Welcome friends to yet another exciting penetrating episode of the new Discourses podcast.

I'm James Lindsay and I'm going to talk to you about cynical theories. This is a book that I wrote

with Helen Pluckrose. I'm not going to talk to you actually about the book itself. I'm going to

talk to you about criticizing the book. I'm going to criticize my own work because I keep seeing

criticisms of it come up and frankly contrary to what the people criticizing my work tend to think

they are not the best experts in terms of what might be a shortcoming or what might be

wrong or whatever with cynical theories because I wrote the book. I'm better at it than they are

and I really do mean that. I am relentlessly critical of my own work typically and I have put

more thought probably than anybody else into what I could have done better and so I'm going to

give the criticism of cynical theories that my critics wish they could so that there's

look pathetic by comparison and so they kind of come up in a variety of genres but primarily they

take the form that we don't really understand the philosophers that we talk about in particular

that we don't understand the postmodernist so I'm going to talk about some postmodernism not

really about postmodernism. I'm going to talk about how we engage the material or the postmodernist

to write cynical theories. I'm going to put that out there make that clear and it will not necessarily

refute what these people are arguing but rather it's going to defuse or defang their argument that's

the goal is I'm going to take the fangs off of that argument. I also want to give kind of a short

I want to keep this one relatively short some of my new discourses podcast recently recently

been running long. I want to keep this one a little bit shorter if I can but I want to give kind of

an overview genealogy of wokeness and it's very difficult to do because it actually combines a

lot of lines of thought this won't be complete but those are the kinds of goals that I'm going to have.

So let's talk about how we wrote cynical theories. We have this bizarre belief and

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