@cristaiji already made a post about this, and since I'm late to the party and had a ton of things to get off my chest, rather than a comment I'll just make another post (and sling mistah some sats).
OK, so Dave Smith (comedian, commentator, libertarian, famously anti-war) and Doug Murray (British journalist, gay, right-wing/pro-West intellectual) had a showdown on JRE2303. It was... a mess.
Literally five minutes in, before they had basically warmed up or Rogan even asked a question or structured the convo, Murray hurled an unfounded/silly/pathetic accusation at Smith... both Smith and Rogan sort of "uhm, hang on... wth??" (somebody in @cristaiji's post #942073 said the episode was filled with ad hominem attacks and that was indeed how it opened, a problem neither of them could get away from for the rest of the following 3 hours.)
...and that's how it continued. Smith making standard libertarian non-interventionist arguments, and Murray... strawmaning and dilly-dallying on "only experts may opine" and "enemies of the West are BadPeopleTM."
Murray, a journalist who was great on the plandemic (no, stop auto-correcting this word!) and has been a lone voice of British reason during the woke wars of the last decades, has completely had fame/attention go to his head. He was smug and pathetic, and didn't bring anything of substance; one-liner quotes from famous authors and politicians, of very dubious and questionable relevance. He insisted on first-hand accounts and/or credentials — as if one may only know things about the world or opine on them if one had geographically been to places or studied them at accredited institutions. (Nevermind forest-for-the-tree effects or one-sided reporting capturing the view of someone.)
Like, wtf dude.
The worst, most revealing bit of intellectual hubris came when, 30 minutes or so into Ukraine-Russian (aggression, invasion, national sovereignty, provocation, Nato expansion etc, etc—very standard, almost yawn-provoking convos), Murray says about the Nato expansion/provocation
No, that's not why Putin invaded Ukraine.... He invaded Ukraine because he wanted to annex the country... because it's what he's dreamt since the falling down of the Soviet Union...
To which Joe expertly interrupted
"You know what he dreams?"
This is my very reasonable, very balanced, very sane objection to warmongering in the West and the extreme anti-Putin mentality that runs the intelligentsia show: you don't have a vision into the intention of foreign leaders. You can't just assert that this specific piece of information is what's true among the myriad of propaganda lies that said leader allegedly spouts. Put differently: if everything Putin and his captured media outlets say are lies and propaganda tools, why in the world are his words about the Soviet Union (taken out of context) and anything that might-possibly-potentially-maybe fit a Making Russia Great Again agenda undeniably, unfakably true and something we must take with the highest amount of seriousness?
The epistemological burden there, and misconstruction of reality is pretty pathetic.
The convo over foreign military adventures and especially Ukraine/Russia plus Israel/Gaza makes for very odd positions. There are no consistent political positions anymore, a close friend of mine wisely says—only to come out strongly in support of Ukraine and wholly having swallowed the Russia boogeyman story. Still scratching my head in confusion.
You can sort of make a Matrix of peeps (super-simplified obviously, but bear with me):
trying to entangle the underlying principle, then, I'm struggling with the consistency.
- Wokey: if you're on the side of Gaza and the side of Ukraine, I guess the consistent narrative here is that "victim/weaker party" is always in the right—even if you get absurd things like "Gays for Palestine" (one of the worst places for gays in the world...) and hardcore leftists pushing for more war.
- Doug Murray: Western democracy values are good (Israel relatively more democratic/enlightened than its Arab neighbors; Ukraine relatively more democratic/enlightened than Russia)
- Neocons: warring for realpolitik is good, I guess? Israel is ally of America, Ukraine is/was turning into European vassal state; better to opposite and overthrow.
- Dave Smith: he would obviously say he's anti-war, and not anti-Ukraine but in the many convos he has publicly that's how he comes across: war/military conflicts are bad seems like a reasonably consistent position; Israel is a worse aggressor in the Middle East, and can just stop, plus Ukraine being propped up by Western money/guns, and so the West can just cut that off and stop, and the war ends.
The convos about who provoked who, and who first aggressed against who, becomes insanely intertwined in both of these. Favoring one story in one of the conflicts rarely has that person favoring the equivalent story in the other conflict.
It all comes back to these value judgments over who's worthy, who's worth supporting and why. Nothing seems that obvious to me... and anyone with a strong position one way or another strikes me as wrong/mistaken.
Excellent extract:
Smith: "Why do we become these collectivists?" ...why isn't it horrible for the people, the millions of people living in Gaza, who did not start a war? We are not collectivists....
"Killing innocent people is wrong," Dave Smith said, and that's basically the only consistent, sane, skeptical, respectable position to hold here. Everything else is hidden in the informational warfare fog.
I was profoundly unimpressed by Murray.
Here's Jonathan Newman for Mises.org completely eating him for his errors:
Murray didn’t really point out what Smith gets wrong in his anti-war, libertarian view of the history of US military entanglements. He only resorted to logical fallacies like attacking strawmen, appealing to “experts,” and ad hominem. Instead of participating in a good faith debate over the arguments for and against particular wars, the state’s intellectuals quash the idea of a debate. If they do find themselves in one, they dismiss the other side for not being one of the officially recognized experts on the matter.
I have 3 or 4 of Murray's books. I will not be buying the new one.
Those are my, um, 100 sats.
read in the newspaperslisten on a podcast is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge," is probably what Murray, who is undoubtedly very knowledgeable about a lot of things, is experiencing when listening to other less credentialed people, and I sympathise with that. BUT, he's being very lazy with how he expresses his frustration, which I think makes him look very bad. More interesting and productive would have been to reflect on, and propose an idea, a solution to bad/wrong online speech.