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On April 08 2018 07:45 Jockmcplop wrote:Show nested quote +On April 08 2018 07:38 zlefin wrote:
also, remember this is the US politics thread, so we use the US politics terminology; so right wing and conservative go together a great deal. and conservative does imply right wing in the US parlance. This doesn't make sense to me. Right wing is surely a subset of conservative that implies certain far-right beliefs, regardless of the country or setting. I can understand how a conservative could be a right winger, but they are not identical, even in the USA. Peterson doesn't hold far-right or extreme views at all, not in any way.
Wait, you're from the United Kingdom and you don't see how 'right wing' and 'conservative' go together?
Our primary right wing part is called The Conservative Party. Can you see the linguistic connection here? And, having seen that, can you see why the Guardian might connect a traditionalist conservative with right wing politics? Especially when he is - I'm sure quite coincidentally - championed by conservatives and right wing people while being broadly disliked by the left wing and liberals?
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On April 08 2018 18:34 iamthedave wrote:Show nested quote +On April 08 2018 07:45 Jockmcplop wrote:On April 08 2018 07:38 zlefin wrote:
also, remember this is the US politics thread, so we use the US politics terminology; so right wing and conservative go together a great deal. and conservative does imply right wing in the US parlance. This doesn't make sense to me. Right wing is surely a subset of conservative that implies certain far-right beliefs, regardless of the country or setting. I can understand how a conservative could be a right winger, but they are not identical, even in the USA. Peterson doesn't hold far-right or extreme views at all, not in any way. Wait, you're from the United Kingdom and you don't see how 'right wing' and 'conservative' go together? Our primary right wing part is called The Conservative Party. Can you see the linguistic connection here? And, having seen that, can you see why the Guardian might connect a traditionalist conservative with right wing politics? Especially when he is - I'm sure quite coincidentally - championed by conservatives and right wing people while being broadly disliked by the left wing and liberals?
I can see the link, but not that being conservative 'implies' that you are right wing, particularly.
The tories are largely a centrist party, for example, with some on the wing of the party who I would describe as right wing, but they are far further to the right than Peterson is.
I'm starting to think that most people want to do away with centrists completely because it lets them engage in their left/right war without reasonable people questioning anything.
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On April 08 2018 19:03 Jockmcplop wrote:Show nested quote +On April 08 2018 18:34 iamthedave wrote:On April 08 2018 07:45 Jockmcplop wrote:On April 08 2018 07:38 zlefin wrote:
also, remember this is the US politics thread, so we use the US politics terminology; so right wing and conservative go together a great deal. and conservative does imply right wing in the US parlance. This doesn't make sense to me. Right wing is surely a subset of conservative that implies certain far-right beliefs, regardless of the country or setting. I can understand how a conservative could be a right winger, but they are not identical, even in the USA. Peterson doesn't hold far-right or extreme views at all, not in any way. Wait, you're from the United Kingdom and you don't see how 'right wing' and 'conservative' go together? Our primary right wing part is called The Conservative Party. Can you see the linguistic connection here? And, having seen that, can you see why the Guardian might connect a traditionalist conservative with right wing politics? Especially when he is - I'm sure quite coincidentally - championed by conservatives and right wing people while being broadly disliked by the left wing and liberals? I can see the link, but not that being conservative 'implies' that you are right wing, particularly. The tories are largely a centrist party, for example, with some on the wing of the party who I would describe as right wing, but they are far further to the right than Peterson is. I'm starting to think that most people want to do away with centrists completely because it lets them engage in their left/right war without reasonable people questioning anything.
The Conservative Party is absolutely not a centrist party, and a ten minute examination of their basic history and platform should disabuse you of that notion. The tory party still harks back to Margaret Thatcher, a staunch right wing politician without an ounce of centrism in her.
David Cameron's big project was to reform the Tory party into a more centrist group (for which I think he's grossly underappreciated), and his influence caused the extreme far right of the party to start bleeding into UKIP, with the net effect of making the Torys more centrist, but it's not an accident that one of the absolute biggest revolts he had to deal with was when he went to them and said "We're going to be ones who legalise gay marriage."
The Torys follow a very traditional right wing playbook under May, and I fail to understand how you can read them any other way.
