I like that guy. Watched some of his videos.

Addendum: "If Stef is a con man, he's like the worst con man in the world." Heh.

Very good observations. Anyone who truly has strength of intellect, character, and self esteem - able to think for themselves - will not stick around FDR for too long.
This guy is great!

His followers are certainly dedicated recruiters, I'll give them that........dogmatic, "in your face" recruiters.

I think Stef has given up on convincing the world and what not and is now focused on just maintaining, exploiting and moderately expanding his following.
I dunno...I mean, although I had an initially more positive view of Stefan than I do now that was because I agreed with some of his conclusions, or at least his sentiments. I think it's more like certain people are attracted to the sorts of ideas he presents, and insufficiently independent of mind see/acknowledge how bad he is at presenting them. The same can be said for Rothbard's ethics, which are asinine non-arguments and have scads of followers.

In other words, I don't think Stef has ever been good at attracting/conning people, he just presents a niche that attracts certain people; and (often for a lack of anywhere else to 'belong') many of those people have simply stayed.

What I think is incredible is, here is this guy in his 40s who earlier this decade defended the war in Iraq, and is now lecturing people about what a cool super ethical guy he is and how many years he has been chiseling at being such a cool guy.

Danny Shahar wrote:

And then in the same video, he talks about not listening to what someone's saying and instead looking to see what they actually do. Unbelievable!

My understanding is, that part of the video is where he admits he is a shitty philosopher. He knows he's no match for brainpolice, so he diverts the focus away from ethics as a logical subject, to rest instead on his intuitive notion of what constitutes "ethical behavior".

Am I wrong, or isn't that the very definition of the ad hominem fallacy? People always conflate it with insulting the other party, but my understanding is that the true meaning of "ad hominem" was disregarding the person's argument on the basis of their behavior or some feature of their personality. Like saying, "you're fat, so you're obviously a bad philosopher and not living your values, so I don't need to refute, let alone listen to what you have to say," as he did with Roderick Long. He seems to be defending that as a valid way to debate. I mean, that's right on the list of logical fallacies, yet he's promoting it in his "debating tips" video!?!

Well Bigus, the other side of that coin is that Alex is many things, but he is not a fierce debater. He's much better in writing or in a congenial conversation than he is in an adversarial debate format. If he were more of a hard-a**, he would have nailed Stefan when he digressed and made him sound like he was being incoherent. And it's true that Alex didn't go into that conversation with a set plan of what he wanted to demonstrate, which is a problem when you're talking to someone whose skill is in rhetoric rather than analytical philosophy.

I mean, Stefan isn't wrong about the fact that he's a good debater and that the people who come to talk to him don't seem to be ready for what they're taking on. It's just that he's wrong about how good of a philosopher he is, wrong about how effective and appropriate his research strategy is, and wrong about the importance of listening to other people's arguments in doing good philosophy.

Dylan, I agree that he would be guilty of ad hominem if he were actually advancing an argument, but I don't think he is. He would probably want to say that you might be right even though you're unvirtuous or whatever, but that it's really difficult for him to get past your unvirtuousness or that it probably isn't likely that you truly understand the nature of ethics since you clearly haven't incorporated the ideas into your own life. At least that would be my guess.

Agreed. I mean, granted Alex was brought into the conversation by Stefan saying that he would "love to debate" him. But still, it was clear that he wasn't trying to get into an argument.

Can I pay you to do a debate with Stefan? Others might chip in too.

It'd be totally awesome
If I worked on that sort of incentive system, I'd be a stripper.