Tag: philosophy

A pair of commenters discuss the weakness of William Lane Craig.

“If folks want a less satisfying taste of what an interaction between Vox and JBP would look like, WLC plays the role of the gentlemanly philosopher who never quite goes for the throat the way that Vox would.”

Vox has pointed out in the distant past how WLC has a tendency to corner his opponents but never go in for the kill shot. I’ve had the privilege of interacting and talking to WLC on many occasions and pointed this out to him. He admits he doesn’t want to humiliate or embarrass his opponents. Strikes me that Christ didn’t have an issue with this tactic when the proper occasion was presented. However, in his more recent debates, I’ve noticed that Dr. Craig has practically accused his opponents of being idiots, in a refined but no so subtle way.

I think William Lane Craig performs a real disservice to the followers of his opponents by failing to fully expose the arguments of his opponents or complete the unmasking of the charlatans he encounters. It’s fine to not wish to humiliate or embarrass your opponents, in fact, that is the hallmark of a decent individual.

The problem is prioritizing your own sense of decency over the truth and permitting those who follow falsehood to more easily continue to do so. Civility is not the prime objective. I believe that if one knows someone is committing fraud, then one has a moral responsibility to alert those being defrauded. This is just as true of intellectual frauds as it is of financial ones. One should not handle a Jordan Peterson or a Ben Shapiro any more delicately than a Bernie Madoff or a Charles Ponzi.

Whether one is cruel about it or not, and whether one takes pleasure in it or not, one’s moral responsibility remains the same.

John C. Wright asks a non-rhetorical question:

In the ongoing and ever-losing battle with my own personal dragons of pride, I took to wondering: why is the proud man angry or peeved with the stupidity (real or imagined) of his fellows? I ask because one would think a saint would be very patient with someone who was stupid, if it were honest stupidity, and not merely laziness in thinking. Whereas the devil (or Lex Luthor) is always in a state of haughtiest annoyance, because he is brighter than those around him. Their stupidity proves his superiority – yet it irks him. Why?

I think there are different reasons that irk different people. Speaking only for myself, I truly don’t mind people being stupid or being absorbed in interests that I consider to be stupid, pointless, or uninteresting. Let’s face it, I consider the average individual to be almost unfathomably stupid, if not actually retarded, and that doesn’t anger me any more than the fact that Spacebunny’s Ridgeback can’t work out differential equations. That being said, I do get extremely annoyed when one of the great masses of my intellectual inferiors takes it upon himself to attempt to correct me, almost invariably incorrectly, and in a manner that indicates that he didn’t even begin to understand what I wrote or said.

Take it or leave it, as you like, but don’t discuss it with me, don’t ask me about it unless I’ve indicated I am available for questions, and don’t even think about trying to “correct” me.

I also dislike when people tell me things that are obviously false or illogical and present them as factual, or even as conclusively true. I tend to regard this as a personal insult, since I find it offensive that they would imagine that I would not see through their transparent pretensions. This is probably why I hate midwits and gammas so much, and why the idiotic way in which they smugly posture and strike false poses is something I simply will not tolerate in my presence or on my blog.

It’s also somewhat beside the point that someone else’s stupidity “proves” my intellectual superiority to him. This is the one thing that normal people and midwits cannot ever seem to grasp about the highly intelligent. WE KNOW. We have always known. We can’t help but know. There is no way to avoid noticing it. You might need the proof, but we don’t and we never have. Because being smarter is no different than being taller, being faster, or being stronger; it’s just a readily observable state of relative being. That an outside observer can’t see the intelligence gap as easily, and that it bothers people more than other differences, doesn’t actually change anything.

As a child, all I ever wanted from the dim-witted was to be left alone. And they could not, would not, do that! Now, I don’t hate them, perhaps because over the last three decades I’ve successfully managed to arrange my life to minimize my daily contact with normal people. I can go days without ever speaking so much as a single word to anyone with an IQ below 120. But while I don’t blame the dim for their lack of intelligence, I find that I can’t blame the intelligent individuals who hate and despise them after enduring years of malicious abuse at their hands either. Because dim or not, it’s really not difficult to simply leave people the hell alone.

But before anyone gets too self-congratulatory about their intellectual superiority, here is an observation that will likely offend many of the more intelligent readers. I have noticed that the smart, but third-rate mind (which usually falls in the 130 to 145 range) inevitably feels the compulsion to explain itself because it needs the external confirmation of its self-assessment. First- and second-rate minds never require that confirmation because they are a) more confident in their self-assessment, and b) too accustomed to no one understanding or believing what they are saying from an early age.

