Caffeine & Philosophy has written me an open letter to me, which I will quote in part:
I enjoy reading your work. But it is a different kind of amusement I experience than normal, reading your criticisms of Dr. Jordan Peterson. It’s not that your criticisms are inept, or even completely wrong, but they convey a misunderstanding that is tragically mirrored in the misunderstanding I see in my friends and family members to whom I try to explain your ideas.
I think the problem lies in communication style. You are, first and foremost, a dialectician. You may play the rhetorician, and you do it well, but anyone who has read both your debate books about The Existence of Gods and On the Question of Free Trade after having read your rhetorical works like SJWs Always Lie and Cuckservative can see that your heart is in the syllogism. I know this based on your minimal to absent tolerance for non-syllogistic thinking, in commenters or in virtually anyone else. You literally have to convert ordinary debate into pseudo-syllogisms (the enthymeme) to find it tolerable. This is not a criticism. Your subsequent precision is one of the reasons I enjoy your work so much.
Unfortunately, it’s also a reason why you are often misunderstood, dismissed as an asshole, or as ridiculous. It may also be why you have a hard time with intellectuals (or humans generally) who are not dialecticians.
Jordan B Peterson is not a syllogistic thinker. This, too, is not a criticism, and I suspect it is why you have a difficult time taking him seriously.
To the contrary, I take Jordan Peterson very seriously indeed. Yes, he is dishonest, incoherent, and hopelessly illogical, and but there is method and intent underlying the madness of Jordanetics. Still, Caffeine & Philosophy simply finds it hard to believe that Jordan Peterson is Approved Opposition, if not worse.
Jordan Peterson is being pushed by mainstream media as a “right-wing” intellectual so that he can gate-keep the Alt-Right.
Peterson never claimed to be of the right. He has sympathies for some right-wing positions (like respect for tradition as a starting place), but he has always claimed to be a classical liberal. This makes his opposition to the Alt-Right entirely normal.
But just because someone is being pushed by the mainstream doesn’t mean that they are necessarily serving their interests. When Hillary’s campaign information came out, we learned that she had donated to Trump’s primary campaign. Obviously, she had thought she could divide the candidates and hurt Cruz, thus increasing her chances of winning the general. But it didn’t turn out that way.
The mainstream outlets that are now pushing Peterson haven’t the faintest idea what it is they’re even supporting. To them, he’s just a popular guy with some edgy ideas. But he is telling people that the school system is corrupt and that the modern left is pathological. He’s telling men to be prepared to fight. It’s possible that the short-term effects of his advice will harm the Alt-Right, but because the identitarian position is the natural one for healthy and self-confident people, his practical advice for being assertive, combative, taking responsibility, and getting your own life in order will ultimately help the Alt-Right in the long-run.
Yeah, so, about that.
Interestingly enough, the picture of Peterson in the mask at home in front of his Lenin portrait to which I linked yesterday has been disappeared. Meanwhile, even as the evidence of Peterson being the Mouth of Soros grows, a member of the ELoE group on Idka correctly notes that it doesn’t matter whether the globalist minions are card-carrying party members, constructs, or mere fellow travelers.
The global elites do create, and we’re all very familiar with false flags, fake news, and puppets like Shapiro. But they also manipulate and shape organic developments to their ends. Peterson probably did start out posting lectures and resenting pronoun laws. The Weinsteins likely did emerge from the Evergreen debacle. An element of common sense may well have taken Rubin from SJWism to Liberalism. What matters is that all of them can be used to serve globalist ends. In the current climate, civic nationalism is indistinguishable from globalism. I don’t mean in some “theoretical” formation, but in terms of their overall faith in human perfectibility, the people they oppose, and the alliances they form. The only real “left-right” distinction is between a globalist, atheist tyranny crouching behind a fig leaf of civic nationalism and the empirical, Christian, nationalist West. Who cares about gradients of twentieth-century political taxonomy?