Aside from Ferguson strawmanning and ascribing motivation to Jonah, it drove me nuts when he would interrupt Jonah. If I recall Jonah did not interrupt him once.
I agree with Niall about the threat to morale from the despair in this country. It’s not just the overdoses being ignored. They aren’t outliers - they are the tip of an iceberg of people who feel they have no control over their destiny.
I agree with Jonah that there are signs of hope. The Free Press and this debate are among them. But in reality, very few people are reached.
Trusting technology will enable the truth to rise to the top, will make us like the passengers on the Titanic, trusting that technology can make us unsinkable, and we’ll slam right into that iceberg.
That iceberg may represent the silent despair Niall warns us of, but it is the trusting technology that will sink us.
Trusting the technology is giving up agency. And since it is a black box, it is unaccountable to us, doubling down on our lack of agency and control.
I disagree with Jonah that free speech prevails. The Supreme Court may seem to be protecting free speech by preventing govt intervention, but technology is not fair. Money buys share of voice, share of voice programs what we hear and silences questions. To level the playing field and make technology transparent and accountable, we need strategically smart regulatory intervention.
Fantastic debate. If this were a boxing match, Sir Niall would be a bloody mess in the corner of the ring, not knowing where or who he is. As Jonah says, America is a great country, and the Soviet Union was evil. If conservatives are now making relativistic comparisons between the two in a way that Chomsky and others used to, we are in trouble. If Ferguson’s goal was to shock us into choosing a better path for our country, he utterly failed. Reading his essay made me want to suffer a death of despair myself.
I appreciated Jonah’s remarks at the end, highlighting the differences between The Free Press and The Dispatch. TFP has some truly excellent essays from some of the best minds in our country. But at the same time, some of the output is terrible. To read their Front Page morning newsletter, for example, is to subject yourself every morning to a litany of why America is a crappy country and why you should feel bad about living here. The site can read like a never ending series of exposes on the excesses of the woke left. An important topic, to be sure, but I just don’t want all my news filtered through that lens. If TFP has an angle, that’s it. I became a paid subscriber when Douglas Murray started his year-long weekly poetry column, and I read every word of it. And it was life-enriching. But Ferguson’s essay was right at home with the negative part of what the site has to offer.
From reading both Jonah and Niall I thought Jonah had the best reasoning. After listening to this podcast, I was not persuaded to change my mind. Seems like Niall had a theory and simply cherry picked statistics that show similar trends. Including fentanyl deaths as evidence seems absurd to me and at that point Niall lost credibility. The DEI takeover on some elite schools was not convincing either. Jonah had reasonable responses. Thanks to TFP for this content
To my surprise, Goldberg won this excellent debate in the last 5 minutes when he reminded Ferguson that the foundation of the Soviet Union (Marxism) is fundamentally different and much less solid than the USA constitutional foundation.
Still, the Marxist capture of our universities, entertainment industry, media and some government institutions is real, worrisome and needs to be stopped. So, even if Ferguson might be overstating the Soviet analogy, it’s a good warning and must be listened to.
Yeah, I’m just not buying the Soviet comparison, which seems to be based in large part on an apples to oranges comparison between fentanyl and drinking deaths. The former is capable of killing each and every use, and the latter takes years and years of self destructive behavior.
I am a little more circumspect on this. Yes, Ferguson is stretching the analogy. And Goldberg seems to be reserving the Soviet term for other uses (expletives that can be used against the Right) and does not want Ferguson hijacking it (and asserting that it is present and the Left is an enabler).
Both men make remarkably strong cases in agreement. Goldberg seems more sanguine; Ferguson in panic. Perhaps each is showing his partisan allegiance.
Would like a rematch in two years.
I am concerned about the excess deaths of despair. We sure have become indifferent about White men which is a large portion of that statistic. The excess murders of Blacks by Blacks is also troubling.
Perhaps the State, and George Clooney, will sort all this out.
