legitimately referred to as "a murderous equity doctrine" and whether that kind of rhetoric can be considered "hysterical". — Baden

Well, no, because Peterson did not specify which belief he thought was a "murderous equality doctrine." I went over this with Maw. You can read that sequrnce of posts if you would like to see how that discussion went.

We don't even have to argue over whether the left or the right is more unreasonable overall actually because it's not all that pertinent, — Baden

But you invited that discussion by saying that there were more conspiracy theorists on the right. This is what puzzles me: when I make an argument, you respond that you're not interested in a discussion, despite the fact that I was addressing one of your points.

Sanctimonious? Check. Self-righteous? Check. Hectoring? Well, there's a limit to the extent to which it can reasonably be claimed blatant sarcasm is just gentle ribbing, and so...Check. Sectarian? Check. Maudlin? Well, expressions of self-pity and claims of sad disappointment probably qualify, and so...Check. Blustering? Well, certainly indignant, at least, and the use of uppercase can be said to be "loud", so...Check. — Ciceronianus the White

I typed the words "woof woof" and got this in response. I am sorry if I hurt your feelings, but this seems a bit exuberant in response to "woof woof."

To recap: we have a widespread hysterical reaction on the left, where you've got some harmless middle-aged psych professor telling people to clean their rooms and grumbling about the social justice movement, and the reaction to him is to cast him as some kind of harbinger of fascism.

We have a stubborn refusal to recognize the violent extremism of groups like BLM and antifa, and pointing out the violent extremism of such groups immediately makes you the target of ridicule (sans argument). Also, there is a lot of conspiracy theorism about Trump being a Russian puppet, shadowy right-wing fraternities controlling Austria, and so forth.

Several times in this thread I have tried to coax some kind of argument out of SLX and Baden. But at one point I (gently) made fun of SLX by typing "woof woof" and he took that as a reason not to defend his position. Meanwhile, I also (gently) made fun of Baden with a reference to David Icke, and he decided that that meant he didn't need arguments to support his point. I'm a little disappointed, guys.

It worries you that I think gender equality shouldn't be equated with a murderous equity doctrine? — Baden

No, my point was that calling yourself a "woman's equality" activist doesn't mean that what you are doing is good, or even that it has anything to do with equality; antifa, for example, call themselves anti-fascists, but really just engage in terrorism. Slapping a nice-sounding label on something does not make it a good thing, and I know you're not dumb enough to be fooled by that.

but you can't admit to that happening on the right even with blatantly obvious examples, and would prefer to distract with talk about hypothetical "reptoid aliens". Yawn. Same old boring tribal support mental block. — Baden

No, that remark was in reply to your assertion that there is more conspiracy theorism on the right than on the left. My reply cited three examples of widespread conspiracy theorism on the left.

Are you even reading my posts, Baden, or just skimming them and firing off a reply?

I don't see anything hysterical about the three points you mentioned.

Your use of "women's equality" is a bit hand-wavey, though. That's like claiming that antifa can't be a terrorist organization because they call themselves "anti-fascist." The fact that a group of activists canvasses what they do as "women's equality" doesn't mean that what they're doing is good, and your uncritical acceptance of their self-imposed label worries me.

As to tinfoil, I see more of that from established media outlets than from independent pundits. For exampl, the Russia collusion nonsense, the claims of Austrian politics being infiltrated by "shadowy far-right fraternities," and several news outlets blaming the Mafia for the Italian elections. Whenever one of these populist political changes takes place, all of the sudden it's because of Russia or the Mafia or Austrian fraternities or whoever. What's next? Trump is a reptoid alien?

That's a pity. I'd hope that a person as well-read as yourself would deign to post his arguments in this thread, if not for my benefit, then for that of the forum. I've enjoyed your posting on this forum and the previous one for years. It's a bit disconcerting that a little lightheartedness is such a turn-off for you. Hope you're alright.

You've engaged me for several posts so far. Why the sudden reticence? Your post made some assertions but with no arguments. I'm certain that you have arguments, though, so why not post them? This is a philosophy forum.

Come now, you needn't dig your heels in like this. You said I had a shallow read of his standing, and I asked for an in-depth explanation.

Of what exactly? — StreetlightX

Here are the last two posts:

No, but then, if you think that caricature is the crux of the issue, then you have a very shallow read of his standing — StreetlightX

Cool! Let's hear an in-depth critique. — Pneumenon

Cool! Let's hear an in-depth critique.

I dunno. Maybe he'd specify which brand of feminism he was criticizing and why. You seem to be making some serious inferential leaps here, without apparent justification.

I'm afraid I do not see the link between "get your shit together and take care of yourself" and "SUBMIT TO THE PATRIARCHY WOOF WOOF." I agree that he is famous, though. And there are certainly many incredibly fascinating things you could glean from looking at his popularity and the reasons for it. But he's not the Lord of Mystic Fascism.

is stating that modern feminism is "a murderous equity doctrine" valid criticism, — Maw

Irrelevant, as Peterson never said this. He didn't even directly state what the doctrine was. Herrings within herrings....