Lest you dismiss what I am saying as simple arrogance, I would encourage you to keep in mind that the most reliably destructive behavior I have ever witnessed on the part of the highly intelligent is the equalitarian assumption that if they can grasp an idea or master an activity, so can anyone else with equal ease. Also, since I am literally retarded when it comes to spatial relations as well as protanomalous, I have a much deeper understanding of what it is like to be totally unable to see things than the average 3SD+ individual.

UPDATE: If you want to make life easier for the smart guy on your team and get along better with him, don’t repeatedly ask questions “just to confirm” things. It’s a maddening habit, and you can tell that you’re annoying the smart guy, whether he shows it or not, when he says things like, “the answer is still yes.” In fact, the word “still” serves as a pretty reliable indicator that the smart guy regards you as at least mildly retarded, particularly when it is spoken in patient, pleasant tones. The unspoken implication is that he suspects you will be genuinely surprised when you see the sun rise again tomorrow.

Some see incidents like these as tragic. I tend to view them as Darwinian comedy:

They saw the world as a warm, welcoming place where strangers would commit random acts of kindness every day.

“You get a feeling of wanting to give back, not just to this person who has welcomed a stranger into their home, but to the wider world,” Mr Austin wrote on his blog. “You become someone who wants to welcome others into your home. You become a merchant in the gift economy. You’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place. ‘People,’ the narrative goes, ‘are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil.’ I don’t buy it.”

The thing is, the world simply doesn’t care what you believe.

They were travelling along the Pamir Highway, a Soviet-era road that stretches across 2000km near the border with Afghanistan and has spectacular views, when a carload of men who are believed to have recorded a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group spotted them. They sped towards the group of tourists, rammed them, jumped out and attacked the cyclists with knives. The horrendous slaying was captured on grainy footage from the attackers — who also took the lives of one Dutch and one Swiss national.

I really fail to see why ignoring human nature is considered any less stupid than ignoring gravity or physics.

A comment thread at Bounding Into Comics about Alt★Hero #1 illustrates the core problem with tolerating gammas, even when one rides herd on them.

Considering how much of an asshole/sperg Vox Day is to everyone in his blog and his “my way or the highway” mentality, I’m surprised this isn’t a massive disaster or that Vox didn’t fire everybody midway through for not kissing his ass hard enough. That said, it seems this is fun and good enough, so I hope this does well and can keep going forward in the hands of other more capable people.
– Skullomaniac

Vox gets attacked constantly and doesn’t tolerate it anymore. He is an excellent guy to work for, however, and allows a lot of creative leeway.
– David The Good

I have followed his blog for a couple of years now and I’m convinced he has a severe attitude problem with everyone who may dissent even 0.001{329aa4aef5613a80085c3dd6bd84f5d0e8f5581fdc29e0868f0c3a40e8b25a32} with him, and he often appears to demand complete obedience to his words.
– Skullomaniac

It’s been an interesting process to watch. I started reading Vox Day’s blog back in 2008 and the discussions were provocative and harsh at times, but they were also thoughtful and highly-intellectual. Stay on topic, but nothing was really off the table because it was by and large a self-policing community. No one was afraid to question anyone else, including the proprietor of the blog. It was still largely the same through the Sad Puppies situation. Then, as the Alt-Right started to become a thing and Vox Day became a figure within it, his blog readership increased very quickly and the community rapidly changed. When this happened, everything else changed with it, including the house rules and the attitude toward comments.
– Arcturus Rann

Notice the divorce between the guy who has followed the blog “for a couple of years now”, the guy who has followed it for a long time and actually works with me, and the guy who has followed it for a decade.

Merely having to deal with gammas and the psychological trash they drag in with them has been sufficient to convince some casual observers that I am an oversensitive, incapable sperg who requires people to kiss my ass and doesn’t allow any questioning of my opinion whatsoever. This, as those who work with me know, is almost the complete opposite of the truth; the most common criticism I receive from those who work with me is that I don’t give them enough guidance and oversight.

Granted, I’m not given to much in the way of kumbaya and cuddles either, but if I have repeatedly erred, it has always been on the side of giving people excessive responsibility for which they were not truly ready.

Anyhow, being a game designer, I am putting on my design hat to address this problem. It’s probably going to be based on letting the Dread Ilk decide who is, and who is not, allowed to comment here. What none of my critics realize is that I have actually been far more tolerant of the newcomers than most of the historical readership here prefers.

I think it is now time to openly institute an anti-gamma policy. It’s no secret that I detest them and their behavioral patterns, but I simply don’t have the time or the patience to tolerate their antics any longer. The now-banned Pale Male’s nonsense is a good example of why they simply aren’t worth the effort required to put up with them.

