Comments by "SsjC" (@ssjcosty) on "David Pakman Show" channel.

It's because many people's attitudes are that if a public figure intellectual says anything that they disagree with, then it means that person is now an enemy. I disagree with Sam Harris's opinions on several things, but I agree with him on more. He brings valuable perspectives to a lot of conversations, and has interesting discussions with experts in many domains through his podcast.
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That was also standard practice in Eastern European Communist countries until 1989.
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I never liked Russel Brand as a youtuber because of his new agey wishy washy spiritualism and way of talking in "spiritual" overtones and non-sequiturs, but I've been following him more closely in the last few years and it does seem lately that he is going the way of Dave Rubin. He's the open minded one, he has no opinion (yeah right) on anything, he delves deeper and deeper into alt-right conspiracy theorist territory and only "asks questions".
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I think this simplified view is quite problematic. Sometimes there are valid reasons to have negative feelings about a group, especially when it comes to politics and religion. Pointing out systemic issues and evils that some religions and sects promote, and harmful actions done by their adherents in the name of their religion, can be insulting to the followers of those religions and others who feel offended on their behalf. And you'll notice that the more fundamentalist some sects are, the more they get offended by the modern world, by the existence of LGBTQ people, by sex education, by the existence of apostates and non-believers, by people seen as blasphemers etc. I personally have negative feelings about conservatives and religious fundamentalists and Christian nationalists. Should I really fear saying things that they may find insulting?
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@Frankie9553 „he also didnt make 200 billion. so what have you done? you're avoiding the question. list your vast accomplishments” He also didn't make 200bln yes, but what's your point?
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@Frankie9553 "if someone was smarter than elon then they probably have accomplished more no?" No, not really. It would have to be someone a) smarter than Elon, b) motivated to lead businesses, c) take the right opportunity at the right time, and d) starting from a well connected rich family. Actually, the right opportunities, connections and well placed decisions are likely more important rather than just being "smarter". Unless you're saying that rappers and pop singers are so much smarter than university professors and NASA engineers because they make so much more money than the latter. But anyway, none of that really matters when criticising someone's behaviour.
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@bobrolander4344 "By denying free will, they open the door for anyone who wants to deny responsibiltiy." But that's not the point though. It is a very relevant and interesting question to ask - whether free will exists or not. Why would we want to refrain from investigating something and actually expressing our honest opinions on these topics because someone else can do bad things with this information? And how is this any different than the typical religious apologetic that by denying that God exists we open the door for anyone who wants to rape and murder? I seriously dislike this way of thinking - "don't investigate things because it might have bad consequences".
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@jandrews6254 Sure, but they complain about immigration, don’t they? Immigration is immigration.
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@colloquialsoliloquy6391 Peterson is often wrong and he makes esoteric connections that just aren't justified. For example, in his debate with Matt Dillahunty he wrongly claimed that one cannot stop smoking without a supernatural intervention. He also claimed several times in public talks (so not just interviews) that the depictions of entangled serpents in ancient art represent DNA strands, which is a wildly unjustified claim. His claims that one cannot be moral without a belief in God is just a regurgitation of what countless religious apologists have wrongly claimed before him. His opinion that Christianity should sit at the core of our moral values is just bad – I wouldn't even qualify it as wrong, just bad – not unlike Muslim apologists who claim Islam should dictate our moral values. His old fashioned traditionalist views on the strict gender roles men and women should abide - you can say these aren't exactly "wrong" since they are a subjective opinion, but they are completely at odds with goals of liberty, equality, freedom of thought and freedom of expression.
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@giannism6875 Well that's rich. Accusing me of pretending to my own nationality. Goes to show how dishonest and entrenched in your narrow worldview you are.
