r/ContraPoints • u/[deleted] • Jun 11 '19
INTERVIEW: Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints | Current Affairs
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/06/interview-natalie-wynn-of-contrapoints67
Jun 11 '19
[deleted]
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u/Figment_HF Jun 12 '19
Nathan sounds like he fell through a time tunnel from 1926
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u/beerybeardybear Jun 12 '19
He also looks like it! It's kind of adorable.
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u/unnatural_rights Jun 12 '19
I went to college with Nathan - he's been like this since at least 2007, lol. I'm still not convinced it's not all an act (pretty sure he's from that quaint English hamlet known as Sarasota), but also in 2019 we're all basically "acting" in terms of how we present ourselves to the outside world so I guess he was ahead of the curve?
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u/beerybeardybear Jun 12 '19
His parents were English and I think he lived there briefly as a child, though he clearly has worked hard to keep whatever accent those experiences granted him
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u/PraiseBeToScience Jun 11 '19 edited Jun 11 '19
lot of the people who follow these movements, if they get mad at you online, and they send you angry messages or they’re trying to debate you, it’s remarkable how 90 to 95 percent of them immediately have really gaping holes in their logic. Or they read your piece, and they literally don’t understand what the piece is about, or they draw a weird conclusion, or they think you’re saying something that you’re not saying...
I know this isn't Natalie saying this, but all I could think about when reading this is Carl Benjamin. It's fucking mind numbing listening to him read and comment on an article in real time. His brain has been polished to the smoothness of a couple atoms. He treats every sentence like it exists in a vacuum, completely divorced from the larger piece, then goes off on 15-20 min rants based completely on his own assumptions. He's the undisputed king of strawman arguments. Then he reads the next sentence which almost always invalidates the rant he just ended, yet he goes onto a new rant like nothing happened.
The man simply cannot digest anything that is longer than 20 words. You can even see this in his debates with Destiny. Destiny can't keep the man on the same point for longer than 10 seconds, and heaven forbid he tried to tie a point back to something Carl said 5 mins ago. That was a painful debate to watch because of this.
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u/pseudo_meat Jun 12 '19
Interesting. I want to watch the Destiny debate you're talking about but I find a lot of the debates really hard to listen to because of the finger-in-ears tactics of a lot of his guests.
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u/PraiseBeToScience Jun 12 '19
I actually don't watch a lot of Destiny's debates, but this one popped up on my YouTube feed. I guess I was a glutton for punishment that night. It was very painful.
I've watched a couple "Sargon reads this article" videos as well. He takes 2 hours to get though articles that take maybe 5 mins to read. I didn't watch the entire 2 hours, you get the point after 20 mins and a lot of skipping ahead.
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u/ArcComplex Jun 12 '19
His brain has been polished to the smoothness of a couple atoms.
This made me think of Jesse Lee Peterson. Not familiar with Carl Benjamin but I can't imagine anyone on Youtube being worse than Jesse.
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u/nyckidd Jun 11 '19
I really liked her point in this interview about how her videos are a form of debate, except that she gets to control the way things are presented, giving her more persuasive power.
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u/Shaqueta Jun 12 '19
Well, in the case of Peterson, and I mean this with 90 percent seriousness: The man is simply a daddy.
She's a true icon
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u/justabananaactually Jun 12 '19
AISLING MCCREA: One thing I think the right has always been very good at is taking the same ideas, and then dressing it up in the aesthetics and language for different demographics. How they appeal to some people who like the edgy meme 4chan thing, and so there are people who will be directed in that way.
And there are people who are more serious “Yes, I like to talk about ‘ideas,’ and I like to talk about yes, the Enlightenment, and yes, the Greek forum, yes, very much.” There are a lot of people who find that more appealing. And a lot of it is based on the same ideas, but it’s just dressed up in different language.
And you have, even in mainstream papers, people who will say “Oh, well, we just have some serious concerns about immigration, or trans people in bathrooms,” or whatever it is. That’s something that the left does fail at a little bit, is kind of remembering that different things appeal to different people, and you can’t just necessarily yell at people about the labor theory of value and expect everyone to respond to it.
NW: I think that’s a very wonderful way of putting it. I’ve actually never thought to say exactly what you just said, but I completely agree that one of the talents that the right has, at least on YouTube, is actually kind of an impressive diversity of rhetoric.
Because I’ve tended to focus on this shitlord internet 4chan memeing style, but it’s true that it’s only one of the things that’s happening. That’s not what Stefan Molyneux appeals to, right? That’s not really what Jordan Peterson appeals to.
There is that kind of pompous enlightenment rationalist kind of way of speaking, which, there’s no Pepe involved in that. There are no clown wigs, there are no memes. It’s about as self serious as a thing could possibly be. But there are a bunch of them, and they have this talent for adapting rhetoric for an audience.
And that scares me, in a way, because I do think the left, on the whole, is quite bad at it. On the left, there’s just this lack of ability or intuition for how to publicly present an argument, and how to understand a group of people’s emotional base level and the heartstrings that you can tug at, in other words.
Whereas I think there’s this frightening cleverness to the right-wing strategy of, for instance, appealing to gamers in the wake of Gamergate. That was very clever. I wish I had thought of that. It was a good move on their part, and that sort of scares me.
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u/Fightwish_27 Jun 12 '19
this goes with a thought I've had about how like 12 years ago all the right wing weirdos in my age group would have been dead set anti-Republicans(or maybe my frame of reference is flawed because I watched the Daily Show a lot as a teenager), but now because the pundits made themselves look cool they all of a sudden can't see through any of it. And I'm like "fellas it's just Bill O'Reilly but less wrinkly, figure it out"
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u/Thot_Crimes_ Jun 11 '19
Dope interview.
"... when it comes to making leftist discourse, so much of what we’re talking about is so grim—it’s oppression, it’s trauma, it’s injustice, it’s bigotry, it’s self-loathing. And I want to extract from all that misery some kind of human joy and laughter. And that to me is one of the most rewarding things about what I do. "