You forgot the modifier:  Social science is not scientific. That’s because “social” is a modifier meaning “not”:  social science, social justice, social work…. Tell us, Vox:  have you ever taken a course in physics?  Did you pass?

This is classic gamma bullshit utilizing the four As of the gamma.

1. Assume a superior, lecturing pose.
2. Assert that the other party has made a mistake, and in doing so, demonstrate a complete failure to have understood what the other party said.
3. Attack the other party instead of addressing the subject at hand.
4. Attempt to disqualify and discredit the other party in lieu of demonstrating the errors of their position.

You forgot that using the Stanford prison experiment to conclude anything whatsoever about physics is a non sequitur. Completely different people, methods, standards of evidence, reproducibility (institutional review boards would no doubt prohibit it today), everything.

I didn’t forget anything. I’m literally the individual who coined the sarcastic expression “You can trust biologists. Because physicists get amazingly accurate results.” As I pointed out in my response, that is like saying that because Charles Ponzi was a completely different person living at a completely different time and using completely different methods than Bernie Madoff, and operating under very different regulatory standards, it is a non sequitur to use his actions to conclude anything about Madoff’s.

Physicists are people, subject to the same incentives and motives and character flaws as psychologists. They are corrupted in the same way and for the same reasons. And we already possess considerable evidence that some of them are behaving in exactly the same way, despite their various differences. Just ask Stickwick about how intellectually and scientifically pure academic physicists are these days.

Tell us, Vox: have you ever taken a course in physics? Did you pass? Your own rule: 2… If you are asked a direct question relevant to the topic, then you will be expected to answer it in a straightforward and non-evasive manner… I’d bet 10:1 I know the answer but I want it straight from you.

Notice that he is posturing as if he is confident, and yet he doesn’t commit himself publicly to a position, for fear that he will be proven wrong. This is textbook gamma posturing. And he is still trying to make the subject about me, rather than about the big news concerning the scientific fraud underlying one of the most famous studies in social science, while trying to use my own rules against me.

Of course, being careless and obsessive like all gammas, he stopped reading once he found what he was looking for and failed to read the whole thing.

29. These Rules may in no case be interpreted contrary to the purposes and principles of Vox Day, as solely determined by Vox Day.

I’m still waiting for him to tell us if he’s actually gone there in physics, and how far.

Notice how he’s “still waiting” for an answer to a question he never even asked. That’s because this is not a relevant question, it is an attempt to “win” the discussion through discrediting and disqualification; he’s begun to fear that I have taken a course in physics and is preemptively laying the groundwork for moving the goalposts. Which, of course, is why I ignored the question in the first place. Whenever you successfully answer a gamma’s initial attempt to discredit and disqualify you, he will simply respond with another question intended to do the same. This process never ends until a) you kick him out, b) he finally manages to come up with a question that allows him to say HA!, c) you have such impeccable credentials that he falls silent in embarrassment, or d) you ignore him so long that he finally gives up and goes away.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed the flashing neon signs saying “warning: gamma at work ahead”.

In what way is Vox’s educational history relevant to the question? Are you always this dishonest, or only when challenged? This is a sneering, gamma-ish, and obviously false assertion of the appeal to authority, and you should know this.

And notice how the gamma always eventually brings the discussion back around to himself. Every single time. Note that literally no one asked about his credentials, his degrees, or what subjects he studied, but that didn’t prevent him from telling everyone anyhow.

I stopped my formal study of chemistry in my freshman year of college, but I’m still working on it.  Autodidact, check.  I’m sketching hardware to do practical applications. 

After initially trying to ignore his antics to no avail, I opted for Option A and kicked Pale Male out. He’s now banned from commenting on the blog, and I plan to similarly ban every single gamma who acts up and subjects us to similar antics. From now on, if anyone even addresses me in a personally challenging or passive-aggressive manner, I’m just going to delete their comments. I have learned over 15 years of daily blogging that it is always a waste of time to even answer such commenters; they add nothing to the discourse, they inevitably attempt to derail the discussion, they try to snarkily disqualify everyone who disagrees with them, and they inevitably start to talk about themselves instead of the subject at hand.

This is not a place for gammas to show the whole world what smart boys they are. This is not a place for anyone to attempt to work out their psychological issues. And above all, this is not a place to waste my time. Everyone is welcome to express THEIR OWN opinion about THE SUBJECT BEING DISCUSSED, they are not permitted to attempt to hijack the microphone or try to elevate their perceived status at my, or anyone else’s, expense. If I tell you that you are wrong, you are welcome to try to prove that you were actually correct, but any attempt to attack, disqualify, or discredit me in lieu of an actual defense of your assertions will be nuked on sight.