The discussion about declining life expectancy was frustrating to listen to as neither thought to point to real data on the causes. Yes fentanyl kills people. It is deadly and associated with despair. But our horrible diets kill significantly more and account for our decreasing lifespan. Soda, fries, chips, pasta, pizza, soda soda soda. And too much of it. We are addicted to sugar and carbs. Our economy is addicted to corn and wheat production as well as to an expensive heath care system focused more on screening than on generating health. This isn’t rocket science. And this isn’t what was going on in the Soviet Union and has nothing to do with Marxism. Talk about an elitist conversation! All the focus on chattering classes and Yale and Harvard etc. Goldberg is right that you have to look deeper. Real facts and real people’s lives. It you are looking for a good Christmas Tree to hang these problems I would suggest something that is truly at the heart of American life over the last forty years: policies that serve the rich and tell the poor and the middle class they should be happy with the “freedom” to try to find nifty ways to succeed in spite of them.
Honestly I’m not sure why this is a topic for an Honestly debate. The vibe I got is Ferguson is married to a rather idiosyncratic analogy and spends the time pompously defending it saying that Goldberg isn’t recognizing how things are in the US, when clearly he repeatedly is. Talking about the problems in this country is important, or wondering about how each individual society that came before us went into decline, but arguing over this point for an hour seemed like an inferior use of Goldberg’s intellect. Unfortunately this was my first time listening to Ferguson who left me with nothing new to think about, no insights impactful for my life. With more humility he might realize that his arguments are neither interesting nor persuasive.
Yeah, exaggeration and alarmism as argumentative/rhetorical tactics are tricky and fraught with risk. Very easy to go overboard at the cost of credibility, and as stated earlier, I find it irritating when it comes from the left. Is there anything more irritatingly pretentious than some lefty who does something massively noisy and performative in order to “raise awareness” about this or that, as though the rest of us are just sleepwalking through life? I guess the difference is that I’m familiar enough with Ferguson that he has built-up “credibility capital” with me that enables me to go easier on him when he takes things a bit too far. And I think he’s right that past victories are no guarantee we’ll keep on winning, particularly if complacency causes us to gradually squander all of our advantages. An axis of authoritarian dictatorships with combined control over most of the world’s largest landmass is nothing to take lightly.
Ferguson is either knows what he is doing by writing and debating that the United States is essentially the Soviet Union today, that is garner a sense of shock and awe, or is a complete kook. I say it is the latter. The fact that Ferguson is basing his opinion on comparing the overdose of fentanyl to Soviets or Russians dying of drinking too much Vodka is ridiculous. Goldberg pointed out how even in a free society there are problems. Look at the period when there was a "War on Drugs" that started during proliferation of drugs coming into our inner cities during the 80s and 90s, the Reagan administration and into the Bush administration, which was a response to the and some might argue that period was the best time in the United States. And I ask where Ferguson gets his data that the average life expectance is 40. If that was true that would be front page news in this country, it would be hard to miss or ignore. Ferguson sounds like a fear monger for his own gain. He is the equivalent of a "doomsayer" and you get a better sense of this when you hear him on the podcast. Ferguson also points to what is going on, on campus as to more evidence of, us becoming a Soviet country, and although what is happening on campus is troubling there is a counter group in MAGA. What I am saying is Ferguson just focuses on the negative but does not acknowledge what is going on to address what Ferguson is saying is evidence or problems that this country is sliding into the way of Soviet Russia. Goldberg mentions it and is more rational.
Two intellectual titans for whom I have the highest regard. I think Niall was guilty, at most, of overstretching an otherwise useful metaphor to raise the alarm about very real crises. My respect for him prevents my being over critical of this, although I'll admit I'm less forgiving of catastrophism as a tactic when used by people I think less of. I don't have much patience with those who shriek that anthropogenic climate change is an "existential threat," for instance, or those who constantly grouse about inequality without acknowledging that the economic engines that create staggering wealth for a few have also been more effective at lifting billions out of poverty than anything else that's ever been tried. What can I say--I'm gentler on my fellow travelers and fall short of perfect consistency. And I'm honest about it.
Ferguson simply can't show sufficient comparisons and Goldberg keeps pointing that out. No one is saying there aren't problems but I was surprised how evasive and strawmanny Ferguson was throughout the debate. The issues is whether we are living in late Soviet America and it seems the answer was definitively "no" for many well articulated reasons by Goldberg. The problems are very real, the enemies are obvious, but the comparison is very stretched despite Ferguson clinging to it.