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That poll is apparently highly questionable anyway. But I just want to say that when constructed well, to minimize statistical biases, polls can be highly reliable and accurate and can involve surprisingly low numbers of people (e.g. in the thousands or depending on the scope even hundreds). There are ways to calculate the accuracy (and the margin of error) with regards to the size of of the sampling population, and there are some thresholds after which the accuracy gained by adding more individuals to the sample becomes statistically insignificant. In any case, the polls published by Pew Research Center tend to be quite reliable, with robust methodologies behind them.
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@tiffanywyatt5137 I guess...? I mean, I judge groups for some of the reasons mentioned above. Some of the groups I'm thinking of are even classified as "hate groups" in the USA, while others are literally terrorist organisations, so I'm not sure why there would be a problem with having negative feelings about them. And in regards to political groups, I believe it is quite alright to have positive or negative feelings about them without being bigoted, is it not? My other point was that a lot of specific criticism of systemic problems in some religions (e.g. Westboro Baptist Church, Jehova's Witnesses, The Church of Latter Day Saints, Catholic Church) are considered offensive even if they are well grounded, and even when they aren't meant to discriminate actual followers of those religions. E.g. accusations of child abuse in the Catholic church offended a lot of Catholics who claimed these were just nefarious forces trying to attack and undermine their faith, or worse, they took it as a personal attack on themselves rather than a valid criticism of the Church institution. So I don't believe it's reasonable to give blanket recommendations that people should just refrain from expressing opinions if they can offend people's sensibilities and biases.
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@tiffanywyatt5137 Absolutely not. You should be biased against those who actually commit crimes, not against a whole group arbitrarily defined by some biological characteristic. According to the FBI 2019 Uniform Crime Report, African-Americans accounted for 55.9% of all homicide offenders in 2019, with whites 41.1%, and "Other" 3%. Be aware that this is only a percentage of the total who commit violent crimes, which overall are a tiny percent of the population. Consider that the violent crime rate in the USA is about 366.7 per 100k inhabitants, meaning about 0.36% of the population — according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting 2019. Now according to the USA Census Bureau, for 2022, Black Americans represented 13.6% of the total population of 333,287,557 people. I'll spare you the calculations, but considering the percentages mentioned above, it means that of all the black people in the USA, only 0.002% of them are violent criminals. Would you seriously discriminate against a group on the basis that 0.002% of them are criminals? It's unjustifiable to the extreme. Now contrast this with what I said in my previous comments. Specific religious organisations and political groups promote specific values that are harmful, discriminatory and even racist, and I am against them doing that. Sometimes, expressing negative opinions of their practices leads to followers of those organisations to claim they are offended. Should I care about their offense? I believe I shouldn't. I also believe the same people should be far more offended at the bad shit done by those organisations than by people uncovering said issues.
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@tiffanywyatt5137 How so?
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That's exactly it. I think that the more transmissible and dangerous a disease is, the less rights you should have. We literally imprison people who harm others (e.g. murderers, thieves, rapists), and it's not really because they're bad people, but because of the harm they've committed and the danger they still pose to society. So on the same grounds we can justify limiting the rights of those whose infectious diseases pose severe health risks to others.
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@Frankie9553 "that even if you think he failed at one thing he succeeded in many more" I don't get what point you're trying to make. What does that have to do with anything?
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@Frankie9553 "he's at least smarter than you at business" Oh absolutely, I don't doubt that he's much better than any one of us here at business, but he wasn't smart about how he handled Twitter at all, which is the point of this conversation. Unless ruining twitter and blaming others was his intention all along of course - in that case I'd say he's succeeding.
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@Frankie9553 "please tell us what large company you run" I can speak for myself, but I'm not business savvy, nor have I even tried to run a company ever - not something I'm interested in. Not sure why you keep telling others that they haven't run large companies. Why does this matter to you? Do you think that only people who run large companies should have an opinion on Elon Musk's handling of Twitter?