And while you’re welcome to try to correct me if you think I am wrong, you had damn well better cross your t’s, dot your i’s, and get all of your ducks in a row while you make your case for it, because there are few things I despise more than one of my intellectual inferiors wasting my time by erroneously attempting to “correct” me, especially by citing orthodox information with which I am obviously already familiar. If all you’ve got is a snarky passive-aggressive statement of opinion that is a prelude to the usual routine, just go away and don’t come back. Or at the very least, keep it to yourself. I’m not even remotely interested in playing stupid gamma games.

The great Umberto Eco unwittingly dismissed the incoherence of Jordanetics without even knowing Jordan Peterson was having nightmares about dogs walking on their hind legs, butchering his cousin and offering flesh to him and other survivors of a nuclear holocaust in FROM THE TREE TO THE LABYRINTH: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation:

While in an ideal encyclopedia there are no differences between necessary and contingent properties, it must be admitted that, within a specific culture, certain properties appear to be more resistant to negation than others, on account of the fact that they are more salient: it could feasibly be denied, for instance, in the light of a new system of classification, that a sheep is ovine, or again this particular trait might not be deemed necessary to the understanding of the term sheep in the sentence: “the sheep was bleating in the field.” There can be no doubt, however, that it is hard to deny that a sheep is an animal—and the characteristic also remains implicit for the comprehension of the example we just cited. It has also been observed (Violi 1997: sect. 2.2.2.3) that some traits seem to be more resistant than others, and that these uncancelable traits are not only categorical labels such as ANIMAL or PHYSICAL OBJECT. In the life of semiosis we realize that we are also reluctant to cancel some “factual” properties that appear more salient and characteristic than others.

To explain why certain properties appear more resistant than others, Violi (1997: sect. 7.2) distinguishes between essential and typical properties: it is essential that a cat be an animal; it is typical that it meows. The second property can be canceled, but not the first. But if this were to be the case we would be back again to the same old difference between dictionary and encyclopedic properties. Violi (1997: sect. 7.3.1.3) instead considers properties that are functional and certainly encyclopedic in nature to be similarly uncancelable: hence it is difficult to say of something that it is a box and at the same time deny that it can contain objects (if it couldn’t it would be a fake box).
Often, however, in order to construct and presuppose a local portion of encyclopedia needed for the comprehension of a determined context, we must resort to simplified local representations that set aside many properties that are otherwise (in other contexts) resistant.

In Eco (1984b: sect. 2.3.4) I gave the example of a dialogue between a wife and her husband at midnight in a suburban home. The wife looks out the window and says with a preoccupied air, “Honey, there’s a man in the garden.” The husband takes a look and says, “No, honey, that’s not a man.” The husband’s reaction certainly violates a pragmatic rule because it provides less information than the situation calls for, since denying the presence of a man could on the one hand suggest that what is there is a child or a cat, while on the other hand it could also lead his wife to imagine something more dangerous (why not an invader from outer space?).

In this context, when she is afraid there may be a man there, the wife surely does not assign to the term the properties of rationality, bipedality, or the ability to laugh—all properties that in that context are narcotized (cf. Eco 1979a: ch. 5) and considered irrelevant, but instead those of a living being, capable of movement and aggression and therefore potentially—at night and in someone else’s garden—dangerous. Because it is also part and parcel of the infinite encyclopedic properties of man to be prone to take up a life of crime (don’t we all know that homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to men?) The husband ought then to adjust his iteration on the basis of a local encyclopedic representation, one that he conjecturally considers shared (given the circumstances) by his wife.

If the husband wishes to calm his wife down he must either exclude immediately the property of mobility (by saying, for example, that what she saw was the shadow of a tree) or deny any suggestion of properties suggesting dangerousness (in which case he might say that it wasn’t a man but a stray dog). The ad hoc construction of a local portion of encyclopedia, that organizes only the properties pertinent to the context, is the only strategy that will allow the husband to interact in a reasonable way with his concerned wife.

Jordanetics turns this sort of sensible pragmatism on its head. Consider how it applies to the situation envisioned by Eco. Since truth is determined by whether it serves life or not, the wife’s fear means that the claim that the object in the garden is a man must be true, since the mere possibility that the object is a man and therefore a potential risk to the man’s wife and family would serve life, whereas ignoring, denying, or rejecting that possibility, and by doing so, failing to accept the wife’s narrative, would not only not serve life and therefore be untrue, but would add unnecessarily to the suffering of the wife. Ergo, in the absence of conclusive proof that the object is not a man or otherwise dangerous entity such as an invader from space, it would be evil to do anything except accept the wife’s narrative and behave accordingly.

