Hypocritical or contradictory

[Anonymous No.13480603]

Finished reading Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker.

>page 166 – "Human life has become more precious, while glory, honor, preeminence, manliness, heroism, and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded.”
>page 169 – “Their norms for everyday conduct shifted from a macho culture of honor, in which affronts had to be answered with violence, to a gentlemanly culture of dignity, in which status was won by displays of propriety and self-control.”
>page 220 – “Today, women make up a majority of university students.”
>page 225 – “the values of Western countries have been getting steadily more liberal (which, as we will see, is one of the reasons those men are so angry)”
>page 235 – “Better-educated girls grow up to have fewer babies, and so are less likely to beget youth bulges with their surfeit of troublemaking young men.”
>page 252 – “As a feminist-era husband”

>page 297 – “There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.”

Insults men and praises women. How isn't this sexism against men? Argues that manliness is backwards, but multiple times he refers to great scientists as conquerors of famine and disease.
>page 247 – “only the callous would deny that the conquest of disease, hunger, and illiteracy are stupendous achievements”

Is it autism?

Reading this book feels like I'm tripping through cognitive dissonance. What other books can give me this feel?

[Anonymous No.13480630]

>>13480603
Unironically The bible

[Anonymous No.13480647]

>>13480603
>enlightenment now
>nothing actually about enlightenment

Oh this reminds me why pinker is a pseud faggot.

[Anonymous No.13480652]

>>13480603
Page 140, he writes a warning against dehumanizing other people. We should avoid saying things such as “politicians are pigs”

But later on, he writes:
>page 218 – “These threads confirmed that racists may be a dwindling breed”
>page 279 – “Suicide rates rise sharply during adolescence and then more gently into middle age, where they peak for females (perhaps because they face menopause and an empty nest)”

Like he says "the human moral sense is not particularly moral"

>>13480630
Then at least post some examples. I'm agnostic btw.

[Anonymous No.13480667]

>>13480603
I feel a little autistic reacting to cherrypicked quotes but I just have to air my thoughts on this: honour and heroism are not symptoms of "excess testosterone" but prized traits in dire situations/conditions of scarcity for a reason -- would Pinker belittle their utility in the struggle against Nazi Germany in the Second World War? "Never was so much owed to so few." Their relative decline correlates to the present "peace" (or rather, alienated warfare carried out by machines in faraway regions) which is fine, but it's jumping the gun to sing happily of their irrelevance. Only an inveterate liberal would talk this way of course, someone who believes in the end of history and the futility of all future struggle. Leftists (being people engaged in communal struggle against a powerful status quo) value these things as much if not more than whatever conservative stereotype Pinker is trying to channel. It's like Lewis says: "We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

[Anonymous No.13480781]

>>13480647
This is probably my main issue with his book.
How is any of this actually enlightement? I get what he means, but he seems to distort and cherry pick his own choices of who the Enlightened people are.

Wasn't Karl Marx an Enlightened individual? He was in the last century and look at the horror he brought.
Wasn't fascism Enlightenment before WW2?

Pinker has the benefit of modern times to pick whoever he wants to represent progress. But even this isn't perfect.

>On page 405, he mentions Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
When Gandhi's wife was suffering from pneumonia, the British doctors told him that penicillin will save her.... but Gandhi refused and called the medicine alien. She died. Then later on, he got malaria and asked the doctors to help him out. He also said Hitler isn't such as bad man and told the British to let the Nazis occupy them.

Martin Luther King cheated on his wife many times. he also laughed as his friend raped another woman.

>page 91 he mentions Nelson Mandela, the Nobel Peace Prize winner
He was a terrorist who bombed civilians. The Christchurch terrorist attacker wrote in his manifesto that he expects to eventually be released from prison like Mandela... and to win a Nobel Peace Prize as well

>on page 316, he mentions Barack Obama and his Nobel Peace Prize
But everyone knows he didn't deserve it. Obama himself admitted that he didn't understand why he got it.

>page 285, he mentions Woody Allen
Yeah... Allen seems to be a pervert.

>page 262 and 263, he mentions Louis CK
This guy has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women. He admitted they were all true.

>page 252, Thomas Edison
He was a lazy conman, he tortured and killed his assistant with radiation, and he was a jealous dick towards Nikola Tesla.

On page 14, Pinker admits many past Enlightenment thinkers were racists, sexists, anti-Semites, slaveholders, or duelists. But he tries to dismiss it as "men and women of their age, the 18th century" But many intellectuals aren't such amazing people even today.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !mxvabIoSIE No.13480800]

Peven Stinker

[Anonymous No.13480809]

>>13480603
>166 – “While a vision of world peace may have given John and Yoko some good songs”
I raged a little when I read this. Yoko has no good songs.

Source:
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdZ9weP5i68
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbGuxGGOIV0

[Anonymous No.13480813]

>>13480630
Come on man, post something. Lately, I'm having serious doubts about my atheism/agnosticism.

[Anonymous No.13480817]

>>13480603
Taleb BTFOs Pinker so you can safely ignore him.

[Anonymous No.13481072]

>>13480817
One of my favorite writers. I'll definitely check it out.

