“Start by being warm, pleasant, & generous w/every person you meet; but if someone tries to exercise power over you, exercise power over him; & if he messes w/you, remember to keep messing w/him long after he has forgotten about it”.
Silver Rule of Fat Tony in N. N. Taleb’s #SkinInTheGame
I’ve said it before – socialism is evil.
Not kidding, then or now.
While I’ve respected Dr Peterson’s work, and still think his explanation of the symbolism of myth/etc., and the reasons why you should follow common sense advice, and why identity politics and C16, etc. are so poisonous, are still good, in the end, I only really considered him a gateway to searching for truth (a damned useful one). I also have said flat – out before that he has a few critical weaknesses where he’s not taking the logic of his position all the way down the path.
I’ll refrain from calling him a coward – bluntly he’s already done far more than Ben Shapiro to help people and provide cogent explanations of why post-modernism is a death cult that murders thought, and completely outclasses our little chickenhawk in every way. Nevertheless, I do have to address some things not specifically related to his recent reply on the “Jewish Question”, but to his blind spots related to those, blind spots shared by many moderates.
One – that the Nazis were “right wing” authoritarians. I’ve stated many times that the west, and Europe and the “educated elites” in general, learned the wrong lesson from WW2, that the problem was the “nationalism” – which the Nazis were not, at least as a universal principle, so much as they were German imperialists/supremacists over all others – and not the “socialism”, which of course is a left-wing ideology, that it shared with the Soviets, Cubans, Maoists, etc., etc. ad nauseam.
More recently, I’d started pointing out where it may fall on fertile soil that the Nazis were pioneers. By creating a new identity group other than the proletariat, they were decades ahead of our current identity politics.
It’s worse than that though. The thing is, you cannot have socialism without identity groups, it’s baked in. There has to be some group, a victim class in whose name everything gets distributed and done. This could be the workers, the Germans, the LGBT community, women, blacks, you name it.
As a result of buying into this lie, you get the odd experience of people talking about how Nazis are somehow right wing, which they are not, except in the barest sense that they are slightly to the right of Stalin. Sorry, bucko, the Nazis were not on the opposite end of any political scale except that which was convenient to communists, and even Jordan Peterson knows how far they could be trusted with the truth.
This extends to a second problem – the rejection of the Alt-right as a bunch of white supremacists and racists. I get that the media has seen to label and lump everyone together from Milo Y to the Spencer alt-reichtards to the stormfront/white supremacist crowd and act like they’re all the last two groups of morons, but believe it or not, the Spencer/Anglin crowd is fake right – they are neither truly nationalist (by their own pronouncements, being pro pan-national organizations like the EU) and their policies are socialist.
So still not “right wing” in any sense.
The monomaniacally obsessed morons and losers for whom everything is about race, that like the Nazi symbols? Well, if you want to follow a branch of an evil ideology that managed to lose despite the cool uniforms, go for it, you putzes.
Besides, why do we trust the news to accurately identify what the alt right/etc. even is if they will not identify who’s even a member remotely accurately. Seriously, lumping people like Jon Haidt (though the latter I hadn’t actually seen the press do that…)?
This of course leads to a rejection of any and all identity politics.
OK, I get it. Identity politics is bad. In an ideal world we’d be dealing with who’s best at getting the job done and not their skin color, what they identify as, or what supposedly irrelevant bits they’ve got dangling, or not, between their legs. It’s a poison.
And if one side keeps playing it, the other side will start playing too. That’s bad.
Here’s what isn’t acknowledged.
Think “tragedy of the commons”, or the iterated prisoner’s dilemma.
You see, I hadn’t given a shit about being white, male, etc. growing up – I was raised with women can do anything they want, so can everyone. Learning that no, some people are just dumb, too weak, etc., hell, learning that there were things that I would never be good at was a brutal shock. I still really don’t.
But.
The people who hate us do.
No, it’s not just Breitbart delusions – there are professors, college students, people showing up as mainstream commentators, who think that white people should be replaced, men should sit down and shut up, and so on. Toxic masculinity, rape culture, and other similar expressions that assume men are evil abound. Saying we live in a free country is a racist microggression. People are losing their jobs and their livelihoods over this stuff, being shouted down by hate mobs.
It only takes one side to start a war.
If no-one shows up to fight back, it’s awfully short. And nasty for the losers.
You don’t have to be “for” white pride or american / western identity and culture to be targeted as white, straight, and male, and racist, sexist, etc. for simply breathing.
It’s now a horrible thing to simply say “it’s OK to be white” – contrast that to the expected reaction to “it’s OK to be [minority of choice]”.
So the second lie is that anyone who thinks it’s OK to be white is a racist, a white supremacist, and playing the identity politics game just like the left.
No. We are not.
One’s identity can be self-defined, but by definition, your enemy defines his targets. If the left calls you “white” or “male”, and attacks you for it, identifying as really hispanic won’t save you.
Game theory teaches us we cannot afford to let them get away with it, as the left getting what it wants, defeating us in detail, by calling us racist and all that other crap, simply incentivizes them. I agree that we should use our words. I disagree that words are the only tools. Yes, sometimes you can stand brave and call their bullshit in public, and not get destroyed. Yet people and lives are destroyed.
Again, they are willing to ruin peoples lives, de facto social exile, reading them right out of society, if they will not submit to the “truth” of the day. And they will do so as long as it works. And they have already proven, through shootings and antifa action, that they will not stop with words when they believe they can get away with it. And those in power, in the mainstream press, cover for them.
No, I don’t want to care about whether I’m labeled “white” by some social justice warrior, but it is, no kidding, becoming an existential threat. Of the body, mind, and soul.
Pushing back via identity politics, even though most of it is actually simply defending the group defined by the wannabe tyrants, is not just an expected reaction, it is just and moral.
Otherwise you let bullies and tyrants to ruin people’s lives.
If they won’t live and let live, if they won’t allow us to speak our piece, if they won’t allow us to defend ourselves from them or anyone else we deem necessary, if they want us powerless, then I’ll apply their stated standards to them.
And the “conservatives” who don’t want to punch back because it’s uncouth?
If you get in my way and try to shame me, fuck you.