That was a great back and forth which I really enjoyed that was well moderated. MM is no ahistorical dummy and could have easily over-inserted himself in between the two and he didnt. I get Ferguson' points about the urgency both the issues he raises, but he is too attached to what is all too clever an analogy. It reminds me of another conservative writer who once wrote a piece saying North Korea had more freedom in its medical system than Canada did. Its one of those exercises where once you get rid of all the differences, any two objects of comparison are the same. Great, so whats the utility in this exercise ?
Anyways, well done to all involved in this episode.
Ferguson keeps repeating the mantra about 100,000 over dose deaths from Fentanyl as the reason for the declining mortality among young men in the US. Goldberg and Ferguson completely ignore the Failed MRNA Shots that no one in the press outside of Substack will even address, The millions of dead young people because they trusted their leaders and took an unproven and unsafe medical intervention to treat something that was never dangerous to them and the vast majority of the people if properly treated with low cost generic drugs. There are legitimate estimate that the serious adverse side effect rate from the MRNA shots is 1 in 800 shots to 1 in 1200 shots. the fact that they ignore this FACT renders much of this conversation mute.
Its also rich to have a Brit who ignores his own countries hard turn to the left into socialism which has failed everywhere its ever tried trash the American experiment.
Millions of young people dead from vaccines? I know what I see with my own eyes. During the time when the vaccines were first being mandated I taught at a state university where there were mandates. I interacted with large numbers aof students, all vaccinated, everyday and they all survived. My son who was in his late 20s at the time, lived in San Francisco where you had to show proof of vaccination to get into a bar. Not a single one of his many friends, all of whom were vaccinated, suffered any side effects. Then there are my friends, their young adult children, their children’s friends. Hundreds of young people whose stories I’m aware that f. And I’ve heard of absolutely zero bad effects of the vaccine. Zero. Do you expect me and others to ignore the reality we see in real life in favor of a reality spun on the rumor mill on the internet?
Aside from Ferguson strawmanning and ascribing motivation to Jonah, it drove me nuts when he would interrupt Jonah. If I recall Jonah did not interrupt him once.
I agree with Niall about the threat to morale from the despair in this country. It’s not just the overdoses being ignored. They aren’t outliers - they are the tip of an iceberg of people who feel they have no control over their destiny.
I agree with Jonah that there are signs of hope. The Free Press and this debate are among them. But in reality, very few people are reached.
Trusting technology will enable the truth to rise to the top, will make us like the passengers on the Titanic, trusting that technology can make us unsinkable, and we’ll slam right into that iceberg.
That iceberg may represent the silent despair Niall warns us of, but it is the trusting technology that will sink us.
Trusting the technology is giving up agency. And since it is a black box, it is unaccountable to us, doubling down on our lack of agency and control.
I disagree with Jonah that free speech prevails. The Supreme Court may seem to be protecting free speech by preventing govt intervention, but technology is not fair. Money buys share of voice, share of voice programs what we hear and silences questions. To level the playing field and make technology transparent and accountable, we need strategically smart regulatory intervention.
Fantastic debate. If this were a boxing match, Sir Niall would be a bloody mess in the corner of the ring, not knowing where or who he is. As Jonah says, America is a great country, and the Soviet Union was evil. If conservatives are now making relativistic comparisons between the two in a way that Chomsky and others used to, we are in trouble. If Ferguson’s goal was to shock us into choosing a better path for our country, he utterly failed. Reading his essay made me want to suffer a death of despair myself.
I appreciated Jonah’s remarks at the end, highlighting the differences between The Free Press and The Dispatch. TFP has some truly excellent essays from some of the best minds in our country. But at the same time, some of the output is terrible. To read their Front Page morning newsletter, for example, is to subject yourself every morning to a litany of why America is a crappy country and why you should feel bad about living here. The site can read like a never ending series of exposes on the excesses of the woke left. An important topic, to be sure, but I just don’t want all my news filtered through that lens. If TFP has an angle, that’s it. I became a paid subscriber when Douglas Murray started his year-long weekly poetry column, and I read every word of it. And it was life-enriching. But Ferguson’s essay was right at home with the negative part of what the site has to offer.
No thanks. The Dispatch reigns supreme.