*shrug* I'm not a terribly huge fan of Peterson's. But I think the hysterical reaction to some frog-voiced middle-aged psych prof who occasionally criticizes the political left is symptomatic of a wider phenomenon. The guy yells at people to clean their rooms and grumbles about the excesses of the social justice movement, and people act as if he's the Antichrist.

Well, you used a somewhat-strong adverb to modify "wrong" there, so clearly you're an unstable firebrand!

Yeah, nothing to do with the the 'murderous' quip at all. — StreetlightX

Calling for someone else's murder is "acidic" and "vehement." Calling someone else "murderous" is not.

But it's not clear to me that "criticizing the feminist movement" is meaningful, because the movement itself is not homogeneous. — Maw

Red herring. Very few movements are homogeneous. Your opening post made some general criticisms of right-wing politics, and right-wing politics aren't homogenous, either.

More generally: the "it's not monolithic!" defense is a red herring because it doesn't add anything to the discussion. If you want to criticize someone for not being specific enough, then make an argument.

I do not think that Maw was using "conservative" in the sense you're thinking. He seems to apply it to right-wing politics in general.

In response to a Justin Trudeau tweet commending those who came out to march in support Women's Rights, Peterson tweeted that such support leads to a "murderous equity doctrine". — Maw

Okay, so criticizing the feminist movement makes you "acidic" and "vehement?" The over-the-top hyperbole you're using here is precisely what you're accusing him of doing.

Perhaps this is true of conservatism as well, which, having retained the same talking points for decades, has exhausted itself, has fallen out of fashion. — Maw

That's clearly why Trump got elected!

So? If the result is the degradation of politics, polarization, and conflict, all the worse for democratization. It would be naive to think that feeding the masses' baser instincts in an uncontrolled manner is somehow going to lead to progress just because it's democratic. — Baden

Precisely.

So, politics in general is moving further and further away from a special space for (somewhat) reasoned debate into a free for all for emotional venting — Baden

I believe we call this process "democratization."

I find it interesting that you think that Peterson, of all people, is zany. I find his views pretty mild and banal. I'd have to be pretty sheltered to think that anything he says is particularly "out there." Even Milo says some over-the-top trollish stuff which is painfully easy to spot, and otherwise has pretty pedestrian center-right views.

Your response sucked. No offense.

In all seriousness: if you are convinced that the Right is a pod of unleashed hell-hounds, it would behoove you to understand them.

You won't succeed in understanding the contemporary Right using the categorical schemes favored by Leftist theorists. The contemporary Right is definitely reactionary, but the reasons for this just cannot be understood in the terms in which Leftist theorists ordinarily think.

Listen, I'm going to give you a valuable tip: if you want to understand what the Right is doing, you won't get there by trying to fit them into the "villain" role in your political Manicheanism (e.g. Ciceronianus' post) and you won't get there by trying to sympathize with the plight of poor, rural white people. Neither of those will work.

Somebody posted a link to the article on First Things, and I think that's a good starting point.

And yet, we're not gonna stop doing metaphysics. The metaphysical tradition continues, and will do so as long as subjects are curious about their own subjectivity. And the loss of that capacity to which you allude is not something metaphysics fails to realize, at least not in every case; in some cases, that "loss" is literally the goal. All the Buddhist talk about extinguishing the ego is a case in point.

Theism, in this sense, would be the belief that the ground of being knows itself. It would follow, if you have any kind of soteriology, that one is liberated/saved when one knows oneself the way the ground of being knows itself, which means knowing that one is the ground of being.

Thanks, Wayfarer and SLX. Both textual references gave me something to chew on.

To reiterate in a slightly different way: you know that you have an introspective sense because it affects you, and you are cognizant of those effects because you have an introspective sense. But the eye never quite turns around and sees itself, per Wayfarer's reference. This is circular, but if you begin with the premise that we only know the world by the way it impacts is, then you're pretty much guaranteed to end up with something like this.

(For Kierkegaard, our freedom results from our finitude, but the freedom is also the aspect in which we are most like God.)

One is tempted to postulate that Buddhism is basically a method for stopping the cycle by basically sabotaging it. But that's a completely different discussion.

Your answer was the best. Many thanks.

My initial response to this is to step back and say that humans have not learned to control their technology yet. As with the economy, I apprehend a marked tendency in contemporary discourse to see technological trends almost as forces of nature rather than the results of the actions of individual humans.

Such forces can be manipulated, worked with, though perhaps not controlled. The problem is that our standard means of understanding and working with things are the result of a culture that takes natural science as paradigmatic for, uh, pretty much everything. Thing is, you can't render things like market forces or technological change intelligible using methods analogous to the study of chemical reactions or whatever. Or if you can, you can only do so using very, very loose analogies, to the point where it becomes more art than science.

