On Being Snookered by Penny-ante Political Obfuscations

Hey, Jordan Peterson! Your descriptions of what young men need if they are ever to mature in our Western world are spot on. But as a political philosopher, you lack the foundation to address the ugly divisions the Left has driven into the heart of civil discourse.

Which is unfortunate for us all. You are good at stating what you don’t know, but sometimes you enter into the realms of what you don’t know that you don’t know, i.e., what you have glossed over or failed to comprehend. Yes, you want your reach to transcend politics but it can’t since the Left has inextricably bound the political into every facet of life, a merging the right rejects categorically. You say the right can be seen by its identity politics but you don’t say the left does exactly the same thing. Try saying “All Lives Matter” in public and see where it gets you.

People are anxious to pigeonhole your ideas and you want to allay their fears that you might be -gasp! – right wing. You attempt to declare your political agnosticism while refusing to bow to an overweening leftist identitarianism. When you refuse the strictures of compelled speech from the rulers of Canada, you are speaking from the right. Compelled speech is a leftist/socialist trope; it is the Right which defends freedom of speech.

By the way, how many rightwingextremists have shown up to disrupt your talks, trash your ideas, or make you feel unsafe in public? And if you think Charlottesville was reality-based, you’ve been snookered, sir. We live near there; we watched it go down. From the beginning, the whole mess was a false flag set-up.

Read Tomas Sowell, sir. Across more than fifty years, his body of work, his opera of conservative political philosophy, has been consistently correct. In his eighties now, he’s still sharp. Here’s his Amazon Page It’s a wealth of information that never stale dates.

Meanwhile, listen to Dr. Turley explain why Nazism -National Socialism- is leftist. It did not come from the Right.

Now tell us why wanting to be a nation-state with one’s own peculiar culture, language and traditions is not a good thing. Ask Les Québécois why they won’t give up and join you Anglos. Do you think they should? If not, why not? Compare and contrast.

14 thoughts on “On Being Snookered by Penny-ante Political Obfuscations

  1. You will not get an answer from this fraud.

    Jordan started out fine – opposing political correctness at his University. But as Vox Day (Publisher, writer and much more) describe Jordan:

    “Of course, Jordan Peterson also happens to be a narcissist, a charlatan, and an intellectual con man who doesn’t even bother to learn the subjects upon which he lectures. He is a defender of free speech who silences other speakers, a fearless free-thinker who never hesitates to run away from debates, difficult questions, and controversial issues, a philosopher who rejects the conventional definition of truth, and a learned professor who has failed to read most of the great classics of the Western canon. He is, in short, a shameless and unrepentant fraud who lacks even a modicum of intellectual integrity.”

    Downhill from a fine start. Today he has become a bought opposition, and very rich indeed, with a leftist agenda – while supposedly being conservative with a message to many lost conservative young men.

    Vox Day has written a book about Jordan after looking more deeply into what Jordan really stands for intellectually and much more. Its not pretty:

    “Jordanetics: A Journey Into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker”
    https://www.amazon.com/Jordanetics-Journey-Humanitys-Greatest-Thinker/dp/9527065690

    • I read some of Vox Day’s animus toward Peterson a few months ago. Psychological “assessments” at a distance are suspect at best, but the former piles on the vitriol. Dr. Peterson answers a real need among today’s fatherless boys. Besides, his psychology research is robust. He’s mistaken in the political/economic realm, though.

  2. I read somewhere that the environmentalist theme was started by the NAZI party and therefore some of their platform has become the platform of the Greens. Have you got a list of the elements which are common to both? I would be very interested to see how much overlap there is as I suspected that the Nazi (National Socialists) were actually socialists just like the Greens and therefore they are both left wing.I suspect some of the wealth redistribution they engaged in is somewhat similar to the Greens Party platform as well? Thanks

  3. I appreciate this short statement about Peterson! I was beginning to wonder, after watching this man on various internet videos, if I was alone in thinking —“why is this man being touted as some shining light and incredible purveyor of truth.” As a retired physician, be very wary of “psychologists” trying to explain the truth of existence!

