Canadian Politics Today

Maybe Peterson is just completely thoughtless:

https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/status/1009716701385101313?s=21

Hannah Arendt made a point about thoughtlessness:

"When I speak about the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level... He was not stupid. It was thoughtlessness. Something by no means identical to stupidity... such remoteness from reality can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together..."

I'm not **** interested in your brother and his fictitious credentials and behavior. And I believe you are inherently dishonest anyway and liable to make up anything that protects your favorite protected religious group. I judge groups based on known group behavior and individuals on their behavior as I know it to be. Your attitude is "Oh, look, here is a good Muslim! Therefore ALL Muslims are wonderful and we should let them all come here!"

See?  Here is an individual who, according to you, should be a 'preferred' immigration candidate because he's well-educated, has obvious ability to succeed economically, speaks English, believes that women are not lesser than men, that gays are 'wrong', but shouldn't be killed for it, and that people should be free to follow their own religious beliefs.

But because he is Muslim, you have decided - on no other evidence than that he is Muslim - to declare his education/beliefs/economic viability as 'fictitious' and myself as dishonest because I present him as an alternative to your agenda of painting all Muslims as backwards, ignorant savages.

So much for your claim that you consider "individual merit". 

We crushed the fascists in the past, so I have no doubt in my mind that you and your ilk will be crushed again.

I spit on fascism. You embrace Marxism and all its theories. So don't give me any crap about 'we' crushed the fascists.

And fascists are no danger to us since their bankrupt ideology is rightly ignored by all but a very rare few isolated retrogrades. Wild eyed Marxists, on the other hand, infest academia and politics like cockroaches.

How often do you have to be told that reciting the sterling qualities of a single person does not in any way whatever impact on the group characteristics?

Upon reciting the sterling qualities of an individual Muslim, an unbiased individual who really judged individuals by merit would result in a response along the lines of "Even though I think little of Muslims generally, that is the kind of Musllim immigrant I would be able to accept in Canada".  A response of "He is lying and/or you are lying because that is not how Muslims think or behave" betrays your bias. Your own words hoist you. 

And the hypocrisy of your attempt to do so is that every time there's a Muslim terrorist incident you rush desperately

Not quite true, which you would know if you stopped foaming at the mouth long enough to see what is really going on.  I have quite deliberately ignored the last few I have seen. 

onto the internet to remind everyone that it was just one (or two, or three or four) people and not representative of all Muslims! Again and again and again, through incident after incident after incident after incident...

Yeah I did do that.  And MH called that approach moronic.  Given that  I respect Michael, I decided maybe he was right and I should stop doing that.   Waiting to see how that works. 

He [Peterson] is a threat because his entire ideology is one that refuses to allow for equality between people. He fights against identity politics because it threatens the dominant position of white, middle-class men to dictate the default lines of thinking, the meaning attributed to all things. He, and xenophobic radicals like Argus, see identity politics as an attempt to subjugate their positional dominance in society. They’re far too ignorant to see that identity politics is about recognizing the variety of status positions and eliminating the established hierarchies associated with those statuses. Instead they wrongly believe  that it’s about status oppressed groups claiming dominance for themselves. Peterson’s ideology is a threat to society because it opaquely seeks to reproduce hierarchies of domination.

This is a wholly false summary of Peterson's beliefs.  I don't agree with everything says, yes he oversimplifies postmodernism.  But he's a straight-up liberal who believes in equal individual rights of all people regardless of characteristic.  This is the ideal that our liberal democratic society is built on, and what all of us true liberals (Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr, the Famous 5 etc. ) have been fighting for the last few centuries.

He believes in individualism, like MLK Jr did, where you should be judged not soley on the colour of your skin (or any other group characteristic), but on the content of your character, your individual actions and merits as a human being and not simply as a member of some stereotyped monolithic group that all share some inferior or superior qualities, which is what sexism and racism is.  The progressive agenda since the 1960's & even since before the US Civil War/end of slavery has been to give everyone equal rights and equality of opportunity and sees that some individuals ie: specific men who individually do bad deeds (ie: misogynists or those who commit sexual assault) are guilty of those specific offenses and not all men should be charged guilty of being bad.