Notice too the logical consistency and the precision of Eco’s thought. Peterson’s Maps of Meaning, which I am reading now, reads like a parody of the legitimate academic and intellectual that Eco was, when it is not downright sinister.

My interest in the Cold War transformed itself into a true obsession. I thought about the suicidal and murderous preparation of that war every minute of every day, from the moment I woke up until the second I went to bed. How could such a state of affairs come about? Who was responsible?

I dreamed that I was running through a mall parking lot, trying to escape from something. I was running through the parked cars, opening one door, crawling across the front seat, opening the other, moving to the next. The doors on one car suddenly slammed shut. I was in the passenger seat. The car started to move by itself. A voice said harshly, “there is no way out of here.” I was on a journey, going somewhere I did not want to go. I was not the driver.

I became very depressed and anxious. I had vaguely suicidal thoughts, but mostly wished that everything would just go away. I wanted to lie down on my couch, and sink into it, literally, until only my nose was showing—like the snorkel of a diver above the surface of the water. I found my awareness of things unbearable.

I came home late one night from a college drinking party, self-disgusted and angry. I took a canvas board and some paints. I sketched a harsh, crude picture of a crucified Christ—glaring and demonic—with a cobra wrapped around his naked waist, like a belt. The picture disturbed me—struck me, despite my agnosticism, as sacrilegious. I did not know what it meant, however, or why I had painted it. Where in the world had it come from?

It should not be hard to see that Jordanetics is an incoherent philosophy of fear, concocted by a very fearful and mentally disturbed individual who is not the driver of it. And since we, as Christians, are not given a spirit of fear, Jordanetics is neither a theology nor a philosophy for us.

Research request: Transcripts of Peterson videos would be very useful for a comprehensive deep dive into his philosophy. If you’re willing to transcribe a video for me, please shoot me an email with however many you’d be willing to do, keeping in mind that his lectures usually last around an hour, and I will give you a list. Don’t do any without getting a specific request from me, since we want to avoid redundancy.

Because that is what one should do with false prophets who attempt to pass off madness and lies as truth. Real, objective, Aristotelian correspondent truth.

I find it mildly amusing that Jordan Peterson’s dismayed fans don’t seem to realize that their responses to my recent Darkstreams on the subject such as the one below don’t dissuade me in the slightest, but to the contrary, confirm for me that they are very, very nervous about their hero’s ability to successfully defend himself from my critical analysis.

What is basically going on here: “SJWs Always Double Down” isn’t selling nearly as well as its predecessor and so you are trying to attract attention, and more potential sales, by attacking one of currently hottest public figures. What happened to you man? You used to be one of good guys but now you are bitter, shallow, barely eloquent and on your way to joining other online right has-beens like Nick Land & co.

What happened to me is that I caught the unmistakable scent of bullshit and sulfur. Contrast the response of the Peterson fan with the response of the Dread Ilk to people like Greg Johnson and Andrew Anglin calling me out. The Dread Ilk knew they had no need to defend me, and they also knew that I would not hesitate to face my critics directly in order to defend my case against the Fake Right. Peterson’s fans, to the contrary, appear to be well-aware that he fears to even address the fact of my existence, let alone attempt to answer for his intellectual crimes.

Jordan Peterson set off my BS radar like no one since Paul Krugman and his repeated post-2008 attempts to claim that he never called for a housing bubble, and I quickly noticed the bizarre way in which Peterson’s fans were repeatedly offering multiple different and contradictory alibis for his intellectual crimes, but I had no idea that the Crazy Christ was building up an quasi-cult around him to make the now-defunct New Atheist fan club of Richard Dawkins look downright moderate and sane.

Consider, for example, the following comments, all culled from a single video of an appearance on Stefan Molyneux’s show.

• Genius is not a strong enough word to describe the level of insight Jordan Peterson has into the world. Wow, he’s impressive on the worst of days but this one just absolutely blew me away.
• the word you are looking for to describe JBP is a prophet, or someone who can see into the future and correct and sort things out now while there’s still time.
• One of the two most important voices in the world today.
• Dr. Peterson is such an impressive man. In ~1 year of watching and listening to his lectures and speeches/debates I learned more about myself, society, mythology and religion than I did in 4 years of college.
• my hero emerging in a time of darkness.
• We in the West, are fortunate to have this great mind during this time of great social turmoil, to guide us and to help us understand and survive the coming deluge of this media manufactured communist typhoon.
• This great man embodies the emergence of the hero in a positively inspiring way.
• The world’s center of gravity is always located with Dr. Peterson.
• Anyone at any age can improve themselves and find missing meaning. Dr. Peterson has been essentially my advisor through his YouTube videos, online tools and books. What a gift he is to humanity.
• Another fascinating discussion with one of our age’s great minds.
• If one does not comprehend Jordan Peterson, one does not comprehend the warrior.
• Jordan Peterson – what a mind!  Impressive – also, I noticed that the question that they were rhetorically asking earlier in the show got answered later in the show.  It was about why Christianity – desert religion – would have found such fertile ground in Europe.  And the answer was all about sacrifice – the whole idea about Jesus being sacrificed for people’s sins, meshing with the sacrifice of present consumption for future planning and storage for a tough winter in Europe. 
• Jordan Peterson is a genius person’s smart person.
• Jordan Peterson is the most interesting person I have ever heard speak.
• Jordan Peterson, the new almighty.
• Thank you Mr Peterson for saving my generation.
• My first time really watching Peterson. He is quite wise and sharp as most consider him, and he seems pretty genuine and well meaning as well. 
• Jordan Peterson at his brilliant best. This man is a gift to humanity. Unfortunately most of humanity cannot even settle long enough to hear him and understand.

