.

If you are talking about the broad rise in racial tensions, hatred whatever, then a specific causal explanation is that growing income inequality, shrinking social mobility, shrinking middle-class, growing precariat will result in a destabilised society and one of the ways in which a society becomes less stable - is by turning on itself along racial lines.

Now, if slightly more context were added to the clip, to ground the man's question as specific to an observable spike in racial hatred toward the Jews, then maybe a cogent answer would be as Peter suggests "Islamic extremists" but I'm not sure how influential they are. 

A much better specific origin for the growing plight of the Jewish diaspora would be "Benjamin Netanyahu's prosecution of the IDF's response to the Oct 7th attacks." The damage Netanyahu has done to Israel's standing in the world, is incalculable. In many ways, his response has been a total Hamas victory.

But this is all kind of a red herring. The question wasn't clear, it was stupid, it was fucking stupid. Where does Jew hatred come from? You're asking about a phenomena that has persisted for thousands of years. Mostly it comes from sectarian violence, if we consider all Abrahamic religions Jewish sects. Are we only going back as far as the crusades, or do you want to get really specific and talk Babylonian exile? Or do we trot out some Old-testament scholars and archealogists that can tell us about proto-Judaesm? Because there's a case to be made that it comes from the Persian empire and Zoroastrianism, or maybe the Egyptian Pharaoh who earned such ire from his people because he tried to install himself as the first monotheistic god? 

The thing that is bad about racial hatred toward Jews, is that Bernie Sanders and Benjamin Netanyahu become the same thing, when in reality they are opposites.

I suspect Peter Boghossian plays the transactional analysis game "now I've got you you son of a bitch" where Hamas' Oct 7th attacks are license for infinite retribution, when clearly, most people lost their stomach for Israel's response within just a few days, fun fact, you can find a Coleman Hughes interview with Rory Stewart from maybe a week or two after the attack, where Rory corrects Coleman by stating that Israel had already exceeded a proportional response by firing thousands of rockets into Gaza.

Mariah Careylusion

"Why are you so obsessed with me?" Peter Boghossian is an interesting conundrum, if he were to have an afternoon filming subway takes, his garbage takes would start with 100% disagree and end with 100% disagree. I don't know where he gets his confidence from, BJJ I guess.

And again, possibly autism plays a big role here, I mean watch him interview the critical drinker and he's like "I like star trek, I watch star trek, I've only watched star trek, do you like star trek?" and maybe "have you ever done BJJ? You should do BJJ."

The other thing, is that Peter likely has had a very traumatic time with his whole Portland University experience, and it seems plausible that he has received death threats, experienced ostracism, has security concerns for questioning trans-activism, identity politics in general. 

But the conundrum is that Peter kind of founded street epistemology, but is in many ways its worst ambassador, his garbage takes just make me believe that maybe Socrates was as dumb as he claimed he was, and it didn't make him wise, it made him dumb, like Peter Boghossian.