He's Right - Which is Why He's Wrong

There’s been a bit of a pissing match due to recent comments and actions by Jordan Peterson toward the alt-right and ethnonationalists.

First, while not directly relevant to that bit of jackassery, a recent and outstanding vid where he generally takes apart communism, post modernism, etc., and gives some solid grounding for life.

So.

I’m not going to go as far as call him a coward for disinviting a lady who spoke with red ice – no, they’re not my crowd, so? – from a free speech event. First, he’s already risked life and livelihood by simply standing up the way he has. Second, as I alluded, he’s got a couple blind spots – ironically, because he doesn’t follow up on a couple ideas all the way.

So he’s utterly correct, but leaves a couple things out. The vid is well worth listening to, so I’m not knocking it, just addressing those blind spots.

First, it’s true that “There is more diversity within groups of people than there are between groups of people.”

That said, it’s also fundamentally true that small, consistently applied decisions, much like compound interest, can result in vastly different outcomes. And so, a few points of IQ – say 10, or 15 on the average, while there is significant overlap, or when the tail/distribution of one group is wider than the other, or in whatever aspects of personality such as conscientiousness affect corruption, honesty, trust toward the quality of work done by others, etc., can result in vastly different outcomes, civilizational structures, stability, etc., for different geographic groups of people, of different ethnicities, etc..

So, yes, it’s stupid to consider a job applicant as inferior because of their race, etc., the odds are that more men, or white people, or asians, etc., will be applying for different jobs, and women for others, for reasons ranging from different average interests to different average/distributions of IQ.

And trust is easier to extend, like it or not, to those who look, speak, act, and were raised like us. The results of that study were sat on for years because it didn’t agree with the presuppositions of the researcher and he wanted to be able to propose solutions to the world not working the way he thought it should.

Second, game theory.

He’s utterly correct in pointing out that it would be ideal, as in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, if all sides stopped hitting each other and got themselves straightened out instead of further pushing things and people apart. It would, indeed, be great.

That leaves out the question of how to convince the people who call him “alt right” and won’t listen to him, and are determined to play the part of the prisoner who delights in taking advantage of the “nice” sucker. The ones who see it as a win/lose game, and for them to win, our side must be crushed, rendered incapable of appearing before them to disturb them or remind them of our existence. In the past, this has stacked up bodies in the tens of millions and crushed far more souls.

It doesn’t matter if we don’t care if we win or lose against them, it matters that they do, that they care I’m white, male, straight, or whatever the new thing is this week. It only takes one side to have, and win, a war. And as ugly as “winning” can be, losing in an existential context rather than just a ball field is usually worse.

So third, why the issues with ethno-nationalists?

Well, he hates nazis, and another blind spot is the academic tendency to label National socialists as if they were on the right when there were actually one of the first on the left to break out identity politics into race along with nation rather than a global struggle of workers against the owning class.

Combine that with his unwillingness to fight, even if he’s courageous enough to stand his ground.

Factor in that there’s been a lot of noise about the alt-right, everywhere from the left to the stupid Prager video on the “conservative” side. I’m not going to play no-true-scotsman because on one hand the alt-reichtard crowd calls itself “alt right” by the same big-lie token as the communists did, and because there is at least an element of the reactionary rather than globalist or post-modern identity politics, some acknowledgment of reality. On the other, the left calls everyone to the right of them including recent liberals who haven’t changed an opinion “alt right” (if everyone’s special, no-one is…) and cuckservatives are not much better about anyone willing to actually fight for the principles they supposedly believe in if it means not buying into magic dirt and “everyone is alike in a different color of skin, ignore the genetic portion of personality, epigenetics, and culture and the trans-generational effects that those have – even culture ”

As I pointed out earlier, even if Ben Shapiro was 100% right, and it was just culture/ideology that mattered, the end result to our immigration, enforcement of civilized standards, etc., would have to be the same.

So yes, there are people who are monomaniacally obsessed about race, and think it’s deterministic, and are thus stupid. Others are just a different identity group but buy into globalism, socialism, and in the end, the tyrannical end state it eventually devolves to. Others simply think it’s funny and going to convince the normies to wave nazi symbols.

God forbid you point out that men are not women, and that statistical group differences in IQ and personality and culture exist, and they matter in the long run and large numbers (say, unrestrained immigration), but are otherwise willing to get along with anyone who extends to you the same respect and evaluate them on their actions, and even the GOPe and supposed libertarians at Cato will call you a nazi.

In the end, while by no means is being called a Nazi an excuse to act like one, especially if one is not actually a national socialist, community is not collectivism, it’s OK to be white (or jewish, or chinese, or dogs, or from Alpha Centauri), and until the left stops its march to totalitarianism and death camps, those of us they are attacking need to band together and make it painful for them until they stop, while straightening ourselves out so we can be examples.

The polarization he fears is a horror – but not as bad as what happens when our opponents decide to ignore our standing firm and saying “stop”. Ghandi himself said his non-violent means only worked because his opponents – the brits – were a just people.

Our opponents are SJW’s.

And social justice is not justice.