But on Peterson, he directly supports many right wing views and directly condemns many left wing views, even while claiming that he doesn't. That's a pretty strong indication of 'the man doth protest too much' about his alleged lack of interest in politics. He's not a centrist, if that's what your last line was meant to imply. He's just vague.
As for the unpopularity of centrists, an old aphorism comes to mind: "The man who takes no side is everyone's enemy." It isn't so much that people want to do away with them, but more that the centrist doesn't have strong views on much. A man (as the guy who does this in most of his social engagements) standing there saying 'hang on, calm down, we should think about this a bit' isn't as persuasive or dynamic as someone saying 'I AM CORRECT YOU IDIOT, HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THAT?'
If you do not condemn, people assume you support, and calls for caution and reason are equated to moral cowardice.
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Definitional debates are kind of silly. Peterson is probably centre-right, which is still "right wing". I agree he's not far-right, but that's not what people are saying.
Here's Oxford, for example:
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/right_wing
Right wing
1. The conservative or reactionary section of a political party or system.
It just means right of centre, broadly interchangeable with "conservative". I realise that political characterisations mean different things in different places, but it's not generally an extreme term.
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I prefer squarer cities personally; well, at least from what i've seen, I'm in a less square area.
generally speaking, the factors affecting squareness are age (long term cities had more chance to divert from original plans, and just grew up and expanded over time), and terrain (flat areas make it far easier to do squareness than hilly areas). in trend i've heard squareness is more common out west than in the east, though there's still a fair bit of it in the east as well.
of course non-squareness doesn't matter as much these days with advanced navigational systems on phones and in cars and such. windy roads leading around who knows where and turning you around and getting you lost used to be more of a problem/nuisance before that.
or maybe it's road size i'm thinking of that varies like that; cities in the east were made long ago, so the road widths tend to be thinner, as they wrere made when populations were smaller and before cars; whereas many cities out west had much of their growth occur more recently (i.e. 20th century), so they made nice wide roads.
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Square cities are a result of urban planning and infrastructure design. Boston is the only city that didn’t benefit from the advent of urban planning. New York has the common sense to burn down during the civil war riots to be rebuilt with proper streets. Boston operates on the “if you don’t know where you are going, you deserve to get lost,” theory.
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On April 08 2018 22:42 Plansix wrote:
Square cities are a result of urban planning and infrastructure design. Boston is the only city that didn’t benefit from the advent of urban planning. New York has the common sense to burn down during the civil war riots to be rebuilt with proper streets. Boston operates on the “if you don’t know where you are going, you deserve to get lost,” theory.
Not to be pedantic or anything but I think american squared block cities are completely soulless compared to the chaotic, curved and somewhat irrational european city centres. Paris, Rome or Madrid geographies don’t really follow any other logic than historical contigency, yet they are better places to live in imo than any american metropolis (I talk about the cities themselves, not the economic or cultural opportunities, mind you). Efficiency and rationality don’t make places any richer, quite the opposite.
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On April 09 2018 00:35 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On April 08 2018 22:42 Plansix wrote:
Square cities are a result of urban planning and infrastructure design. Boston is the only city that didn’t benefit from the advent of urban planning. New York has the common sense to burn down during the civil war riots to be rebuilt with proper streets. Boston operates on the “if you don’t know where you are going, you deserve to get lost,” theory. Not to be pedantic or anything but I think american squared block cities are completely soulless compared to the chaotic, curved and somewhat irrational european city centres. Paris, Rome or Madrid geographies don’t really follow any other logic than historical contigency, yet they are better places to live in imo than any american metropolis (I talk about the cities themselves, not the economic or cultural opportunities, mind you). Efficiency and rationality don’t make places any richer, quite the opposite.
I'll agree with you that history makes those cities much more interesting to live in; however, I think that the way some cities in the United States seem to have formed by race and during a time of heavy industrialization makes them just as interesting to look okay from afar, albeit a lot less pleasant.
Things seem much more compartmentalized, which can lead to awful levels of discrimination (and it has). However, it does have some ruthless efficiency in how it separates things, so I would say that efficiency and rationality make places richer. The people living there won't get equally rich as fast, and inequality seems like a natural result, but the area overall does make money.
