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The feminist.
Didn't you say you got pulled into feminist studies by an ex? And that led to your hatred for people who actually agree with you on all relevant policy issues?
Is Jordan B Peterson's new website idea an atrocious one or reasonable one?
- Thread starter emax
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The feminist.
Didn't you say you got pulled into feminist studies by an ex? And that led to your hatred for people who actually agree with you on all relevant policy issues?
D
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Nobody forced me into it. I thought I would take some feminist classes to see what all the fuss was about and it was a huge mistake. I have had a strong hatred for feminism and identity politics ever since.
The other book you are referring to in your previous post is the Closing of the American Mind by Allen Bloom?
Have you ever read anything by Christopher Lasch?
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Well, we've been over this. You're a bigger proponent of identity politics than almost anyone here (and in the top 1% in the population, I'd guess). Supporting politicians whose policy agenda you oppose is exactly what identity politics is about.
Correct (though it's "Allan"). Not endorsing or anything, but at the time I read it, it was very eye-opening and thought-provoking.
And I'll check that other rec. You should check out Peter Lawler:
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/category/senior-contributors/peter-lawler
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Atlas Shrugged??
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DP isn't a right-winger in terms of his general thinking. Just really hates a subset of campus feminists, which turns him against the whole left.
That's a general thing in America, too. A big chunk of Republican voters (a plurality) opposes the party's economic policy but votes on racial/cultural issues or because they believe Democrats are corrupt, evil monsters or support policy that they don't actually support, like open borders or gun confiscation.
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A few days ago, he created a poll asking his subscribers whether a website of this sort would be of interest to anybody. Since the response was not overly supportive (from his own subscribers), he decided to scratch the idea as being too "polarizing".
The "plan" never even reached the development stage.
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In his private time? Probably a libertarian-leaning Democrat. Think Clinton without the hawkishness and apathy towards the security state.
In his public image? Firmly to the right.
Pro-capitalism and neoliberalism are not synonymous. And neoliberalism need not necessarily be a modification to liberalism so much as a tangential or supplementary ideology in furtherance of liberal aims. To imply that a market-based economy necessitates neoliberal extraction of wealth, foreign and domestic, and political dominance of shareholder interests is inaccurate.
Also, please tell me that Atlas Shrugged is not one of your favorite or most influential books...
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No. I've slogged through it, but I found it to be horribly written and juvenile.
As I said, DP guessed correctly, and I'm not necessarily endorsing tCotAM either. Just saying that when I read it, it made a big impression and was very influential to me (not that it would necessarily have the same impact if I read it at another time or that it would have the same impact on someone else--that's a very personal list).
D
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I have never voted for Canada's Conservative Party (I will in 2019 though). I have only voted either Green or NDP. Our politics and outlook on things are probably closer than either of us would care to admit.
You read articles from the ImaginativeConservative? I go to that site all of the time.
I am going to read this article by Peter Lawler first:
What Can the Puritans Teach Us about Philanthropy?
D
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The short essay Up From Liberalism (1959) by Richard Weaver is what turned me away from leftism:
You can read it for free here: http://www.unz.org/Pub/ModernAge-1959q1-00021
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So it was basically 'yelp' for people who may or may not want to avoid firmly left professors and their rhetoric. Or, at least get a sense of the severity of their leftist views. What's wrong with that?
According to the nearly incoherently angry people telling me about it online, it was a continuation of violence against professors and students who have been recently targeted (I assume with violence?) by the alt-right. Also something about a death threat at UofT, and Peterson being a bigot and such.
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As an Alumnus of UofT -- it's hilarious that any of the mass left coalition that attend / teach there would worry about being violently targeted. Again, it's the equivalent of white people in Greenwich being on edge due to the notion of genocide against them.
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Don't be silly, when anyone refers to the top 5 most influential books this one always cracks the list.
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I can't believe he ended the conversation just as it was getting good. Peterson and Pageau looked stumped there.
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Very good observations, an exquisitely tight cortex Mr Brothir, quite a delicious specimen you are.
1 - Weinstein agrees with Jordan on investigating religions to distill philosphical tools that can be used as a moral framework using the terminology "Wisdom" instead of a type of truth. Where they differ is in the values of moral utility to govern science or vice versa. Weinstein and Sam Harris are saying science will not only solve all our problems but also provide us with the ethical framework that we already distilled from wisdom, it is valued more and is at the top of the hierarchy wherein objective truth supersedes the moral framework we have built upon for centuries.