[Anonymous No.13481212]

>>13480603

Literally all great conquerors, artists, serial killers, and just about any man that has done anything has done so because:

>they wanted to conquer or impress at the behest of their harpy of a mother
>they wanted some pussy so bad that they were ready to risk it all

this is an indisputable truth that nobody can refute. who raises these tyrants and conquerors for sons anyway? is it not the women?

[Anonymous No.13481466]

>>13481212
you forget about all the fags

[Anonymous No.13482690]

>>13480813
>I have doubts about my doubts
Just say that you believe already. You will be able to be happy again.

[Anonymous No.13483173]

>>13480603
god these satanists need to be stomped out of existence

[Anonymous No.13483191]

Pinker is a BS vendor.

[Anonymous No.13483209]

>>13480652
>>13480603
>page 235 – “Better-educated girls grow up to have fewer babies, and so are less likely to beget youth bulges with their surfeit of troublemaking young men.”
>page 279 – “Suicide rates rise sharply during adolescence and then more gently into middle age, where they peak for females (perhaps because they face menopause and an empty nest)”

[Anonymous No.13483321]

>>13483209
Good Lord, how the hell did this manage to slip past the editor? No one can possibly say with a shit eating grin, all of this quoted nonsense is the reason why we currently live in the best of times. I sincerely hope all of these quotes are fake.

[Anonymous No.13483406]

4chan hasn't had the impact people think

[Anonymous No.13484767]

Its kind of bullshit. I agree with the thesis that shit is generally getting better but it has nothing to do with masculinity and everything to do with institutions and economic development. He's a fag. But he does think women are inferior to men intellectually at least

[Anonymous No.13484933]

>>13480603
>There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.”
I wouldn't take it so personally or as sexism OP, as much as ignorance. For instance: women did not evolve in a vacuum, the only reason they thrived was because of the very violent, "conquistador" men he puts down.

[Anonymous No.13484943]

>men bad
>women good

[Anonymous No.13484949]

>>13483406
i for one get all my humor from google searching "bitch jokes," but not before i briefly peruse "classical art by european phenotype"

[Anonymous No.13484951]

>>13483406
>proceeds to bot search "nigger jokes" ad nauseam

[Anonymous No.13485716]

Ass

[Anonymous No.13486196]

>>13480603
>>page 235 – “Better-educated girls grow up to have fewer babies, and so are less likely to beget youth bulges with their surfeit of troublemaking young men.”

What's so objectionable about this?

[Anonymous No.13486256]

>>13480781
>Wasn't fascism Enlightenment before WW2?
uh, no?

[Anonymous No.13486295]

I'd rather read the actual book instead of cherrypicked quotes.

[Anonymous No.13486304]

>>13486256
I don't know what that r*tard means but fascism is obviously in many regards an Enlightenment ideology, as almost any ideology of the period is. Modernist type.

[Anonymous No.13486305]

>>13486256
How about you read some Adorno because it definitely was?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment

[Anonymous No.13486317]

>>13486305
>A jew who won't stop whining about why we can't have nice things anymore because the Holocaust happened, and that everything that led up to it is fascism, so it must be true.

[Anonymous No.13486358]

Stinker is just another hysterically optimistic high priest of neoliberalism.

Suggestion: gas chamber.

[Anonymous No.13486362]

>>13486317
That's an objective, pure reason based argument if I've ever seen one.

[Anonymous No.13486722]

>>13480817
Taleb is a fucking useless kike

[Anonymous No.13486744]

Why do I feel such disgust and shame for feminist "men"?

[Anonymous No.13486766]

BRUH

[Anonymous No.13486779]

>>13486304
It is a postmodern ideology but it ultimately rejects the enlightenment, see Carl Schmitt.

[Anonymous No.13486787]

>>13486766
It really hurts to read garbage condensed this densly.

[Anonymous No.13486958]

>>13480603

>How isn't this sexism against men?

By definitions of sexism commonly offered by feminists, it is. But... Which of these statements do you actually think is untrue? A couple of them are facts that aren't even slightly controversial...

[Anonymous No.13486969]

>>13480603
This is why we can say with complete certainty that leftists and liberals are lower than rats.

[Anonymous No.13486992]

>>13483209

Those statements do not contradict each other...

[Anonymous No.13487004]

>>13486766
Why are jews like this?

[Anonymous No.13487008]

>>13480603
Which one of your quotes says anything about backwardness? The closest is 'other symptoms of excess testosterone'. It's neutral otherwise.

[Anonymous No.13487349]

Every improvement is a result of technology, completely irrelevant to the Enlightenment, which was actually destructive to society, only the aforementioned technological innovation keeps us afloat.

[Anonymous No.13487761]

>>13483209
what would Oswald think of Pinker?

[Anonymous No.13488249]

>>13486992
Of course they don't, idiot. They point out Pinker's lack of awareness of noticing this correlation, which ends up saying "educated women are choosing not to have children and are killing themselves because of it (and that's a good thing!)."

[Anonymous No.13489434]

>>13480603
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

[Anonymous No.13489778]

>>13488249

>idiot

"Empty nest syndrome" is about people with children that have moved away not people who have never had children.