Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

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(1) You don't care enough about definitions to argue over them until they're settled? How do you expect a discussion to be resolved, then?

(2) You don't care if secondary or tertiary points are illogical? If they're not important, or if the logical flaws can't be fixed, why do such secondary/tertiary points continue to be included along with the central point? It makes no sense to blame Peterson's camp for this in any case. The opposition should fix their damned arguments.

(3) Can you cite an example of a logical argument presented by JP's opposition that is dismissed with "that's not an argument"? Please make sure what you cite is an actual logical/dialectical statement, and not rhetoric/sophistry... that's the typical problem with neoliberal/postmodern/progressive language.

JP's philosophy needs to be attacked on several fronts, most notably his ridiculous attempts to give religion and particularly Christianity a validity beyond mere myth and collections of historical cultural wisdom, such as it was. But the complaints you raise are absurd.

I've only recently watch a few talks by Jordan Peterson, and haven't read the debate around him, but:

> (2) You don't care if secondary or tertiary points are illogical? If they're not important, or if the logical flaws can't be fixed, why do such secondary/tertiary points continue to be included along with the central point? It makes no sense to blame Peterson's camp for this in any case.

When you are discussing social movements the "opposition" is open ended. When you can pluck your examples from literally thousands of arguments and articulations, it's easy to pick out some ill-conceived notion, or simply misinterpret by taking it out of its context.

For instance, I watched a video where he talks about White Privilege (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbDggKqt3KA), and he quotes one seminal piece (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peggy_McIntosh#Invisible_Knaps...), but that essay simply introduced the phrase to many people and opened a conversation. And he points out that some of the items may be class privilege instead of race privilege (though of course he wouldn't say "class" because that's Marxist!) So?

> The opposition should fix their damned arguments.

No one's going to go back 30 years and rewrite the Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack to clarify whatever confusion Jordan Peterson had with it. There's no hope so long as he plays the critic and selects the material he prefers to refute.

He's decided to engage with social movements. It's why he's popular, he's reacting to something that feels familiar to many people. If he engaged with any specific argument most people wouldn't care what he said, because most people don't care about any specific argument. You can't engage logically with a social movement, because there's no single logical basis, and there's no underlying authority which can be refuted.

Like fucking clockwork haha.

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