AliceFraser
patreon
Angry Thinkers, Hungry Handsome Birds and Tea With Alice Salon 33 Details (U.K. time)
🕑 Added 2021-08-16 05:25:15 +0000 UTCHallo Darling Patreonites
Thankyou for all the lovely messages as always.
This bird was eating the flowers out of a local garden, which was extremely cute. Though I know cockatoos can be very destructive, I find it hard not to be charmed by their brash confidence and fancy hats.
Sydney lockdown wends onwards with various people all over the country having extremely strong opinions about whose fault it is, all of which I find intolerably annoying to engage with. I’m just sad I don’t get to visit my twin and his babies, my niece and nephew in Queensland. We’ve missed two or three planned trips/visits at this point, and every time they come up on my calendar, I want to curl up in bed and self medicate with a novel.
I’ve been having some nice chats with Professor Twin Henry Fraser on the phone though and thinking about co-writing an article about rhetoric and the Intellectual Dark Web.
INITIAL THOUGHTS ON THE MATTER
There’s a clear attrition rate among well meaning “good thinkers” in the centrist/conservative/intellectual dark web community sliding off the rails into conspiracy thinking.
The sort of mechanism of that ‘sliding off’ process is fascinating and complicated, but part of it is definitely that we’re in a period in public intellectualism, where basically all public feedback/criticism on meaningful topics is so extreme and violent that people can’t get good quality pushback on speculations or loose hypotheses.
So there’s no regulatory mechanism. The dialectic generative back-and-forth part of ‘the discourse’ is impoverished to the point of being useless.
This article has some good points: https://areomagazine.com/2021/08/12/on-bret-weinstein-alternative-media-ivermectin-and-vaccine-related-controversies/
Henry and I have slightly different angles of view on the whole area (my feelings are fairly well laid out in CHRONOS if you’ve seen it), so it’ll be interesting to write with him about it: I think the core problem of them conceiving of themselves as rationalists is that they don’t factor peer pressure into their own thinking.
They think they’re above these tides of approval and kicking back against disapproval and reflexive group-identification signalling, dismissing that as identity politics, when in fact their IDpol lies in their self-identification as part of this ‘logical’ educated class, above such things, and so their biases become invisible.
The academy and academic thinking is predicated on the frame that it is possible to hone ideas in discussion, with the intellectual integrity of the process being guaranteed by how it is open to all comers (who are capable of addressing the arguments in good faith and at the required level of expertise). Without that forum with its delicately balanced combination of democratic openness and elitist expertise, the quasi-scientific process of ideas testing in the lab of discussion collapses and the data you get out of it becomes dangerously useless.
I see a lot of these clever angry logical people have a tendency to insist on what they “actually” said, rather than the implications, the leading-ness of such questions, stopping short of the ‘logical’ next steps doesn’t necessarily mitigate the the impact of those thought-lines, or how they are received by their audience.
And to point out such technicalities is all well and good. (I only asked the question! I never said that was what I believed! I did say it was only a possibility! I was pointing that out as a cultural norm rather than an ethnic trait!). It IS important to be precise about what you did and didn’t say, what is explicit and what is implicit and what you deliberately come up short of asserting. As a lawyer, I know that.
But, as a comedian I can’t insist a joke is funny if nobody ever laughs at it. There’s a sliding scale between “this dumb audience just don’t get it” and “this arrangement of words isn’t doing what I think it is”. Meaning has to meet somewhere in the middle of intent and interpretation. Neither extreme being useful if communication is the goal.
As ever, no conclusions, but I’ll be interested in thinking more about it and writing something up with the Professor Twin. If we can’t hang out together because of the ongoing disaster of spreading disease and despair, we might as well do the grown up version of arts and crafts at a distance. I remember making ‘potions’ in the garden during long summer afternoons, in a beaten up old saucepan. This feels a bit like a more mature version of that.
Though a zoom arts and crafts afternoon might be fun if any of you are interested?
ANYWAY! This week’s salon!
The details are:
Time: Aug 17, 2021, 09:00 PM, London GMT+1
Aug 18, 2021 06:00 AM Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney
link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85926056441?pwd=aTFOK1ozeTFNK0pVMlJKLzNRLzhCZz09
Comments
He doesn’t just toss out his support for the gender identity cult trivially. He clearly believes in the “gendered soul” and rejects biology. Doesn’t he realise how much harm such beliefs might cause?
That’s because you’re a good person. He was happy to state categorically on Twitter than TP would have been as happy to deny science and reality as he is… I very much doubt it, but we’ll never know because he’s dead!
I don’t know what particular instance you’re speaking about, but when I spoke to Neil the day he first did tea with alice and we became friends, we talked for about eight hours about the responsibility (re: Savage and Good Omens respectively), of speaking for the dead. If he has an opinion about what Terry wanted or would have wanted I very much doubt it would be something he’d tossing around trivially.
And it’s not just Neil. Helen Zaltzman said on the Answer me this podcast that JK Rowling had written “bigoted” things. She’s an intelligent woman so she knows that that’s a lie. So why did she say it?
Didn’t you see what he said about Terry Pratchett? He’s entitled to his own opinions, but not to speak on behalf of the dead.
Oh no! What's the trouble with Neil?
Thanks Alice. I’m fine, just having a bit of trouble with the modern world in general and Neil Gaiman in particular. 🤗
This part of Alice's post stuck out to me: "But, as a comedian I can’t insist a joke is funny if nobody ever laughs at it. There’s a sliding scale between “this dumb audience just don’t get it” and “this arrangement of words isn’t doing what I think it is”. Meaning has to meet somewhere in the middle of intent and interpretation. Neither extreme being useful if communication is the goal." It's interesting to think about defining a successful discussion or debate in terms of a successful partnership or mutual understanding regardless of agreement/disagreement, offense, etc. Just a base level of: do we all see what happened here?
I don’t know the specifics of the scenario you’re talking about, so can’t comment on it particularly. But it sounds like you’re in a rough spot.
The truth and facts matter. But even my employer is trying to argue that faith and feelings deserve the same protection as situations based on objective facts and that we should ignore the legal framework in the interests of diversity and inclusion. Equal opportunities are dépassé apparemment…
I agree with everything you say. But at least one of the people you have worked with clearly doesn’t. Sorry to bring it up, but I’m really struggling to get my head around it.
Excellent post, and lots of good points. The angry polarisation really forces extreme opinion on all sides. I've been obsessively following the Afghanistan news this last week and just seen this article about there not being anger - https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/where-is-britain-s-anger-about-afghanistan- . As with this article, something else I've noticed with the online debate is if an issue is genuinely complex or difficult, not just Afghanistan but other big domestic issues such as the environment, economic inequality, etc. Often there's no discussion at all unless it can be framed in black and white terms, and someone can be condemned. It often feels like people need to be silent unless there is a bad faith take and they are sure of what side to jump in on, which further impoverishes the debate.
Posts like this make me so glad I am a patron of yours, Alice. I became one for the delightful humor, but your insightful and smart commentary on any number of topics (seemingly) unrelated to comedy is so refreshing. I hope someday I can catch one of your shows in person!
