plato85

What can you say after reading something like this. Luckily for us in Australia it's illegal to post statistics so we can pretend there's no problem and we can call people 'ignorant' who say otherwise.

I think I know what you mean. After I read Evolution of Civilisations I thought I was completely interested in anthropology, so I read a book on anthropology that wasn't interesting in the least. So then I realised that what I must really be interested in is sociology. So I bought two second hand textbooks on sociology from a university, I think they were published by Oxford University Press but I've since thrown them out. Absolutely worthless. In the first book they bang on and on about Marx's theories, and in between Marx's theories they had statistics and trends of wage gaps, different wages between the sexes... The second book painted a picture of what it's like to live in every city and every town in Australia. Neither book had any theories about how civilisations rise and fall, they both obsessed about how some people earn more than other people. So I'm sitting there having read Evolution of Civilisations, and then reading the text books that university students are studying and it just blows my mind at how pointless those books are.

Excellent answer Erwin. I'll definitely be trying this. The next question then - rather than wasting time arguing individual political arguments, can we go straight to the source of the relativist ideology and undermine it?

We need people to think for themselves. Can we make it uncomfortable for people to not think for themselves? It sounds ironic to pressure people into conforming to thinking for themselves, but maybe it's not. The word you're looking for is amoral. Amoral sums up our age. People refuse to think; to stand up for their morals. This is an age of equality, as in all morals are equal. I've used this argument recently on a reddit post about how the Asian Olympics are going to include computer gaming as an event. I said in an amoral age gamers are equivalent to our best elite athletes. I was voted right down to the bottom, and then I found out everyone uses a different definition of the word morality. Today 'morality' is defined as 'right or wrong conduct'. The way philosophers use the word morality it is the entire set of values that people live by. You have to have an entirely different set of values to become a great athlete than to become a great gamer.

Thanks Tyler, that's what I was looking for. Question is how do we influence people we can't argue with?

I think the average IQ is 100 by definition. The other way of looking at it is Myers Briggs personalities. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. People can be divided into people who value truth and those who value feelings. People who value feelings are generally better at dealing with people, and they make up around 60% of the population.

After the latest Berkeley Riot, my Mum tried to defend the left wing rioters anger saying that it's bad for human rights that the right are using free speech to denigrate people, and that it happened in Germany in the 30s and lead to the holocaust. This was my reply: Maybe you're right, but at this point there are no Nazis, and no-one's going around beating up minorities, and there's a good chance it will lead to a much better government than the ones we've had in the past 20 years. Democracy is in a crisis all over the world because there are too many things we're not allowed to discuss. This Nazi narrative has been way over done and people are rebelling against it. Our epoch was born out of WWII, and our society is so obsessed with Nazis that they see everything through the prism of Nazis, as if history only began in the 1940s. It's almost like our society is so much against Nazis that we're ironically setting up the Wiemar Republic. Instead of Nazis, try thinking of history though the prism of guilt. People will accept guilt from someone else's moral code for so long and then rebel. A Catholic family might bring up a daughter with strict Catholic discipline, and that daughter will accept that moral code and feel guilty about her own thoughts. Eventually she will get over the guilt and rebel, and she'll become the biggest sinner around. Her family are partly responsible for her rebellion for controlling her with guilt. In the 1960s the left protested for free speech at Berkeley. That counterculture rebelled against the religious conservative moral code with sex, drugs, rock and roll, blasphemy, swearing. The religious conservatives need to take responsibility for creating that counterculture. The Wiemar Republic led inexorably to the rise of the Nazis. The rise of the Nazis was a counter culture which rebelled against Bolshevik Society. The Wiemar Republic was an amoral, all morals are equal, any thing goes, free love society, who preached open borders and accepted mass Slavic migration and a Zionist program. The Communists have to take some responsibility for the rise of the Nazis. They promoted their ideology and shamed conservatives who's establishment led them to WWI. Political correctness has become the moral authority of our time. People with conservative ideas have been treated as deplorables. "The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it." Politics has become completely one sided. If you ask whether mass migration makes our cities better or worse, you're racist. If you say that a stay at home mum can raise a child better than a working mum, you're sexist. If you think there are only 2 genders and saying otherwise is pseudoscience, you're homophobic. If you prefer immigration from Western cultures than non-Western cultures, you're xenophobic. If you argue that Islam is not a religion of peace, you're Islamophobic. All these political positions are apparently immoral, and conservative opinions are not allowed to be discussed openly. The politically correct shun people like Andrew Bolt and pretend they understand all sides of the argument. The British Empire didn't accept much immigration from non-Western cultures before we fought the Nazis, but now if you support the wrong immigration policy you're compared to a Nazi. Churchill fought off the Nazis, the Nazis were a strain of socialism, but now conservatives are compared to Nazis. The leaders of the communist revolution got into power by preaching love and peace, but their genocides under Mao and Stalin each slaughtered far more people than Hitler did. Obama got into power promising love and peace but he started bigger wars and slaughtered more people than Bush did, and then he had the tensity to accuse those who opposed to mass immigration of asylum seekers as heartless. Apparently only the right wing can be evil. Political correctness created Trump though shaming and it needs to accept some responsibility. There is an idea of a silent majority who don't stand up for their views because they are afraid of being seen as deplorable, because people say overbearingly in front of everyone that they are offended and that conservative views are unacceptable. They are the silent majority who would not dare say they support Trump in public, but voted him into office. How do you have an honest public debate if conservative opinions are politically incorrect? You need to tear down political correctness first. That's what the Republicans are doing. They are being deliberately un-PC to stir up hysteria and over reactions not hatred. The hysteria is showing how illiberal and over zealous the left have become. No one wanted Trump, they voted in spite of the hysteria and the fear campaign. The right used to feel guilty and shy away from causing outrage, but now they seek it out. The Left needs to take responsibility and start discussing these problems on a rational level rather than an emotional one. The left need a new counter culture if they want to counter the alt right.

Hi I'm new here, I don't know if this question is done to death but it seems to be a an important philosophical question. Plato was put to death for arguing rationally. Aristotle fled. Ayn Rand had a mental breakdown. I've just watched The Truth about Ayn Rand part 3. Stephan talks about Ayn Rand feeling like a failure because she couldn't get her political aims realised through rational argument. Stephan goes on to talk about how many people just don't have that rational part of their brain to argue with. Does he go further into this topic in another video? I find the things people disagree on to be the most interesting discussions and regularly take my arguments too far for timid people. My question is how do you know when something is worth arguing? How do you know where people's limits are? When and why is truth inappropriate? Can you ever win an argument with someone who thinks truth is relative or am I wasting my time?