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On April 09 2018 00:35 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On April 08 2018 22:42 Plansix wrote:
Square cities are a result of urban planning and infrastructure design. Boston is the only city that didn’t benefit from the advent of urban planning. New York has the common sense to burn down during the civil war riots to be rebuilt with proper streets. Boston operates on the “if you don’t know where you are going, you deserve to get lost,” theory. Not to be pedantic or anything but I think american squared block cities are completely soulless compared to the chaotic, curved and somewhat irrational european city centres. Paris, Rome or Madrid geographies don’t really follow any other logic than historical contigency, yet they are better places to live in imo than any american metropolis (I talk about the cities themselves, not the economic or cultural opportunities, mind you). Efficiency and rationality don’t make places any richer, quite the opposite.
it seems like it would be quite hard to disentangle the effects of the design from the different cultural/social opportunities of the cities, what with different governments, cultures, and a host of other differences as well.
efficiency and rationality can make a place more liveable, in a day to day sense. it helps with the little conveniences that make life a little bit easier and/or more affordable. soul costs money after all.
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On April 08 2018 17:59 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On April 08 2018 15:41 Introvert wrote:On April 08 2018 14:08 Nebuchad wrote:The biggest culture shock for me is how square everything is in terms of city planning, the blocks and the streets and all. It feels really artificial or something. But yeah, I'm hit by the freedom too of course  Come to SoCal and you'll see and feel something more organic in that regard  + Show Spoiler +I'm assuming you are in the east I dunno. LA has big square city blocks and squat concrete buildings as far as the eye can see. New Would cities are just far more planned out in general, or maybe just haven't had time to evolve their own collection of bending alleys, and generally nonsensical street layouts. It also helps that there were no US cities in the middle ages when most of this mess happened (the existence of city walls with a growing population are the main culprit).
we're being relative here. LA in particular is known for being less blocky than other major American cities. Maybe you are thinking of LA proper, particularly downtown? The general LA area is not that way, although there are a lot of concrete buildings, that's true.
Anyways I suppose this is off topic.
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On April 08 2018 20:09 Belisarius wrote:Definitional debates are kind of silly. Peterson is probably centre-right, which is still "right wing". I agree he's not far-right, but that's not what people are saying. Here's Oxford, for example: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/right_wingShow nested quote +Right wing
1. The conservative or reactionary section of a political party or system. It just means right of centre, broadly interchangeable with "conservative". I realise that political characterisations mean different things in different places, but it's not generally an extreme term.
JP is an extreme conservative. His whole philosophy is arguing that classical mysticism should replace the entire enlightenment. You can't get more conservative that arguing that we shouldn't have done the whole enlightenment thing and that we should have stuck with making laws based on the bible and the classics. Go back and read this book review that kollin posted on the last page. Then separate your notions of conservative v liberal from the modern red versus blue incarnation you see on the TV. JP is pushing for rejecting the empiricist/factual/materialist worldview with one based on heroic myths and traditional dominance hierarchies. This is some pre-capitalist conservatism, but you damn well know JP is all for capital reigning dominant over labor.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/19/jordan-peterson-and-fascist-mysticism/
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It's also worth pointing out that Peterson relies on a sort of neo-Jungian emphasis on archetypical psychology that has been practically entirely debunked in much the same way that orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis has. Both lenses still have their use, but Peterson's myth-making ignores the instability beneath him and should be heavily salt-grain discounted accordingly.
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On April 09 2018 03:18 farvacola wrote:
It's also worth pointing out that Peterson relies on a sort of neo-Jungian emphasis on archetypical psychology that has been practically entirely debunked in much the same way that orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis has. Both lenses still have their use, but Peterson's myth-making ignores the instability beneath him and should be heavily salt-grain discounted accordingly.
While not disagreeing with the general thrust of this post, I dislike when people say things like, "this complex thinker has been debunked," without context. At their best, such sentiments should operate as a way of getting people to seriously consider critiques that are largely ignored by someone like JP, but at their worst they operate in a way to discourage thought, effectively saying, this thinker can safely be ignored because we all know better now. Like when someone says, "Oh Plato? He's been effectively debunked" or "Oh structuralism? That's a dead letter" or "Oh Derrida? Everyone knows that's nonsense."