There aren’t enough hands on the planet for all the facepalms required. And the fact that the Crazy Christ has now publicly aligned himself with the Littlest Chickenhawk merely serves to further confirm my sense of the man, to the extent one can even call him that.

After all, if we are to utilize what we are informed is the Coherence Theory of Truth to which Peterson supposedly adheres, the truth is that within my specified set of propositions and beliefs is the firmly held belief that a man does not cry in public, much less on camera, over anything less than the death of a) a close friend, b) a family member, or c) his dog. It is both consistent and coherent with that belief to state that since Jordan Peterson cries on camera like a girl on a reality television show who failed to get into either of her two preferred sororities, that property is sufficient to prove the coherent truth of the matter. Which is to say that it is coherently true to observe that the Crazy Christ is neither god nor man.

But to return to a perspective based on the Aristotelian Correspondence Theory of Truth, and therefore, to the real objective world we all actually inhabit, Jordan Peterson is a smart, sensitive man with a broken mind who is little more than a purveyor of psychological snake oil and pernicious philosophy. He is a parody of a prophet, an enemy of Christianity and Western civilization, and there is very little “correspondent truth” in him or in his endless, meandering self-dialogue.

Peterson’s intellectual project is exceedingly immodest, and can be stated in a sentence: He aims at nothing short of a refounding of Western civilization, to provide a rational justification for why the materialists of the digital age should root themselves in the soil of Christian ethics despite having long ago lost the capacity for faith.

That being said, you need not accept my conclusions now. I am merely, as is my custom, calling my shot. I have not even begun to present my case, let alone prove it conclusively. But if you want an idea of what is coming down the pike, you might want to give a listen to a few of my previous vivisections.

I’m deeply – DEEPLY – disappointed in you Jordan Peterson fans. His lunacy was openly on display from the very start. Did you never even read Maps of Meaning? It was all right there right before your eyes, a psychological purloined letter. How did none of you ever spot this nonsense?

From the 1999 Maps of Meaning Precis

1. We think we live in the “objective” world, but we do not. The objective world is something that has been conjured up for us recently – absurdly recently, from the perspective of evolutionary biology.

Pure existential relativist gobbledygook. And don’t even think of opting for the obvious evasion that it’s just that he defines “objective” differently than the bloody dictionary. If you haven’t learned that bait-and-switch is the first sign of the charlatan, you’re not tall enough for this ride.

Let’s substitute, then paraphrase, the relevant definition just to show how crazy this is:

We think live in the world “existing independent of thought or an observer as part of reality”, but we do not. The world existing independently as part of reality has been conjured up for us recently.

Jordan Peterson’s mind may not live in a world existing independently from him as a part of reality, but those of us who are sane do, and this is particularly true if we are elements of a vast computer simulation. Now do you better trust my sense of discernment? I caught the scent of intellectual wrongness from this lunatic just from that one inexcusable error about intelligence.

I’m sorry, Peterson fans, but now that I have begun to look more closely at him, it increasingly appears your intellectual hero is a complete joke at best. At worst, he is a insane monster of inhuman ethics. Assuming that others have understood him correctly, his definition of “truth” is absolutely and utterly false – which explains his lack of intellectual integrity – and his Darwinian ethics are not only incoherent, they don’t even rise to the functional level of Sam Harris’s hapless utilitarianism.

Harris, who is far from my idea of a formidable intellect or coherent debater, has absolutely no trouble resoundingly dismissing Peterson’s shoddy logic:

I recently interviewed the psychologist Jordan B. Peterson on the Waking Up podcast. As I said at the beginning of our conversation, I’d received more listener requests for him than for Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Edward Snowden—or, indeed, any other person on earth.