The problem with today's specific kind of identity politics & progressivism according to Peterson is that it doesn't see everyone as equal as enlightenment liberalism does.  It's taken the traditional power hierarchy of straight white men at the top and women, blacks/POC, indigenous, LGBT etc at the bottom and inverted it, so that the voices/status/opinions of members of groups that are the highest on the victimized totem pole are given more worth than those at the bottom regardless of merit of opinion, with straight white men at the very bottom.  And if you're white and don't agree with what a POC says regardless of the validity of the argument it's labeled "white tears" because of your "white fragility" and you're told to "check your privilege", which is often just code-word for "STFU you evil oppressor".  And these concepts are literally taught by PhD's in classrooms across the West.

And this is all legitimized because students are taught by professors that POC can't be racist to white people because the dictionary definition of racism is wrong and a new definition created by sociologists means only white people can be racist.  And you cybercoma have used postmodernist argument to defend this saying that the dictionary definitions are wrong because they were created by white men to uphold their own power hierarchies.

The point is we should blame individuals who do bad things, not stereotype & blame the whole group.  This is very ironically the same thing the KKK and Nazis did.  As Jordan says, this type of stuff has increasingly spread throughout universities.  Here's a professor of sociology and director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University who had this op-ed published in the Washington Post who is a hateful misandrist with some valid points but disgusting conclusions, and this person teaches students this crap & proves Jordan's point! https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men/2018/06/08/f1a3a8e0-6451-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html?utm_term=.94a85987ae10

Young white men are rightfully ticked off at this BS because it's not justice it's injustice, no wonder they follow Peterson in droves.  As a white dude I grew up fighting for black rights and LGBT rights etc. against those bad white dudes who would deny them their rights, but suddenly I've found myself lumped in together with all the bad white dudes and targeted based on my skin/gender not on my deeds and damned right I'm going to resist against this BS.

I’m not going kind by line through your post because nearly everything you say about Marxism is entirely wrong. Marxism is about the historical development of the material conditions of life and the unequal distribution of the resources needed for survival. Marx described historical processes and had more to say about capital and the theory of value. Later Marxists began describing why the revolution didn’t happen by pointing out how the working class buy into ideologies that reproduce the inequality in society. If you fundamentally do not understand Marxism and you’re not going to learn from the resources that highlight Peterson’s completely incorrect arguments, there’s not any point in engaging with you in discussion. If you won’t recognize his mistakes and you won’t learn the theories he describes from their sources, then your purpose is to proselytize and I’m not interested in swallowing that bullshit.

I'm well versed in what Marxism is.  It's both a historical analysis of economics, a modern analysis of capitalism & labour, and a prediction of what dialectic will occur & vaguely how it will/should come about which was expanded by others like Lenin.  At its heart though, Marxism is about an oppressor/oppressed dynamic that seeks free the oppressed, which is what's been happening socially as well, and why progressives like yourself are so often Marxist sympathizers.  Maybe "cultural marxism" is a dumb term, maybe what I described should be given a different label.

I'll definitely admit that Peterson overly simplifies and demonizes postmodernism.  I actually love many elements of postmodernism and Derrica's theories.  I don't find people like Foucault and Derrida's ideas necessarily "dangerous", but I think certain parts of them have been co-opted and perverted by academics and many people on the left to advance an agenda whose ramifications are dangerous, similar to how certain types perverted Nietzsche's ideas to advance Nazism.  And i think that's why Peterson calls these current academics "postmodernist", they're moral relativists and see enlightenment/liberalism and much what was built from it as tools of white male oppression.

I feel like I can learn something from a discussion between CG and Cyber.

Yeah, I am not really up on arguing Marxism with a Marxist myself. It always struck me as a proven failed system which was developed by those with no understanding of human behavior and which has failed utterly everywhere anyone has ever managed to bring it into government. You get a government sympathetic to Marxism and you get something like Venezuela, so why would anyone bother to study it?