Don't think I could have assembled a better group of frauds and charlatans, other than maybe whoever is at Beri Weiss's "university"

A group of adults chose this name for themselves? lol

It was kind of a joke, but it's still pretty lame.

The IDW characters had nothing in common except feeling persecuted/canceled/shamed, whatever. They were whining about the “woke crowd” before it was a thing, really. That’s what brought them together. As Mickey said earlier, this coalition was always destined to fail, very easy to see. A group with Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro… yea…

I am glad it existed, though. Bari Weiss was sane, at one point, and had an interesting perspective early on. Also, Jordan Peterson is crazy, but I checked out some of his earlier lectures and just weird, random stuff… When it’s not politically charged, he’s got some interesting ways of thinking. But that more of a “ok, time to move on” type of person for me.

If Sam Harris was as smart as he thinks he is, he’d have known to stay away. Harris is weird, but he’s smart, and I used to listen to him a lot.

They were useful for providing a pretty devastating response to wokeness at a time when it was ascendent and basically unchallenged. Peterson is pretty interesting at times, but the others are basically just academic scientism types. They're mostly fine I guess, but they aren't very interesting.

That the reaction to Peterson et all ever got warmer than, "you are wasting your time, you can get a better version of this elsewhere" is kind of confusing. The intellectual dork web ranged from a waste of time to anodyne to cringe. Suggesting it was somehow dangerous was a weird response.

Peterson before his crusade against woke culture has some interesting stuff, though I guess maybe you do have to be a dork. I’m basically an atheist (tho agnostic applies better), and Peterson has a really interesting way of explaining the Bible in a pretty secular way, even tho he calls himself a Christian. I found it fascinating. He also had some good lectures on “conservative vs progressive/liberal”, not in the political sense, but in the personality sense. I dunno. He was worth some time to get to know, and then, like I said, move on.

Lol. Lmao.

That was literally their mission - counter and destroy wokeness. Like Mickey, I also don’t know what to do but laugh at the bolded, Burt. They did have a few good responses, but their responses didn’t devastate anything. They were only minimally popular among people who probably would agree with them. Other than Shapiro, those guys weren’t really in the political realm. They were mostly irrelevant.

You make a compelling case

I keep seeing this Dawkins thing pop up with people implying he’s warmed up to religion. He has stated that he prefers Christianity to Islam for his whole career, and the full quote shouldn’t lead people to believe much more than that.

“I call myself a cultural Christian. I’m not a believer. (But) I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. If we substituted any alternative religion, that would be truly dreadful. If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I would choose Christianity every time. It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not. I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian society, although I do not believe in a single word of the Christian faith.”

big ups to St. Anselm