The resulting exchange, however, was not what our mutual fans were hoping for. Rather than discuss religion and atheism, or the relationship between science and ethics, we spent two hours debating what it means to say that a proposition is (or seems to be) “true.” This is a not trivial problem in philosophy. But the place at which Peterson and I got stuck was a strange one. He seemed to be claiming that any belief system compatible with our survival must be true, and any that gets us killed must be false. As I tried to show, this view makes no sense, and I couldn’t quite convince myself that Peterson actually held it.

I found this extremely hard to believe too, and I won’t utilize it until I confirm it from Peterson’s own writings, but the basic idea keeps cropping up again and again when I read what others have written about the man’s ideas, as well as in the man’s own words. Right now, I’m still at the “you have GOT to be fucking kidding me” stage; I am starting to suspect that this guy’s genius lies in piling up so much highly compressed bullshit that the bedazzled reader only sees a mirror of what he wants to believe.

• Events as they occurred are only factual but not necessarily true. True is a judgment call and is therefore open to interpretation. The claim of ‘something’s’ validity can only be made when one can see ‘the bigger picture’ — the wellbeing of humanity or ‘life’ itself. Only then can we know if something is true rather than just factual or ‘materialistically true’. – Peterson
• If it doesn’t serve life, it’s not true. – Peterson
• He seems to claim that any belief system compatible with our survival must be true, and any that gets us killed must be false.
• Why is Peterson dishonest in some ways? I think he explained this in the debate with Sam Harris, where he said things like ” something which not benefits /potential harms humanity cant be true”.

This is worse than moral relativism, this is existential relativism. Harris correctly demolishes this absurd, childish, and narcissistic conception of truth in his post-interview response.

In the year 2017, the question “How should we act in the world?” simply isn’t reducible to Darwinism. In fact, most answers to this question arise in utter defiance of the evolutionary imperatives that produced us. Caring for disabled children would most likely have been maladaptive for our ancestors during any conditions of scarcity—while cannibalism recommended itself from time to time in every corner of the globe. How much inspiration should we draw from the fact that killing and eating children is also an ancient “archetype”? Overcoming tribalism, xenophobia, honor violence, and other forms of apish barbarity has been unthinkable for hundreds of millennia—that is, until now. And our moral progress on these fronts is the basis of our most enlightened answers to Peterson’s question.

We didn’t evolve to do science, or to build institutions that last for generations, but we must do these things to thrive. Thriving requires the survival of the species, of course, but it’s not reducible to that. Getting our genes into the next generation simply isn’t our only (or even our primary) goal—and it surely isn’t the foundation of our ethics. If we were true Darwinians, every man’s deepest desire would be to continually donate sperm to sperm banks so that he could sire thousands of children for whom he’d have no further responsibility. If we really viewed the world from the perspective of our genes, no other answer to the question “How should we act in the world?” would seem more fitting. I’ll let readers judge how closely this maps onto the human minds with which they’re acquainted.

Peterson believes that there is an inverse symmetry to our views on the relationship between facts and values. According to him, I see “ethics as nested inside scientific realism,” whereas he sees “scientific realism as nested inside Darwinian competition” (which he views in ethical terms).  A clearer way of stating this is that he thinks I locate all values within a system of truth claims, whereas he locates all truth claims in a system that selects for a single value: survival. Hence our stalemate.

Peterson’s peculiar form of pragmatism, anchored to the lone value of survival, can’t capture what we mean by “truth” (or even what most pragmatists mean by it).

But I have always said that the scientific worldview presupposes the validity of certain values—logical consistency (up to a point), explanatory elegance, respect for evidence, and so forth. This is why I think Hume’s famous gap between “is” (facts) and “ought” (values) is misleading on the topic of morality. We can easily reverse direction and discover that we won’t get to “is” without first obeying certain “oughts.” For instance, to understand what the cause of an illness is, one ought to pay attention to regularities in the body and in the environment that coincide with it. (Additionally, we now know that one ought to emphasize material causes, rather than sympathetic magic or the evil eye.) Facts and values are connected.

However, the fact that some values lie at the foundation of our scientific worldview does not suggest that all scientific truth claims can be judged on the basis of the single (Darwinian) criterion of whether the claimants survive long enough to breed.  On the contrary, this assertion is quite obviously false (as I believe I demonstrated throughout our podcast). We can easily imagine our species being outcompeted by one that has no understanding whatsoever of the cosmos. Would a lethal swarm of disease-bearing insects possess a worldview superior to our own by virtue of eradicating us? The question answers itself—because no insect could even pose it. Mere survival doesn’t suggest anything about the intellectual or ethical achievement of the survivors.