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@Frankie9553 "if you wanna judge someone's business moves it's be good to have some knowlege on business yes" It definitely does help but it's not necessary. Otherwise nobody in society should be able to give their opinions on anyone else who has different credentials. We can all give our opinions on a song, or a book, or a movie, or on a piece of software, or on the practices of a business, or at the questionable conduct of a medical doctor, without needing to be musicians, book authors, movie directors, software engineers, business managers, or doctors ourselves. Besides, a lot of the things Musk is being criticised for aren't necessarily complex business models, but he's criticised a lot for his personal behaviour towards his product's user base and his customers, towards his employees, the controversial political opinions he expresses, the speculative misinformation he sometimes shares, and his behaviour in regards to valid criticism such as more bigotry being allowed on his platform.
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It's so hypocritical of Rubin to say he doesn't talk to people who insult him or attack him, yet he himself makes those types of inflammatory tweets directly insulting various liberals. That said, I do agree that Sam Seder & the people at The Majority Report have constantly been mocking and insulting Dave Rubin on their show, so I do understand why he'd decline to discuss with Seder. Of course, that would mean a lot more if Dave Rubin wasn't the dishonest hypocritical hack that he is.
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I think it's just that Dave Rubin is impressionable and he actually believes what his guests are telling him. So it's not so much that he doesn't challenge the conspiracy theorists, I think he trully accepts their ideas and is convinced by them. With that in mind, why would he challenge them?
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In regards to how someone can have an "awakening" at the age of 40 and do a 180 degree turn, that's totally believable and not really that impressive to be honest. Seth Andrews for example turned from a conservative evangelical radio host into an atheist advocating liberal values when he was in his 40s. And that's just one example, but there are others.
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@richardlawson6787 Is it that weird though? I think it's understandable that the more someone diverges from your own beliefs, especially on key issues, the less likeable they become to you. If not that, then on what would you base liking or disliking someone?
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@Steve-sg3uz Not sure what the point of your question is. They probably haven't tried gay sex because they don't find the prospect attractive, and they probably don't find people of the same gender attractive.
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You'd be surprised, but I've heard that kind of reasoning in the UK as well, also about Trump, from people who don't support Trump. It's weird. So I've heard these people say that Trump deserves to win because he's shown that he can delivers on his promises, but then they continue and say that he shouldn't win because it would be bad for citizens' civil rights. Make sense of that, please...
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I really don't understand what the point is. So basically David Pakman agrees that there are IQ differences in ethnic groups, but then goes on to explain some of the socioeconomic factors which have contributed to this. OK... and? What's the point? Is Harris's view that these factors have not influenced people's IQs? If not, then what exactly is the disagreement? And also, why the fuck is IQ such a contentious topic?
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You need to look at levels of religiosity though. https://www.pewforum.org/2018/06/13/how-religious-commitment-varies-by-country-among-people-of-all-ages/
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"Absence of belief in God" = Atheism!
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You would need a population more well-educated in civics. I for example, while highly educated in a STEM field, would not want to always have to inform myself about all these political debates, policies, potential consequences and so on, so I do not think I and others like me should be able to directly vote on such political issues. That's why we have people who specialize in these things, so that we can appoint them to make good decisions for us.
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What I can foresee is that there would be backlash against electoral reform, in the form of programmes like Fox News calling it an "attack to our democracy" etc.
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@spaghettimonstersjudgingyo504 Exactly. The most bewildering moment for me was when Tucker Carlson had a segment against "the tyranny of the metric system".
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That's... just how he talks. Weird thing to criticize.
