Protesters shut down UVic Effective Altruism club screening of a TED Talk by Peter Singer, the utilitarian philosopher and animal rights activist who has argued that carnivorous animals should be holocausted for the greater good*.
However, it wasn’t Singer’s opposition to Predator Lives Matter that raised SJW ire:
The event, which featured a screening of a TED Talk on effective altruism by Princeton professor and ethicist Peter Singer followed by a Skype Q&A, was met with protest on the grounds of Singer’s past defense of the right of parents to euthanize severely disabled infants.
Protesters argued that giving Singer a platform was implicitly supporting the murder of disabled people, and that his views supported eugenics. Those in support of the event, meanwhile, argued protesters were infringing on people’s right to free speech. …
McOuat said the event was intended to discuss “practical ways we can end global poverty, promote animal welfare, and reduce existential risks like climate change.”
“For me, it just goes back to the fact that we’re not promoting his views on [euthanasia] at all,” McOuat said. “It’s just all about solving climate change and all the stuff that we can all agree on.” …
All the while, Singer’s TED Talk and Q&A continued, and the room grew cacophonous. Shouts of support for Singer’s free speech were met with chants of “eugenics is hate” and “disabled lives matter,” and neither side showed any signs of backing down.
Here’s the thing. As a subset of Silicon Valley’s rationality/transhumanism-sphere, the EA movement is highly intelligent, highly Jewish, highly autistic – and, of course, overwhelmingly liberal (this is meant to swiftly characterize, not to imply that any of these is a bad thing).
I was at EA Global 2016 and my impression was that a good 90% of them supported Clinton over Trump; most of the rest were libertarians, neoreactionaries, Thiel’s boys, or some conjunction thereof. I made a temporary alliance with a libertarian proponent of seasteading to defend Trump at Alexander Kustov’s stand devoted to immigration, where we gathered a small throng at the same time curious and bewildered by our political unorthodoxy. The ensuing debate, however, was very civil and pleasant.
This, perhaps, hints at the root of the problem. Whereas EA supports many “social justice” ideals, perhaps naively – as I pointed out, they tend to be avid pronents of open borders, even though its very doubtful that #WelcomeRefugees is ideal even from a strictly utilitarian, anti-national position – at heart they are high IQ liberals who tend to understand nuance and respect freedom of speech, whereas SJWs are average IQ authoritarian leftists who have no time for “freeze peach” or the smallest acts of deviationism.
As such, further collisions – or coalescence – are inevitable.
- EDIT: Was jst pointed out to me that the argument against the existence of predatory animals has been associated with some of Singer’s more radical fans, and not so much Singer himself: “Philosopher Peter Singer has argued that intervention in nature would be justified if one could be reasonably confident that this would greatly reduce wild animal suffering and death in the long run. In practice, however, Singer cautions against interfering with ecosystems because he fears that doing so would cause more harm than good.“
Both are fanatically anti white, both are hell bent on making any place that is white into non white. So while some might be interested in these bolshevik vs menshivik differences, I say to hell with all of them.
EA doesn’t have anything specific to say about that.
It can be used to argue against mass immigration as well, for instance, as I did here: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/immigration-and-effective-altruism/
So what exactly is EA? I clicked on your link, but it gave me no definition.
Short definition: Quantifying charity.
Wiki:
Examples:
This conflict is an old one, going back at least to the 70s, and some historical examples are vividly described in the Blank Slate. But I don’t think it is accurate to frame this as high IQ versus average IQ. Gould and Lewontin were not of average IQ, but were certainly ideologically opposed to various a priori reasonable hypotheses, some of which are now well-established empirical observations (heritability of IQ, for example). (Incidentally, Pinker is another example of a high IQ, liberal Jew who mostly tries to be an honest empiricist.)
By the way, there are guide-dogs in Moscow. I’ve seen them being trained on the escalator at Авиамоторная. I wonder what the going price is. Could it be a lucrative business to smuggle them into the EU?
The EA community’s response e.g. in the main FB group seems to have been mostly to kowtow to and sympathise with the protesters. I predict the slow death if EA as an autonomous movement as it’s culturally liberal population increasingly chooses to side with and placate the SJ anti-rational mob at the cost of EA rationality.
In other words, it’s another form of the Yudkowsky cult, right?
For some reason, I kept reading EA as “Effective Autism” and was wondering if this was a 4chan group-up on effectively deploying their weaponized characteristic.
Not really.
The concept of priority setting in international aid appeared in the early 1990s, and the first charity explicitly dedicated to effective giving (GiveWell) appeared in 2007. The concept of Effective Altruism evolved from those roots in the early 2010s to also encompass animal welfare and existential risks (the latter is where Yudkowsky latched on).
Kind of sounds like they’ve reinvented stoicism. Only you know, without being all manly and stoic.
I’m all in favor of civility, but if anyone ever seriously proposes that all (non-human) predator species be eliminated, so that bunnies and deer won’t have to suffer, I will be sorely tempted to act like a jerk.
Why that effectively altruistic jews think about
En masse immigration;
….
Disproportional and characteristic Jewish participation in this destructive ideologies???
In other words this effectively altruistic Jews already did self expiation??
A practical illustration of this was pointed out to me some years ago by one of my uncles, a doctor and professor of medicine. He had a winter home in Arizona. Although he was retired by that time, he retained a lively interest in his profession. He had read in the local news that several cases of bubonic plague had been reported in the state. This piqued his curiosity, and upon enquiring further, he discovered that the victims were men who had been prairie dog hunting – the plague-bearing fleas had jumped from dead prairie dogs to the hunters. Since most American doctors have never seen a case of bubonic plague, the cause of the illness was not determined until at least one of the men had died.
Arizona for years offered a bounty on rattlesnakes – one cut off the rattle, brought it to the county courthouse, and got a payment for it. This led to a decline in the number of rattlesnakes, which had previously kept the prairie dog population in check. In consequence, the number of prairie dogs had exploded, and ranchers were desperate to control their spread. By this time, the prairie dogs had come into contact with infected black rats that had entered the U.S. from Asia via ships docking in west-coast ports. The disease found a suitable vector in burgeoning population of prairie dogs.
Thus, as a result of wishing to eliminate the nuisance of rattlesnakes, Arizonans brought something much worse – a plague – upon themselves.
Singer is a kook.
“The EA community’s response e.g. in the main FB group seems to have been mostly to kowtow to and sympathise with the protesters”
Are we reading the same group? That’s not what I’m seeing.
Dalrymple, the sociopath, 😉
Someone explain me, please!!1
People who care only about themselves and have the same feelings (none at all) for close people as for faraway strangers are very common.
Yersinia pestis. Appears in Eastern Europe during the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age, at the same time as a truly vast wave of “migration” (traditional ravaging conquest?; or occupation of mysteriously and conveniently unoccupied lands?) from the steppe.
The natural reservoir of this horrid ailment being … da duh daaahh … the Bobak or steppe Marmot. A great big Russian and Eurasian prairie dog.
Rats? Pfft … a poor substitute.
http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674%2815%2901322-7
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27396172
Come at me, bro! I’ll bite ya!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_donald_photos/12092221316/