Some who listened to my conversation with Peterson thought that in objecting to his conception of truth, I was endorsing materialism or denying that the mind could play any role in determining the character of reality. But that isn’t the case. I was merely arguing that Peterson’s peculiar form of pragmatism, anchored to the lone value of survival, can’t capture what we mean by “truth” (or even what most pragmatists mean by it).

Peterson is so philosophically incompetent that he quite clearly does not fully comprehend that his idiotic ethical system not only fully justifies the Holocaust, it can actually be logically utilized to require future repetitions on a regular basis! I suspect he may harbor a dim awareness of this, which would explain why he is clinging so desperately to the 115 IQ myth that I disproved.

I have not yet confirmed for myself that the way Peterson characterized his definition of truth during the interview is fully representative of his actual thinking on the matter, or that Harris and other commenters are correctly describing it. But if this “evolutionary pragmatism” is genuinely the basis for his conception of the truth, then I have absolutely no problem dismissing the man as an architect of an evil philosophy, an intellectual charlatan, and a false prophet whose works merit complete and comprehensive demolition.

Spare me the “oh, he does so much good for the broken little boys” argument. If this definition of his conception of truth is correct, then Jordan Peterson is not doing anyone any good at all, and unlike more honest atheists like Dawkins and Harris, he is a philosophical wolf in sheep’s clothing, a Pied Piper who is attempting to transform those broken little boys into unethical monstrosities. He appears to have blown up his Gamma delusion bubble into an ethical system and a philosophy of life. I am even beginning to suspect that he isn’t just comprehensively wrong, but that he is mentally ill. Not unlike Google muttering “don’t be evil, don’t be evil” to itself, Peterson is desperately seeking an antidote to the chaos of his mind.

So, if you’re a Peterson fan, you might want to buckle up. I just read the transcript of the Harris interview, then put 12 Rules for Life and Maps of Meaning on my tablet. The baleful eye of the Dark Lord is now focused squarely upon the man. And we’re not just looking at the possibility that the emperor has no clothes here, we’re being forced to consider the very real possibility that the emperor is actually a recently shorn sheep that sincerely believes it’s a cat.

Last week, I was asked how the Israelis regard the Diasporans and their refusal to join the rest of the Jewish nation. This post by a Jew who lived for nearly 30 years in the USA before moving to Israel  is on the harsh side, but it generally sums up the contemptuous attitude of most of the Israelis I know:

I want a divorce. Not from my wife, whom I love dearly, but from the liberal and progressive American Jewish community. From those American Jews who believe that they have a special right to judge and advise the state of Israel because their parents were Jewish…. Your Jewish DNA does not make you any more knowledgeable than anyone else, nor does it give you a greater stake in the Jewish state, unless you decide to accept the generous offer it has made to all Jews everywhere by its Law of Return.

The fact that you had a Bar or Bat Mitzvah does not mean that your piece in the Forward or your letter to the New York Times in which you explain why, as a Jew, you are traumatized by Israel’s efforts to defend her southern border, should be published any more than that of any other person’s.

Even the fact that at some point in your life you have experienced antisemitism doesn’t qualify you to talk about how Israel should behave toward her own antisemitic enemies. If antisemitism in the US is problem for you, there is always that Law of Return.

There is no reason that the pronouncements of “If Not Now” are any more worth listening to than those of the American Nazi Party. Peter Beinart isn’t a more authoritative source about Israel and the Arabs than David Duke just because he has a bigger nose.

The head of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, likes to talk about how the demands he makes of Israel are made out of “unconditional love,” because he wants to “repair it” according to his notion of tikkun olam. What he calls “love,” I call hypocrisy. He owns an apartment in Jerusalem. He should live in it, send his kids to be combat soldiers in the army, pay taxes, and learn to practice situational awareness when he walks the streets or gets on a bus. Then he can try to fix things here (he probably would still give wrong advice, but then at least he would suffer the consequences).

It shouldn’t be surprising that the Israelis are little more inclined to put up with the eternal backseat-driving and unrequested tikkun-olaming of their nomadic kindred than anyone else is. The difference is that unlike most other nations, they aren’t hesitant to call out the Diasporans for their hypocrisy and their enmity-inspiring behaviors, especially since the latter tend to actively damage Israel’s standing in the world.

For example, attempting to eliminate the First Amendment rights of Americans in the name of slowing down the BDS movement is a horrifically bad idea. There are few things more likely to lead to the USA cutting off all foreign aid to Israel; even the most philosemitic Christian Zionist is not going to legally amputate his own tongue for Israel.

Anyhow, this is the sort of thing that NN Taleb means when he talks about the importance of skin in the game; it is a very clear example of how those with skin in the game are always disinclined to respect or pay any attention to those who lack it.