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Where are you getting this information? If you look at statistics across Europe they paint a very clear picture that much higher percentages of people are non-religious compared to the U.S.A. https://www.pewforum.org/2018/06/13/how-religious-commitment-varies-by-country-among-people-of-all-ages/
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@giannism6875 When did I say that the developed European countries are the only ones? I talked about stats across Europe, and in that Pew article you can see that very few European countries match the religious intensity recorded in the U.S. and even then only for some categories but not for others. This isn't a binary thing between atheist vs. religious, this is about measuring levels of religiosity. Aside for the coloured maps you can also check the data tables linked on the right side of the article. You can see in that article that several of the countries you mentioned have a lower percentage of people who say that religion is very important in their lives compared to the U.S. Specifically, Bulgaria has 19%, Romania 50%, while Turkey has a higher level at 68%, compared to the U.S.A. which has 53%. North Macedonia unfortunately hasn't been tracked by the report, as they didn't seem to have data for them. But if you look at the overall levels, U.S.A.is far more religious when compared to ALL of Europe. Maybe it would have been better if we could have a breakdown on a state by state basis in the U.S. so we could how the distribution of religiosity differs in the U.S.A. versus Europe. That would indeed be interesting to check.
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@giannism6875 You became super defensive and angry when nobody is threatening you nor your livelihood. Stop making wild assumptions and stop throwing accusations and personal attacks when you don't even know me and you seem incapable of having a reasoned conversation. "you Anglo ancestry-ed Americans" "we are an amazing people strong in our orthodox faith [..] don’t ever call America more religious then all of Europe again. You know nothing of my homeland." I am not American, I am Romanian, from Romania. I grew up in a small village and then a small provincial town, and I have a somewhat large extended family in various villages spanning 3 counties, and my parents still share their time between their town apartment and their countryside village house. And I come from an Orthodox Christian family (like most people there). In my adulthood, I have also lived in Denmark and the United Kingdom, and visited much of Europe in the meantime, but I have never visited the U.S.A. So most of your boneheaded assumptions about me were wrong, but you are so quick to judge, so quick to jump to accusations and attacks and incapable of having a civil conversation. Throughout your comment, you again conflate religious affiliation with levels of religiosity, proven by your insistence to mention Turkey's religious affiliation yet again. Discerning attitudes at population levels requires statistical data (which is why I posted the PEW article), not personal anecdotes about your family or my family or any of our communities or upbringings. But you seem unable to understand that, and you get defensive when actual scientific findings contradict your personal opinions and observations (which is exactly the point). The PEW report looks at levels of religious commitment, not affiliation. While the article I previously linked was only a summary of the actual report, I will now link to the full 97-page PDF report, go over it and maybe learn something: https://www.pewforum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2018/06/ReligiousCommitment-FULL-WEB.pdf I will not reply to any more comments from you, because of your angry attitude and your personal attacks. Have a nice life.
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A Ghost Without a Past They do have a lot to do with Jesus. Just because you aren’t familiar with that expression of Christianity it doesn't mean you get to dismiss it as not really Christian. The Eastern Orthodox faith, along with Catholicism, has an almost 2000 years continuity, along with art such as paintings, architecture and music. You are probably thinking of the Protestant versions of Christianity which do not have icons and saints and relics.
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Thanks for posting this, it was an interesting read. I had a somewhat similar journey but I ended up in a very different place than you. I grew up as an Eastern Orthodox Christian in a very religious country. I was brought up religious, I used to go to church quite often and for a period of a few years I even hoped that some day I would become a priest. However, at the same time I was also very interested in stories, especially fairy tales and mythology. My grandma (a former secondary-school literature teacher) used to read me fairy tales in the evenings all throughout my kindergarten period. This made me want to read more fairy tales by myself, and my parents bought me a few fairytale books. Then when I was 8, I signed up to the local public library, and I would constantly borrow collections of fairytales, and at some point I stumbled upon a series of volumes of the Ancient Greek myths of gods and demigods, which I loved. Later on, when I read the New Testament in an abridged edition for children and teens (with pictures), I felt very guilty for a long time because I thought that Hercules was much more interesting than Jesus, and I didn't want that to be the case. Anyway, I used to read a lot of religious books and stories, but at the same time I also enjoyed more esoteric