Twitter was David’s public platform and tools for practicing a new language – clear and understandable for everyone, it was a space where he made friends and enemies.

Only David's replies are saved in Twitter archive. Visit the external links to see the full discussions. If the tweet being replied to was deleted, it's gone.

Tweets 7,501 Replies 51,144 Retweets 24,559 Everything 83,204
Fri 10 Jul 2020 10:45

@dominichills5 @SMBHarris1 @SirPaulHartley @STimpromptu @jasonhickel I know about the historical material, which is systematically anecdotal & not statistical despite the fact empirical, e.g., archaeological evidence is available (been working with .@davidwengrow on this). The modern statistics have been challenged by .@jasonhickel amongst others

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Fri 10 Jul 2020 10:40

@dominichills5 @SMBHarris1 @SirPaulHartley @STimpromptu @jasonhickel I don’t remember seeing Pinker face off against the spokesperson for an Indian or Latin American farmers union, or shanty town dweller movement in Africa, describing actual conditions on the ground. Those guys WERE on the air twenty years ago.

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Fri 10 Jul 2020 10:39

@dominichills5 @SMBHarris1 @SirPaulHartley @STimpromptu @jasonhickel this is what amazes me – when you see debates about global poverty now, actual organisations representing and campaigning for the global poor have been basically squeezed out. Unless I’m missing something.

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Fri 10 Jul 2020 10:38

@dominichills5 @SMBHarris1 @SirPaulHartley @STimpromptu @jasonhickel yeah then if some people get poorer, cook the books and pretend it didn’t happen – which necessarily, I should emphasise, means creating structures to shut them up when they try to point it out, so only people like Pinker himself get heard on the subject

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Fri 10 Jul 2020 10:36

@LiegeOf @spectraldiscord @STimpromptu @jasonhickel I thought the use of “scientism” was just meant to suggest Pinker does think psychology is a positive science, & that social problems can be reduced to equations, thus justifying anti-democratic technocratic rule by people like himself. But that was just my reading.

Fri 10 Jul 2020 10:28

@SMBHarris1 @SirPaulHartley @STimpromptu @jasonhickel so yeah, I’d say that Pinker is being directly racist in his argument. Plus it’s an apologia for what was basically the worst behaviour in human history with the possible exception of Genghis Khan 6/

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Fri 10 Jul 2020 10:25

@SMBHarris1 @SirPaulHartley @STimpromptu @jasonhickel since “the West” (term basically used as a substitute where 75 years ago the same person would have said “the white race”) & the West alone made our present wealth, security, & freedom possible, including that of the survivors of its various genocides 5/

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Fri 10 Jul 2020 10:23

@SMBHarris1 @SirPaulHartley @STimpromptu @jasonhickel so what Pinker is insisting is that the forces that conquered the rest of the world, massacred, raped, enslaved, & tortured millions, destroyed whole civilisations, were just behaving normally (everyone was a Hobbesian monster back then), but really they were the good guys 4/

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Fri 10 Jul 2020 10:21

@SMBHarris1 @SirPaulHartley @STimpromptu @jasonhickel instead he decided to argue that only “the West” & Enlightenment produced all that good stuff, no one else, despite the fact that Enlightenment thinkers never suggest anything of the sort (quite the opposite reality) 3/

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Fri 10 Jul 2020 10:19

@SMBHarris1 @SirPaulHartley @STimpromptu @jasonhickel this would be wrong, since Hobbes was wrong & Pinker cherrypicks the evidence, but he could have done it by pointing out how explicit ideas of freedom, equality, rule of law, developed as they did across the world & came together. He chose not to do that 2/

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Fri 10 Jul 2020 10:17

@SMBHarris1 @SirPaulHartley @STimpromptu @jasonhickel oh I’d say Pinker’s argument overtly racist. Look, you could make an argument it’s only through discovering principles of rational liberal governance, doctrines of equality before the law, etc, that we overcame our violent Hobbesian past 1/

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Fri 10 Jul 2020 03:00

@ItzSmiT we don’t have a lot of statues of Muhammed in America. Actually I think it’d be kind of haram anyway.

Fri 10 Jul 2020 02:56

@ztarasj I wanted to do essays about Tarantino’s Hollywood and the Joker, showing that they were both movies where the real villain is the audience. But who had time & especially energy to sell them.

Fri 10 Jul 2020 02:01

@ztarasj I make occasional efforts. I did a good review of Parasite with Nika that N+1 was about to run, then changed their mind during the pandemic. There’s always the Batman thing…

Fri 10 Jul 2020 01:43

@adambanksdotcom @STimpromptu @jasonhickel his name was on the flight logs of Epstein’s private jet. https://t.co/7s5tSHk6Ky

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Fri 10 Jul 2020 01:04

@ThisOneQuestion I don’t think the authors can imagine equality being anything other than symbolic.

Thu 9 Jul 2020 19:27

@STimpromptu @jasonhickel … “because the overall percentages are going down.” What struck me was that almost anyone else would have at least pretended some kind of sympathy for all that suffering, but for him, being right & the other side being wrong was all that seemed to actually matter to him.

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Thu 9 Jul 2020 19:23

@STimpromptu @jasonhickel gotta admit I saw a little clip of him in a debate, and instantly decided he wasn’t a particularly well-meaning person. Someone was saying the total numbers in extreme poverty had gone up & he replied without missing a beat, “that doesn’t matter …”

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Thu 9 Jul 2020 10:32

@ozofperception yes I’m never sure which of those accounts to take seriously and to what extent

Wed 8 Jul 2020 11:15

@ScaleSilver49 @jasonhickel I really don’t understand my generation, let alone the boomers who are just before me. Do they just not care what they’re passing on to their children?

Wed 8 Jul 2020 01:38

@ScaleSilver49 @jasonhickel So it’s exactly his complacent attitude which ensures capitalism won’t reform itself but will just get worse until the seas boil & we all die. Kind of awful thing to do to your children

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Wed 8 Jul 2020 01:36

@ScaleSilver49 @jasonhickel Odd use of “we” – if everyone hated racism there would be no racism. Capitalists only spread the wealth around in mid-century because they were afraid of communism. Now there’s no reason so the poor are getting poorer

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