  4. If I have correctly grasped the thought above, this criticism of Jordan Peterson seems unduly harsh. First, don’t we all “enter into the realms of what you don’t know that you don’t know”? Sometimes areas of thought haven’t really been thoroughly examined, and sometimes in areas of fact the truth may be unknowable (as all that is known is what was reported, often in erroneous, deceitful, and conflicting detail). Peterson at least appears to make an honest effort. Second, there appears to be a matter of definitions. What are “Left” and “Right”? Dr. Turley clearly explains, it seems correctly, that communism, socialism, fascism, etc. are all similarly “Left” in a coherent political philosophy; but it seems that Dr. Peterson, speaking to popular audiences, generally uses the more common (incoherent) political definitions that they understand that put fascism on the “Right”. Using those more common definitions, he doesn’t want to be on the left or right, and he has certainly opposed both extremes, especially the left. He regularly identifies the left as engaging in identity politics, and instead promotes the central motif of Western civilization as the recognition of the individual. The commentator referring to Vox Day’s description of Peterson proves the point of incoherent common political definitions, as Day himself is described by Wikipedia as “far-right,” “white supremacist,” and “alt-right”. If memory serves, Peterson has identified himself as a classical liberal and as a traditionalist (certainly right by Turley’s definition). He is obviously on the side of free speech and truth, and has supported nationalism. Perhaps better not to pigeonhole at all.

    • First, don’t we all “enter into the realms of what you don’t know that you don’t know”?

      One of the things I like about Dr. Peterson is he takes his role as a public intellectual seriously. The things he knows and talks about are subjects he’s studied. But I am weary of his repeated attempts to denigrate the Right, and he demonstrated his ignorance when he sermonized on Charlottesville without knowing anything but what he heard on the MSM. Since the B and I know C’ville well (spent four hours there today), we could tell he didn’t get it. He’s usually quite modest but he has demonstrated a fear Conservative thinking, though he is a conservative at heart.

      By the way, we are coming to the end of the day Lee surrendered to Grant. During the course of the War, his home was taken by the Feds and its grounds turned into a convenient graveyard which eventually morphed into Arlington National Cemetery. After the War, Lee settled in Richmond before going on to become the president of Washington College in Lexington. It was later renamed Washington and Lee. His statue still remains firmly in place in Lee Park in Charlottesville. The official name is Remembrance Park or somesuch, but to locals it will remain Lee Park for many generations.

      • Charlottesville is now a trope thoroughly accepted by virtually everyone in the MSM. The image is that a bunch of white nationalists gathered to promote racism and segregation. Enraged at the presence of peaceful counter-protesters, the white nationalists shouted, threw rocks, and otherwise attacked the peaceful counter-protesters. They covertly encouraged one of their number to ram a car into a crowd of peaceful counter-protesters, resulting in one death.

        The thoroughness with which this trope has permeated all media, including Fox, means that once you express reservations about the standard narrative concerning Charlottesville, that’s it for the rest of your topic. You’ll be stuck for the rest of your time trying to communicate concepts foreign to most people. I don’t know if Tucker Carlson buys into this or not, but he wisely avoids it, just like he avoids the topic of race realism. He has a relatively free hand in what he says, which serves him and us well, but there are obviously red lines.

        It’s like being in a convention of leftists or neocons (same thing?). You say that FDR was an economic disaster during the Great Depression, and forget about whatever else it was you wanted to talk about.

        • Charlottesville is now a trope thoroughly accepted by virtually everyone in the MSM.

          The same ideologues who reign in the MSM also hold the key positions of power in C’ville. The town has an increasing population of federal bureaucrat retirees. It’s an attractive, affordable place for them if they were high enough in the GS Civil Service ratings to afford living there. The presence of such has driven out the natives due to increasing real estate prices. It really is Berkeley East, except there’s a vibrant black community with a strong sense of history. The better-educated among them have hung onto their pride of place, fiercely so. Also their real estate: they learned a bitter lesson from those 60s big guv block grants which the city used cynically to erase Vinegar Hill from existence. They left it largely bull-dozed for a generation.

          http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/schwartz/vhill/vhill.history.html

          BTW, local leading black community leaders didn’t like the attempt to erase history, white or black. I saw a comment by Eugene Williams, the founder of Dogwood Housing (a push against those crowded “projects” the local govt built to keep blacks in place), during the brouhaha. He said Lee Park ought to be left alone, and Lee’s statue left in place on his horse, Traveler. Eugene Williams and I had many a run-in during my job finding housing for women and their families back in the day…One time at a City hearing on our shelter, Eugene spoke against us. On the way back to his seat, as he passed, I murmured, “there’s a special place in Hell reserved for you, Mr. Williams”. He never looked at me, but replied, “after you”.

          When Eugene and I are gone and this bloated boomer generation has passed through the python, perhaps C’ville will shrink once again to its proper proportions. I give it another 25 years or so.

