source-library

CONTRA REACTIONARY IDEOLOGY

Their Talkers

Their Talkers

This section is in need of a rehaul.

• What’s so bad about PragerU?
  • It’s not a real university, but rather a conservative think tank which benefitted early on from funding by wealthy conservative donors. This is not a non-partisan group by any means.
  • They’ve taken up unscientific stances on a variety of issues, ranging from climate change to trans issues to evolution.
  • Plenty of PragerU videos bring on people who have no expertise in the field they’re talking about. Here’s a few examples:
    • “Comedian” Steven Crowder, who talks about democratic socialism
    • NFL player Burgess Owens, who talks about slave reparations
    • Bjørn Lomborg and Alex Epstein, who have both been discredited by the scientific community yet have several videos on PragerU talking about climate-related issues
    • Dinesh D’Souza, who has been a very controversial political figure who has no degrees in political science or related fields yet is brought onto PragerU to speak about complex political issues
  • Hours upon hours upon hours of content has been made debunking PragerU on nearly every topic it covers.
• What’s so bad about Candace Owens?
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE5j0LRxR8Y I need to work on this section later tbh
  • Cited by the Christchurch shooter in his manifesto as who “influenced [him] above all”: https://www.mamamia.com.au/candace-owens-manifesto/
  • As late as 2016, she ran a publication which was staunchly anti-Trump, and afterwards set up an anti-bullying website Social Autopsy which was heavily criticized by moderates, the right, and the far-far right
    • While she claimed that liberals and progressives were the main drivers in shutting down Social Autopsy and that this moved her to the right (“I became a conservative overnight … I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls … Social Autopsy is why I’m conservative”), the main drivers were actually from 4chan. This suggests her very reason for becoming conservative was misguided.
  • https://newsone.com/3848636/candace-owens-receipts-con-artist/ openly partisan, might have a few useful things
• What’s so bad about Nick Fuentes?
  • https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1196604409607794688.html
  • https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNGRQi2kyMcIKblmDeRRw89k6yii8shIC
  • He doesn’t just joke for the laughs, there’s beliefs underlying those jokes which he wants to see spread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrBbZq7GddI
• What’s so bad about Andy Ngo?
  • https://twitter.com/RespectableLaw/status/1163895246213779458?s=20
• Thomas Sowell
  • https://dawsonvosburg.medium.com/whats-wrong-with-thomas-sowell-464baab5978e critique of his broader narrative about black culture
  • https://www.evangelicallaborinstitute.org/post/is-welfare-to-blame-for-joblessness-among-black-folks more about black joblessness and countering that narrative

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Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous

• Langbert et al. 16
  • Used to assert that a majority of college and university professors in the humanities departments are Democrats and thus are ideologically inclined to further a Democrat agenda
  • The study is fine and has real uses, but those who use it ignore that the Democrat:Republican ratio is skewed due to most of those professors not being registered to vote nor being affiliated with either party - this means it’s hard to evaluate the political stances of those professors as a whole because we don’t have enough info for many of them
  • Medium: Boedy 18 is a good think piece/debunking article
  • add together the number of professors not affiliated and not registered, and it gives us a serious issue with the Democrat:Republican ratio’s reliability
• Rind et al. Controversy
  • Paper on the harms of child sexual abuse
  • Universally condemned methodology. Their definition of “harm” excludes short-term effects.
  • “The Rind paper has been quoted by people and organizations advocating age of consent reform, pedophile or pederasty groups in support of their efforts to change attitudes towards pedophilia and to decriminalize sexual activity between adults and minors (children or adolescents), and by defense attorneys who have used the study to minimize harm in child sexual abuse cases.”
• George Borjas’s Mariel Boatlift study (more info)
  • Used by anti-immigrant folks to assert that low-skill mass immigration hurts wages for everyone
  • David Card’s older analysis of the same material found different results
  • More debunk material for this one, and a bit more
  • George Borjas even believes that immigrants are net contributors: https://web.archive.org/web/20190119083531/https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/fs/gborjas/publications/popular/CIS2013.pdf “Of the $1.6 trillion increase in GDP, 97.8 percent goes to the immigrants themselves in the form of wages and benefits; the remainder constitutes the “immigration surplus” the benefit accruing to the native-born population, including both workers, owners of firms, and other users of the services provided by immigrants.”
  • Check out this doc too
• Borjas 06
  • Claims that immigration is associated with lower in-migration rates, higher out-migration rates, and a decline in the growth rate of the native workforce.
  • Peri & Sparber 10 addresses methodological flaws in Borjas 06
  • Check out this doc too