As Kierkegaard said:
Whatever one generation learns from another, it can never learn from a predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh, has no task other than that of any previous generation, and comes no further, provided the latter didn't shirk its task and deceive itself. This authentically human factor is passion, in which the one generation also fully understands the other and understands itself. Thus no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning, the task of no later generation is shorter than its predecessor's, and if someone, unlike the previous generation, is unwilling to stay with love but wants to go further, then that is simply idle and foolish talk […] So long as the generation only worries about its task, which is the highest it can attain to, it cannot grow weary. That task is always enough for a human lifetime.
Kierkegaard is ultimately talking about faith, here, but it also pertains to persuasion. Both require labor ("Now the story of Abraham has the remarkable quality that it will always be glorious no matter how impoverished our understanding of it, but only — for it is true here too — if we are willing to 'labour and be heavy laden.' But labour they will not, and yet they still want to understand the story."). Persuasion is experience, not the immediacy of a self-evident epistemological proposition. And politics is the never-ending need for persuasion as experience of labor, something that must be re-tread anew for each generation.
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What is so damning about Peterson for me, is not that he tells stories about the pancake-dragon, it's his completely disingenuous use and abuse of figures like Nietzsche and Orwell. Reading that CurrentAffairs essay previously linked in this thread by kollin, I don't know how any intellectually honest person can read JP's use of Orwell's Wigan Pier and not be completely disillusioned with most of his pronouncements in areas outside of clinical psychology. The Wigar Pier quotation is totally damning in my view, and clearly reveals the unconscious ideological iceberg underneath all of his political opinions (JP's constant insistence that he is against all ideology should put everyone else on notice that he is, in fact, a deeply ideological man). If he can't even deal with Orwell in an intellectually honest manner, imagine how he thinks about all the "postmodern neo-marxists" he's always railing about.
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Fair enough, I suppose I should clarify that by "practically entirely debunked," I'm mostly referring to the notion that some aspect of the lens being criticized performs a sort of destabilizing effect that must be addressed by those who implement said lens in pursuit of making a qualitatively "good" statement about something. Good criticism of folks like Peterson or Dennett or Pinker inevitably relies on exposing the extent to which these thinkers overlook the implications of the limits inherent to the substance of their chosen platform.
Peterson, for example, repeatedly makes naked appeals to categorical labels that totally ignore the problems of using the label without some kind of mediating acknowledgement. While this forum has already seen its share of "Marxist" definition disputes, that figures as only one among a host of terms that Peterson uses in service of constructing his perspective, but fails to appropriately situate against a backdrop of meaningful granularity. Instead, and as the words of those most inclined to a defense of Peterson indicate, the terms-without-background tend to figure more as tendentious buzzwords than grounded bases for critical explication.
There's also the problem of how susceptible to the thing of criticism Peterson's criticism oftentimes ends up being, particularly when it comes to postmodern concepts. Any sort of implementation of Jungian archetypes that claims to say something generalizable lives and dies on the reliability of the outline of the archetype, which, as it so happens, is precisely the sort of stability that pomo lenses like Lacanian mirrorism or Ricoeur's phenomenological hermeneutics disrupt. Even Jungian individuation falls victim to its inability to account for the extent to which the human psyche metabolizes the shadow of the "self that thinks it sees itself" just as much as the "self" itself. Nevertheless, those inclined to give the archetype the faith it needs to stand on its own two legs needn't acknowledge that inclination without some kind of pomo push, which, of course, is exactly the sort of thing Peterson likes to decry so often
(good Kierkegaard quote, btw)
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Police have killed another person as a result of piss poor training.
Here we see a dozen or so cops executing a mentally ill man with a knife in a homeless shelter.
The two parties/police are not going to fix this situation unless people threaten their careers. We should be working to abolish the police, not superficially reform them (to little or no success).