stuff, like Stephen King novels, Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, as well as quite a lot of science fiction (Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, etc.). I had quite a few conservative values derived from Christianity, and they were often at odds with the other stuff that I was reading, and I remember I used to wonder about how courageous some of these writers must be since they wrote stories and said things that were borderline blasphemous. Another thing that I think contributed to my now very liberal outlook were TV shows like Star Trek TNG and Stargate, where they explored a lot of fantasy scenarios and had very "enlightened" and liberal values well represented and justified on screen. With time, I kept distancing myself from the claims and conservative values of Orthodox Christianity. I used to read various testimonies from monks who supposedly met demons, and they never sounded too convincing, although they were quite scary, and I always found their claims sketchy when it came to Michael Jackson, Madonna and other bands and singers being satanists, or that barcodes represent the number of the beast (666). I also used to read encyclopedia entries about other religions, like Mormonism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Islam, and found it interesting that we didn't believe their claims nor worshiped their gods but we believed our religion's claims when they seemed to be the same types of stories and themes (supernatural beings, miracles, parables, teachings, redemption etc). Anyway, I eventually stumbled upon the "Root of all Evil" documentary by Richard Dawkins, and I listened in while some of my coworkers were debating about God (one atheist, one Christian) but never chimed in myself. I still believed in God, but I found more and more things troubling (like that documentary). Eventually I ended up watching various debates which included Dawkins, C. Hitchens and Sam Harris, and I was constantly amazed by how their points seemed far more reasonable than those of their religious opponents. That's when I realized I couldn't believe in God anymore, and I went on this investigative quest to learn more. I was in university at that time, and I had just started a Master's degree programme at a top university where I got an introduction in the philosophy of science and I learned a lot about scientific research methods. On my quest to redefine myself, I realized that I was in charge of my own life, and my values were no longer tied to the religious doctrines of my youth, and I could look toward the future. I ended up quite liberal, but I don't like positioning myself within a left/right paradigm as I feel it is an artificial and forced concept. I believe we should all express ourselves in ways that are meaningful to us, and try to not let traditions or religious norms hold us back. Of course, we should be mindful to not harm other people while doing this, and allow them the space and freedom to do the same. In my various readings (which even included fascist writer Giovanni Papini), the most appealing outlooks I found to be the one promoted by the Professor of Philosophy A. C. Grayling - enlightenment values about science, civil rights, equality under the law, tolerance of different lifestyles, freedom of expression, freedom to travel, an interest in social cooperation and helping each other out. I also found the existentialist outlook (Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus) mostly compatible with my own views. I lived in a Scandinavian country for several years, and found that the way their society functions very refreshing - while they do pay high taxes, they get a lot out of those taxes: state funded education at all levels, including University, state funded healthcare system, a focus on family life and a good work-life balance, and practical education levels which meant that they encouraged vocational training (e.g. carpentry, plumbing etc.) without assigning any stigma to it. Overall, this gave me a very positive view of what people can achieve when they care about the wellbeing of their communities, and of course the wellbeing of the individuals that comprise those communities. I saw how unburdened people were, that they could change their minds (several times) about the upper education and the type of job they wanted, and also how easy it was to start a business, as the risks in such decisions wouldn't threaten to ruin you because you always had the social safety net to rely on. Coming back to the so-called IDW, I really despise the views put forth by Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson (and I consider Steven Crowder an uncultured hack). I think it's because their views call us back to the same types of traditional and rigid norms that I left behind a while back, very much opposed my current outlook and aspirations. I still find Sam Harris interesting from time to time, and I found Steven Pinker's book "The Better Angels of our Nature" really interesting and impactful, proof that we as a society can indeed overcome our violent and animalistic impulses. Dave Rubin doesn't seem to have any real values, and is mostly a reactionary against the so-called "regressive left", and I dislike his constant pandering to the conservative values of his guests; I just don't like the guy. TYT also seem a bit... iffy. I sometimes enjoy The Minority Report - they have some really interesting points, but they can also be a bit childish at times. I still listen to a show called The Atheist Experience, although it's not as good as it used to be a few years ago, since a bunch of their co-hosts have left the show in the last 2-3 years.
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