2- If you have time to dig into this you should check out the second talk Jordan and Harris had on Sam Harris's Podcast, they flesh out your conundrum here.
It is quite an interesting discussion here on the concept of truth where those who usually disagree with Jordan on this particular topic follow a dichotomy of ideas that aggregate themselves with conviction. His fans seem to enjoy the ontological approach, the abstract thinking of inquiry to a more holistic journey on ideas so conceptualization this form of "Wisdom" where moral framework governs the trajectory of objective truth is the most appealing approach towards a less perditious future of man.
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Hardly. No discussion to be had because you're clearly a CTer. As indicated by your linking of Peterson's "cultural marxism" diatribes to Yuri's pronouncements of doom.
The rise of "cultural marxism" as a right-wing fringe conspiracy is all there and documented, along with it's various strains from Lind and the LaRouche movement.
There's no connection between the Soviet actions as listed in Mitrokhin archive and Yuri's assertions about the fall of the "West" (his timeline being completely wrong) other than his use of terminology.
The actual actions taken in the Mitrokhin archive do not represent the picture Yuri paints, let alone the even broader allegations of "Cultural Marxism". They show a much more limited power, involvement, influence and effect. Including a lack of industriousness from KGB agents in the West (such as "Ref" or "Kardinal").
What's more we've seen the development of the Russian "soft power" method, and that they are just as happy using nationalist and ultranationalists as they were trade unionists or the like. Ideology plays little role in their pushing at the cracks, and yes the promotion of fake news has taken a substantially different turn with the internet.
The "Cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory replaces Soviet control with the idea of a (predominantly Jewish) cabal who have supposedly been responsible for everything Conservatives hate in the culture war, from environmentalism through to feminism, as a result of the escape of the Institute for Social Research from Nazi Germany.
This isn't even a theory about Soviet/Russian "soft power" (and it should be noted that the Mitrokhin Archive illustrates the extent to which Communism was anti-Zionist, and it's well known that the KGB distributed anti-semitic material as propaganda).
Peterson has jettisoned a lot of the baggage, and seems to use "cultural marxism" as a pejorative interchangeable with postmodernism, but it's pretty obvious that he's chosen it because of it's appeal within his target audience (the long history of a persecution complex from "paleoconservatives" and now the "alt-right" in the broadest sense).
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This is one thing that really annoys me about you. You seem to insist on there being a lack of clarity on the issue (and you've done this in the past as well) on my part. This literally is not a conundrum to me. The entire 13 minutes of that discussion is entirely trivial to me. I skipped to the very end after I made the last post (12:16), and heard Weinstein say "(...) how is it not, by just the virtue of the fact that it does something nothing else does (...)" and paused right there. From that fragment of his sentence, I know exactly what his point was, exactly what he was going to say later and that neither Peterson nor Pageau would be able to summon any counter to that.
That entire discussion may as well have been about whether or not water is wet. It really is that simple to me. There is nothing that can confound me, there is nothing that any of those three can teach me about the subject matter, and that's simply it. I am quite well trained in mathematics, computer science and logic, and through that education I have transcended this entire subject matter. That's how, even though I've never heard the term "performative contradiction", when Pageau said that I immediately knew exactly why that argument was false. There is nothing anyone can throw at me regarding this, that I cannot immediately dissect.
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I also think the "we're more holistic about it" argument is blatantly dumb. For instance, I can very easily form a holistic view regarding the science/ethics dichotomy. The analytical power of mathematics makes it very easy to establish a set of axioms that cleanly solves the point about the KGB scientist developing a deadly chemical weapon that Peterson brought up. Like I mentioned in my original post, that being a pursuit of science and that being an ethical pursuit of science are orthogonal. Pick one.
When you have, it's easy to backtrack from there into a set of axioms that justifies the one you picked. Obviously, Sam Harris and people who hold similar positions to him are not truly confused about it, but many of them lack the training in formal logic that gives them the tools to do just that. Thenceforth arrives the slightly confused "science can justify itself and will solve everything" position. I don't suffer from that limitation, and so I propose a more clear variant: "It is entirely possible, and quite easy, to form a set of axioms wherein scientific pursuit is well defined and constrained by ethical considerations, and a subset of those same axioms can also be used to decisively answer a whole range of moral questions regardless of whether or not they pertain to science specifically". Without internal contradictions, of course.