Shitty story describing the event
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United States24633 Posts
I think this has been discussed a great deal before when I wasn't involved, but how do you abolish the police (in an attempt to prevent unjustified murder of citizens) without crippling society's efforts to meet the police mission (those things we actually want the police to do)? It seems like people who generally benefit from the police (not necessarily due to having done anything wrong themselves) want the police to either be left alone (not preferred) or fixed to weed out corruption and do a better job at holding police officers accountable when they are overly violent (preferred, e.g., don't shoot an unarmed person in a situation that isn't reasonably defensible), while people who feel like the police do more harm than good want the police gone as quickly as possible. What is the actual path forward?
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On April 09 2018 04:16 IgnE wrote:What is so damning about Peterson for me, is not that he tells stories about the pancake-dragon, it's his completely disingenuous use and abuse of figures like Nietzsche and Orwell. Reading that CurrentAffairs essay previously linked in this thread by kollin, I don't know how any intellectually honest person can read JP's use of Orwell's Wigan Pier and not be completely disillusioned with most of his pronouncements in areas outside of clinical psychology. The Wigar Pier quotation is totally damning in my view, and clearly reveals the unconscious ideological iceberg underneath all of his political opinions (JP's constant insistence that he is against all ideology should put everyone else on notice that he is, in fact, a deeply ideological man). If he can't even deal with Orwell in an intellectually honest manner, imagine how he thinks about all the "postmodern neo-marxists" he's always railing about.
I didn't know if this was a philosophical/ psychological reference so I Google that term.
That was a mistake. Thanks, Urban Dictionary.
Besides his obsession with trying to make outdated and disproven Jungian analysis look credible, his insistence on taking mundane and unremarkable platitudes and making them sound as ridiculously wordy and confusing as possible (which equates to "brilliance" in the minds of his supporters), his victim blaming for sexual harassment in the workplace, his denial of any gender pay discrimination, and the fact that he says he identifies as a Christian yet doesn't believe in Jesus's resurrection story (which I think is a contradiction or at least an inconsistency, no?), didn't he also gain notoriety from refusing to follow university protocols on simply acknowledging gender equity (citing freedom of speech, as if his employers aren't allowed to try to enforce additional policies that are aimed towards fairness and acceptance of students)?
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On April 09 2018 04:53 GreenHorizons wrote:Police have killed another person as a result of piss poor training. https://twitter.com/Pdx_resistance/status/982863406502834176Here we see a dozen or so cops executing a mentally ill man with a knife in a homeless shelter. The two parties/police are not going to fix this situation unless people threaten their careers. We should be working to abolish the police, not superficially reform them (to little or no success). Shitty story describing the event
Let's not go through this again, please. Yes, the cops in the US is shit(ly trained). No, no amount of "Abolish with nothing to put in their place" is a good idea. Reform would work, because it has proven to work in literally the entire rest of the first world. Please let's not have 30 more pages of this shit.
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On April 09 2018 05:02 micronesia wrote:
I think this has been discussed a great deal before when I wasn't involved, but how do you abolish the police (in an attempt to prevent unjustified murder of citizens) without crippling society's efforts to meet the police mission (those things we actually want the police to do)? It seems like people who generally benefit from the police (not necessarily due to having done anything wrong themselves) want the police to either be left alone (not preferred) or fixed to weed out corruption and do a better job at holding police officers accountable when they are overly violent (preferred, e.g., don't shoot an unarmed person in a situation that isn't reasonably defensible), while people who feel like the police do more harm than good want the police gone as quickly as possible. What is the actual path forward?
One of the first things we have to do is clearly identify what the police's mission currently is, and whether they are doing it well.
So I have to ask, what do you envision the police's 'mission' to be as of now?
The path forward in my view is a radical transformation of what policing is, how it's done, and how we measure it's success.
If someone is going to suggest that an alternative to what we have would/could be worse, I think they are obligated to tell us by what metrics they would be measuring?
On April 09 2018 05:02 Excludos wrote:Let's not go through this again, please. Yes, the cops in the US is shit(ly trained). No, no amount of "Abolish with nothing to put in their place" is a good idea. Reform would work, because it has proven to work in literally the entire rest of the first world. Please let's not have 30 more pages of this shit.
One way to prevent this from spiraling would be not to repeat the several times debunked claim of wanting to abolish the police with nothing to replace them, and that reform works in the US without providing any statistical evidence or the reforms.
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