  5. I have a lot of admiration for Thomas Sowell, but even he was not immune to being snookered by the left. He bought into the false narrative that the early Czech nationalists were doing their thing because they found themselves at a disadvantage educationally competing with German speakers. There are indeed books by Sudetan Germans and leftists of other stripes that tell this story. In real life these students were native German speakers for all practical purposes. People in the cities all spoke German, for the Austrians had made it possible to go just as far as you wanted to in their education system if you were willing to go along with the German language and culture. The Czech nationalists were more motivated by the romantic ideals about culture and heritage, “All this business about the Volk is fine for the Germans, but it isn’t Our heritage”. At least that was what we were taught in the little Saturday Czech School that was run by Czech refugees who worked for places like the VOA and Library of back in Washington D-C- of the fifties. The nationalists had to go the the remote villages where Czech was still spoken to learn it and rescue it from becoming a dead language. That narrative fits with my familiy’s experience. My ancestors came from a remote village in Moravia, and were speaking Czech when they came to Minnesota around 1874, Though of course the men also knew German, from serving in the Austrian military, if nothing else. When my grandparents came to visit us in Prague, when we were at the American Embassy, and did some touring back to Moravia earlier in the 1950’s one thing that was discovered was that the Czech that they had learned from their parents was simply loaded with Germanisms. My father had also learned Czech from more academic sources so didn’t have that problem.
    Sowell liked that leftist narrative, because it fit so well with his theories about different peoples having different distributions of abilities, etc. I am inclined to think that a lot of these theories tended to be true, but that didn’t turn leftist lies into truth.

    • If I understand you correctly, you are saying that Czech nationalists simply valued their Czech language and identity. They wished to live among other Czechs maintaining the Czech culture. They wished to do this not because they couldn’t compete in a German environment, but simply because they wanted to be Czech.

      To bring it to the terms of the current discussion, the Czech nationalists were specifically rejecting globalism, the merging of all peoples and cultures. They put a first priority on nationalism, Czech nationalism in their case. I think this fits in well with Turley’s video.

  6. I do object to the term “scientific rationalism” applied to the movements Turley described as “modernist”: globalism, fascism and socialism. In fact, globalism and socialism in particular, claim to use science and reason, but in fact, reject all science and reason not reflecting their own views. For example, Stalin, the socialist, rejected the findings of genetics, resulting in vast failure of agriculture in the Soviet Union. Globalism rejects the concept of race differences between peoples and races, acting on the assumption that sub-Saharan blacks are a suitable substitute in Sweden for a lack of Swedish babies. In the cases of both socialism and globalism, dissenters from the accepted doctrines are fired from their jobs, banned from communications outlets, and increasingly subjected to violence from which the police turn a blind eye. Increasingly, dissenters from the accepted viewpoints are charged with criminal thoughts. So “modernism” as described by Turley is profoundly anti-scientific and anti-rational.

    I should note that the “traditionalists” as exemplified by, say, the early church, rejected violence as the basis of conversion, and constantly emphasized that reasoning ought to be the basis of changing opinions. For example, take the speech of speech of Pope Benedict quoting and explaining the dialogue of the Byzantine Pope Manuel II Palaeologus.

    In the seventh conversation edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that sura 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”. The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood — and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regensburg_lecture

    What is the relation between this type of behavior and “scientific rationalism”? None. Zero.

    Is there a difference between socialism and fascism? I’m going to go on a limb, and say the difference is that socialism intends to bring all means of production and all commerce directly under the ownership of the state. Competition will be eliminated because there will be no entities to compete. The state will provide goods and services. There will be nowhere else to turn.

    Fascism, I think, is the idea that the state doesn’t necessarily own everything, but the state oversees and commands everything. The state may allow competing companies, but they will do what the state tells them to do. Generally, under fascism, only one political party is involved, as no dissent is allowed from government dictates. Fascism does not exclude racial identity, but it’s not part of fascism as a philosophy. The Italian fascists under Mussolini did not share Hitler’s antipathy towards Jews and religion in general, and refused to persecute Jews until the Germans took direct control of Italy.

    I think there’s a case to be made that the early Nazis were socialist in philosophy until the Nazis actually obtained power. At that point, Hitler pursued a fascist, rather than socialist, agenda, which was part of the tension between Hitler and Earnst Rohm, the leader of the Brown Shirts and a very early Hitler supporter.
    https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Study-Abuse-Maurice-Latey/dp/0333099486

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