@BalarkaSen the audio of him explaining it is good too, the article is huge, this is the guy wrote the huge Ben Shapiro essay I think was posted here before
i feel like he acts inflammatory to get people to read his books but then they're not particularly unorthodox or even interesting given the tradition he's writing in
“But here the left and academia actually bear a decent share of blame. Why is Jordan Peterson’s combination of drivel and cliché attracting millions of followers? ...Another part of it, though, is that academics have been cloistered and unhelpful, and the left has failed to offer people a coherent political alternative. Jordan Peterson is right that people are adrift and in need of meaning.”
I think mostly the Peterson community is unfamiliar with philosophical literature, which is the medium he uses to communicate his ideas (which one may call propaganda) in an attractive fashion
I think a big part of it for me is that, to the extent that I’ve been ideologically swayed, it’s been towards some notion of Enlightenment values and norms
@Balarka maybe it's like an americanism that has become the standard language but i wouldnt use "radical" for anyone who's just part of the left wing of capital, which is what your typical internet "SJW" or w.e. is
@EricSilva Ah fair. I guess I was thinking that once you try to control language, your motivation is climbing the oppressor-oppressed hierarchy subconsciously through discourse, which says that leftism is perhaps embedded in your political belief system
i mean the problem with the SJW platform isnt the way they try to control language, it's that it's putting respectability over actually advocating for radical social change
i mean potentially i could see an appeal depending on how Christian you are :p JP's argument just centers around biblical stories and moralities which he claims defines an ideal system of ethical and moral beliefs
@BalarkaSen I think there are many reasons for trying to control language beyond trying to reverse an oppressor-oppressed hierarchy. Your historical materialist is showing ;)
@EricSilva i think his knowledge of mythology is kind of limited to Christian moral babbles. the Norse mythology is full of stories with no specific morals
@Semiclassical im kind of a materialist so i have a tendency to find any struggle not rooted in the class struggle kind of incoherent and obfuscating. I dont find the idea of this "tribal warfare" inherently bad but im skeptical of movements that are collaborationist even if i agree with the basic premise of their mission
@BalarkaSen Going off my reference to newspeak, the exact opposite, trying to stabilize an existing hierarchy, is also possible. On a different note, certainly e.g. trying to get people not to use insults (not specific ones, but rather generally) is also a form of language control that doesn't serve any particular class or faction, but rather some overarching cultural value.
oh but I was specifically asking in the context of the recent trend of social justice. I don't know how else to explain people who get angry about certain family of words which might indicate even a slightest change in the equilibrium dynamics of the society (eg, pointing out something as innocuous as, perhaps, that men and women are biologically different)
@Semi i was almost scared it was gonna come off as intellectually elitist until this "It's also important to notice that political engagement is not a function of education--if only people knew this or that, then surely they would rise up and demand"
i would need to read the whole thing to qualify this: "rooted in the ideals of Enlightenment humanism" because if anything this reads to me as a rejection of the actual enlightenment but w.e.
@BalarkaSen Oh I'm not gonna touch that specific debate with a ten-foot pole because the whole conversation is fraught with Americanisms that I consistenly misinterpret :P
@BalarkaSen i think this can only make people mad in a very small strand of popular liberal feminism, which i mean, to me isn't very coherent for reasons i think ive made clear
For instance (speak of changing the meaning of language!) all these words like "liberal" and "social justice" mean something completely different to a European.
Or, well, not completely, but different enough that's it's often hard to determine what's being talked about
the group is definitely a minority and even they aren't it doesnt matter because basically the entire popular front of feminism is incoherent for similar reasons even when it's not like in your face annoying
i guess to articulate what im saying differently: idt it's bad to make people mad with radical ideas (personally i think it's actually good, i would call myself a radfem even though i think labels are a trap), i just think the particular kind of "radical" thought youre talking about doesnt even matter cause it doesnt take itself seriously anyway @Balarka
@DavidZ "liberal" means something more akin to the American "libertarian", and "social justice" is usually connected with the concept of a social market economy and has its focus on economic inequality and the distribution of wealth and opportunities within such an economy
i mean provocation isnt the point it's just an inevitable consequence of being radical, but like anticapitalist thought takes itself seriously and isnt banal and dumb @Balarka
@EricSilva I see what you're saying, but to what level you'd call the politics of provocation as dumb is questionable. Is it foundationally contentless? Sure. But think of how ironical racism can quickly turn into actual racism. That's what the alt-right's been doing for some time
In that sense it's a good way to stir up an active and aggressive group of people
I don't know the demographics in the US but that's the tactics that's being employed by the Hindu fundamentalist government in India to stir up a religious riot of national proportions
back to what sort of radical ideas i think are actually worthwhile to pursue i think it's good to read writers who are critical of capital given it's a totality and the whole marxist tradition is fundamentally kind of radical. the amount of shit ive gotten for being like "marx isnt dumb though and people should read him" is insane though, america is so anti-reading anything subversive it's craaaazy
I am trying to distinguish what exactly is a prediction of a theory from ad hoc "prediction" programmed into a theory (say, for special relativity). Is checking history the only way to do so?