"Perhaps this is because Jonah hasn't spent time in the academy like me..."
barf
From reading both Jonah and Niall I thought Jonah had the best reasoning. After listening to this podcast, I was not persuaded to change my mind. Seems like Niall had a theory and simply cherry picked statistics that show similar trends. Including fentanyl deaths as evidence seems absurd to me and at that point Niall lost credibility. The DEI takeover on some elite schools was not convincing either. Jonah had reasonable responses. Thanks to TFP for this content
To my surprise, Goldberg won this excellent debate in the last 5 minutes when he reminded Ferguson that the foundation of the Soviet Union (Marxism) is fundamentally different and much less solid than the USA constitutional foundation.
Still, the Marxist capture of our universities, entertainment industry, media and some government institutions is real, worrisome and needs to be stopped. So, even if Ferguson might be overstating the Soviet analogy, it’s a good warning and must be listened to.
Yeah, I’m just not buying the Soviet comparison, which seems to be based in large part on an apples to oranges comparison between fentanyl and drinking deaths. The former is capable of killing each and every use, and the latter takes years and years of self destructive behavior.
I am a little more circumspect on this. Yes, Ferguson is stretching the analogy. And Goldberg seems to be reserving the Soviet term for other uses (expletives that can be used against the Right) and does not want Ferguson hijacking it (and asserting that it is present and the Left is an enabler).
Both men make remarkably strong cases in agreement. Goldberg seems more sanguine; Ferguson in panic. Perhaps each is showing his partisan allegiance.
Would like a rematch in two years.
I am concerned about the excess deaths of despair. We sure have become indifferent about White men which is a large portion of that statistic. The excess murders of Blacks by Blacks is also troubling.
Perhaps the State, and George Clooney, will sort all this out.
The discussion about declining life expectancy was frustrating to listen to as neither thought to point to real data on the causes. Yes fentanyl kills people. It is deadly and associated with despair. But our horrible diets kill significantly more and account for our decreasing lifespan. Soda, fries, chips, pasta, pizza, soda soda soda. And too much of it. We are addicted to sugar and carbs. Our economy is addicted to corn and wheat production as well as to an expensive heath care system focused more on screening than on generating health. This isn’t rocket science. And this isn’t what was going on in the Soviet Union and has nothing to do with Marxism. Talk about an elitist conversation! All the focus on chattering classes and Yale and Harvard etc. Goldberg is right that you have to look deeper. Real facts and real people’s lives. It you are looking for a good Christmas Tree to hang these problems I would suggest something that is truly at the heart of American life over the last forty years: policies that serve the rich and tell the poor and the middle class they should be happy with the “freedom” to try to find nifty ways to succeed in spite of them.
Luxury beliefs. Rob Henderson has been quite compelling in this area.
Honestly I’m not sure why this is a topic for an Honestly debate. The vibe I got is Ferguson is married to a rather idiosyncratic analogy and spends the time pompously defending it saying that Goldberg isn’t recognizing how things are in the US, when clearly he repeatedly is. Talking about the problems in this country is important, or wondering about how each individual society that came before us went into decline, but arguing over this point for an hour seemed like an inferior use of Goldberg’s intellect. Unfortunately this was my first time listening to Ferguson who left me with nothing new to think about, no insights impactful for my life. With more humility he might realize that his arguments are neither interesting nor persuasive.
Yeah, exaggeration and alarmism as argumentative/rhetorical tactics are tricky and fraught with risk. Very easy to go overboard at the cost of credibility, and as stated earlier, I find it irritating when it comes from the left. Is there anything more irritatingly pretentious than some lefty who does something massively noisy and performative in order to “raise awareness” about this or that, as though the rest of us are just sleepwalking through life? I guess the difference is that I’m familiar enough with Ferguson that he has built-up “credibility capital” with me that enables me to go easier on him when he takes things a bit too far. And I think he’s right that past victories are no guarantee we’ll keep on winning, particularly if complacency causes us to gradually squander all of our advantages. An axis of authoritarian dictatorships with combined control over most of the world’s largest landmass is nothing to take lightly.
