See
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity [PDF]
by Carlo M. Cipolla
I think that’s either the quasi-strawman/slippery slope argument or the delusional fear JP has. Either it’s genuinely believed that it’s the first step to gulags or it’s facetiously presented as such. I’m not sure which.
I had thought about responding more to other points you made, and I may later, but let’s look at this part.
Certainly. Here are some of his claims.
This particular quote shows up a lot, but here is one cite:
Here is his tweet:
I think he’s fucking nuts. Your thoughts on this? What do you think about feminists and their unconscious wish for brutal male domination?
andy posted a few of his other claims. We can start there.
Other people have posted this
Please connect the missing dots between using “zhe” and then killing at least 100 million people.
You claim everyone is avoiding actual discussion of this thoughts so here is an opportunity to discuss.
I had thought about responding more to other points you made, and I may later, but let’s look at this part.
Certainly. Here are some of his claims.
This particular quote shows up a lot, but here is one cite:
Here is his tweet:
I think he’s fucking nuts. Your thoughts on this? What do you think about feminists and their unconscious wish for brutal male domination?
andy posted a few of his other claims. We can start there.
Other people have posted this quote, which is from his OpEd.
Please connect the missing dots between using “zhe” and then killing at least 100 million people.
You claim everyone is avoiding actual discussion of this thoughts so here is an opportunity to discuss.
:dubious: Do we? All of us?
In the way that JP likes to use it to construct strawmen. Yes. We do. All of us.
Marxism killed a hundred million people? Really? I hate communism as much as Joe McCarthy, but that number still seems at least an order of magnitude too high.
That seems pretty close if you include China: certainly well within an order of magnitude.
This site give the death toll for the Stalin regime at 20 million and Mao’s regime at 40 million for a total of 60 million. So 100 million maybe high but it’s not implausible.
Yeah, it does jibe within the range when you talk about global totals and especially if you consider “collateral damage”. But that only points out the disparity in saying that it is the sort of thing to where you can slip down the slope just for being required to be consientious about someone’s alternative pronoun convention in academic circles. Yes, the pronouning bit can be at times, outright precious (“zher”?). But really, who’s getting hurt, just roll your eyes and deal with it, Professor.
Marxism =/= Stalinism and Maoism.
Or are we going to start blaming Capitalism directly for every atrocity by capitalist adherents?
Because in that case I’ve got some Middle Passage, British Raj, Congo Free State and Nazi Holocaust figures I need to add up, amongst others…
He isn’t fucking nuts.
He is, however, FAR less smart than he thinks he is. Peterson is another classic example of a guy who presents as super intelligent to people who want to hear his message. He is poised, confident, and a good speaker who sprinkles smarty-pants words in there.
He as also, however, Peter Principled himself way above his level of competence. Peterson presents himself as an expert on many things he is not at all expert in, and it shows. But since he’s developed a fanbase that has made him rich, it’s working for him.
The adjective “brutal” wasn’t in the original tweet. You may not think it matters but it doesn’t give you the appearance of making your argument in good faith.
He didn’t say it in that Tweet, he said it in this podcast.
In another day and age he’d just be the crank professor that, safely tenured, pontificates about how the world is going mad and every so often publishes and most of the print run is sold at his own and other college bookstores to burden grad students. You sit through his course, grind your teeth and collect the credit-hours.
Today he has YouTube and an audience of people who are wowed at the dight of an actual live academic who says what they like.
I really don’t know. As I said up-thread, I was only aware of him because a guy linked to one of his videos and I only watched enough to get turned off.
I wonder how much he believes in his message and how much is an act to get rich.
Go ahead a click on the video that Miller shared. He linked to the location in the video, so it only takes one minute of your time.
What do you think about feminists and their unconscious wish for brutal male domination?
So much of Peterson’s dreck reminds me of Wolfgang Pauli’s apocryphal quote “That is not only not right; it is not even wrong.”
(i.e. even a wrong statement can serve some edifying purpose if it is substantial and well-argued).
Always lean towards the money explanation. Always.
He is also a crank professor, of course, as JRDelirious said. There’s a BILLION of these people. Just the other day a professor got on CBC and argued that “Paw Patrol” was secretly indoctrinating kids into a neo-liberalist cult. He is currently enjoying the experience of being dragged on Twitter with sarcastic jokes, but seriously, this kind of stupidity is oddly common in tenured professors, whose job security and isolation from the real world can result in a stew of ridiculous ideas and total, unflinching belief in personal infallibility.
An infinite amount of time. There is no expiration date for the existence of an unjust law which could be enforced any time at the whim of some official’s discretion. Would you argue any different?
Because someone calling a transwoman “him” is expressing the opinion that the person is in fact male and would be prevented from doing so. Or perhaps they’re simply insisting on addressing people by their sex and not their gender. And the opinion that someone is a male is not inherently offensive.
In the second hypothetical Duke is apparently of the opinion that the student is black/AA, and the student seems to share that opinion. Duke is free to express that opinion through any means other than racial epithets. There is no loss of the ability to express an opinion, only a relatively small limitation on how it may be expressed. The two situations aren’t at all the same thing and the further fact that racial epithets are universally offensive (for this purpose) and gender pronouns are not, only adds to how they are distinguishable.
Because terms which are offensive only in certain contexts might depend entirely on the subjective feelings of the listener. And the law, in multiple contexts, does not particularly care about the subjective feelings of any specific person because that person may be irrational and unreasonable. So it adopts the standard of a fictional reasonable person. And such a person need not be inherently offended by the use of gendered language in and of itself. Also, I would think the intended meaning of the word “fag” would be evident from context. Should a gay person be able to claim a legal offense just because someone used that term to clearly indicate a cigarette in their presence?
No, I characterized your argument properly. Talking generally about how intelligent and educated people can be wrong and stupid, or citing Ben Carson, proves nothing about whether Peterson is wrong or stupid, generally or in any specific instance. And many of Peterson’s points concern human behavior, and since he is a qualified expert (impressively so) in that field then there is no appeal to authority. There is also no appeal to authority for the general argument that Peterson’s academic and professional accomplishments indicate a presumption of intelligence. That would be the common understanding of the significance of such things. Unless you are arguing that the PhD and teaching at Harvard are completely meaningless? If your own resume/CV were put up against Peterson’s who do you think most people would guess was more intelligent and more generally apt to be right? Do you really feel such a determination would be baseless?
I’m not here to defend everything Peterson has ever said, and I don’t think he would either. But his credentials are not insignificant and generally speaking create a presumption that can’t easily be dismissed, especially when discussing human behavior. So yes, simply citing those credentials is enough when the majority of his critics, who don’t even possess such credentials, limit their own attacks to things like “he’s stupid/crazy.”
And I think the only link between pronouns and Gulags Peterson would make is that some people on one side of that issue wish to legally enforce their own ideas of acceptable speech on others. Controlling speech in such a manner is a hallmark of authoritarian gov’ts, certainly a valid comparison in kind even if not in degree. The Gulags, of course, are one historical example of what happens when a gov’t can criminalize broad categories of speech. I will add that the law professor who encouraged me to read, and constantly referenced, *The Gulag Archipelago * was as left-wing as they come.
So showing a 4 you decided to double down? Good strategy.