Ferguson is either knows what he is doing by writing and debating that the United States is essentially the Soviet Union today, that is garner a sense of shock and awe, or is a complete kook. I say it is the latter. The fact that Ferguson is basing his opinion on comparing the overdose of fentanyl to Soviets or Russians dying of drinking too much Vodka is ridiculous. Goldberg pointed out how even in a free society there are problems. Look at the period when there was a "War on Drugs" that started during proliferation of drugs coming into our inner cities during the 80s and 90s, the Reagan administration and into the Bush administration, which was a response to the and some might argue that period was the best time in the United States. And I ask where Ferguson gets his data that the average life expectance is 40. If that was true that would be front page news in this country, it would be hard to miss or ignore. Ferguson sounds like a fear monger for his own gain. He is the equivalent of a "doomsayer" and you get a better sense of this when you hear him on the podcast. Ferguson also points to what is going on, on campus as to more evidence of, us becoming a Soviet country, and although what is happening on campus is troubling there is a counter group in MAGA. What I am saying is Ferguson just focuses on the negative but does not acknowledge what is going on to address what Ferguson is saying is evidence or problems that this country is sliding into the way of Soviet Russia. Goldberg mentions it and is more rational.
Much as I respect Ferguson, I don’t see how you can score that as anything but a decisive win for Goldberg.
Two intellectual titans for whom I have the highest regard. I think Niall was guilty, at most, of overstretching an otherwise useful metaphor to raise the alarm about very real crises. My respect for him prevents my being over critical of this, although I'll admit I'm less forgiving of catastrophism as a tactic when used by people I think less of. I don't have much patience with those who shriek that anthropogenic climate change is an "existential threat," for instance, or those who constantly grouse about inequality without acknowledging that the economic engines that create staggering wealth for a few have also been more effective at lifting billions out of poverty than anything else that's ever been tried. What can I say--I'm gentler on my fellow travelers and fall short of perfect consistency. And I'm honest about it.
Ferguson simply can't show sufficient comparisons and Goldberg keeps pointing that out. No one is saying there aren't problems but I was surprised how evasive and strawmanny Ferguson was throughout the debate. The issues is whether we are living in late Soviet America and it seems the answer was definitively "no" for many well articulated reasons by Goldberg. The problems are very real, the enemies are obvious, but the comparison is very stretched despite Ferguson clinging to it.
That was a great back and forth which I really enjoyed that was well moderated. MM is no ahistorical dummy and could have easily over-inserted himself in between the two and he didnt. I get Ferguson' points about the urgency both the issues he raises, but he is too attached to what is all too clever an analogy. It reminds me of another conservative writer who once wrote a piece saying North Korea had more freedom in its medical system than Canada did. Its one of those exercises where once you get rid of all the differences, any two objects of comparison are the same. Great, so whats the utility in this exercise ?
Anyways, well done to all involved in this episode.
Ferguson keeps repeating the mantra about 100,000 over dose deaths from Fentanyl as the reason for the declining mortality among young men in the US. Goldberg and Ferguson completely ignore the Failed MRNA Shots that no one in the press outside of Substack will even address, The millions of dead young people because they trusted their leaders and took an unproven and unsafe medical intervention to treat something that was never dangerous to them and the vast majority of the people if properly treated with low cost generic drugs. There are legitimate estimate that the serious adverse side effect rate from the MRNA shots is 1 in 800 shots to 1 in 1200 shots. the fact that they ignore this FACT renders much of this conversation mute.
Its also rich to have a Brit who ignores his own countries hard turn to the left into socialism which has failed everywhere its ever tried trash the American experiment.
Millions of young people dead from vaccines? I know what I see with my own eyes. During the time when the vaccines were first being mandated I taught at a state university where there were mandates. I interacted with large numbers aof students, all vaccinated, everyday and they all survived. My son who was in his late 20s at the time, lived in San Francisco where you had to show proof of vaccination to get into a bar. Not a single one of his many friends, all of whom were vaccinated, suffered any side effects. Then there are my friends, their young adult children, their children’s friends. Hundreds of young people whose stories I’m aware that f. And I’ve heard of absolutely zero bad effects of the vaccine. Zero. Do you expect me and others to ignore the reality we see in real life in favor of a reality spun on the rumor mill on the internet?
So glad Jonah came on because saying we’re in Soviet America right now is insane!