I don't think that the answer is a post-capitalist society, per Zizek's haunting aphorism that it's easier to imagine the apocalypse than the end of capitalism. At least, that's not a workable next step, or even end goal, given that it's not even visible at this point.

In the end, I have to question whether a strictly economic analysis is appropriate here. I understand that this is all very political, of course, but so much of it is enabled/dictated by technological change that I don't think we can analyze it like Marxist historians looking for contradictions in the system or some such. You need to bring in a wider conceptual context to get out of your "mapping" phase, methinks.

While it is true that (g), (h), and (i) are entailed by (f), and it is also true that Smith could accept/believe that all three are valid forms of disjunction. It is not true that Smith could believe anything at all about Brown's location. I mean, Gettier clearly states that Smith is totally ignorant about that. Thus, Smith - himself - would not form belief about Brown's location. One cannot know they are ignorant about Brown's location and simultaneously form and/or hold a belief about where Brown is located.

The mistake here is conflating knowledge of the rules of entailment/disjunction with belief. Believing that (g), (h), and (i) are entailed by (f) is not equivalent to believing the disjunctions. — creativesoul

A few possible counters:

• Believing a disjunctive statement is not the same as beliefs about the disjuncts.
• Knowledge that (g), (h), and (i) are entailed by (f), and belief in (f) will, upon reflection, result in belief in the disjunctions. I I know that I have two arms, and I know that two is an even number, then, upon reflection, I will come to believe that I have an even number of arms.

I don't think the Gettier problem is really new. I think it was mentioned as early as the Theatetus or however you spell it.

Also, there's something fishy about investigating commonsense beliefs by means of formal logic in a thought experiment where we imagine people constructing formal structures in order to deduce things. It seems like a weird scenario bound to produce nonsense.

I think part of the problem is that neither phenomena nor the explanations that account for them are unitary things: different aspects of any one phenomena may involve different explanatory schemes/levels. — StreetlightX

Can I get an example of something that is unitary?

It is a substantive difference as the reductionist is claiming that a system is simply constituted of its events while the holist adds that, collectively, those events result in a generalised state of constraint. A global property emerges that restricts those events by becoming their history, their context. — apokrisis

Yes. This is very close to, or the same as, a view that I've often held implicitly, so thanks for fleshing it out. This is also the reason that Mr. Irreductionist responds the way he does, by appealing to the history of each particle and its interactions with others.

I voted substantive mainly because you seem to have ruled it out by setting up the idea that an ecosystem is equivalent to a bunch of billiard balls. — unenlightened

Granted, but notice Mr. Irreductionist's counter: "What, exactly, are you explaining?" If you want to, you could pursue that line and say that viewing the whole system as a bunch of particles just doesn't do what you need it to do. Whether that makes it into a methodological disagreement is up to you. 's comment is also along the lines of Mr. Irreductionist's counter.

On my understanding, a true Irreductionist (of whom I'd say I am one, except that I resist accepting labels, especially 'ism' ones) denies that, even in theory, our experiences could be explained solely in terms of interactions of particles. — andrewk

Right. I think it may be helpful - for you and other people - to view the exchange in the OP dialectically. Mr. Irreductionist's counter that the whole thing telescopes out is a means of trying for a reductio against Mr. Reductionist, while accepting some of his premises, and occurs at the point in the dialectic where you would expect such a thing. Mr. Irreductionist's final counter, that Mr. Reductionist is no longer explaining the same thing, is a case of following this line of reasoning toward something like what you say here.

But does the true irreductionist deny that all out experiences (and for that matter all our explanations) could be the result of interactions of particles? — Janus

This is an interesting question. I would ask what is meant by result here. It seems odd to say that our experiences are "caused" by the interactions of particles. That looks like it would lead to epiphenomenalism, because if particles are the cause and experiences are the effect, then particles and experiences aren't the same thing, but one is caused and determined wholly by the other. Perhaps you can reply that this misses the point, because you're just saying that the particles must be there for the experiences to be there. But is that reductionism?

Thanks for the responses, everyone. Digging this discussion so far.

If you are talking about democracy among different tribes vying for control, then it becomes a sort of collective mob rule — FreeEmotion

That's all democracy is anyway.

Part of the purpose of assuming it's good is to investigate whether or not it's good. If you assume that democracy is good, and derive a contradiction, then you can find out that it must be not-good. Think of it like making an assumption in symbolic logic.

The ones that involve logical contradictions. That's how philosophers generally understand "absurdity."

No.

I'm reminded of Mencken's other swipe at American democracy: the "worship of jackals by jackasses."

"what if A was X" is absurd and that is irrelevant of whether ¬X is a part of the definition of A. — BlueBanana

"What if I go to the store tomorrow?" is an absurd question, then (except it's not).

Seriously, man, re-read what you just wrote. If what you say is true, then all hypotheticals are absurd. Come on.

Well, taking that as an assumption we are talking of a potentially hypothetical situation. We might as well assume that democracy is worth killing every single person whom it affects and that answer is just as valid as that it's a positive thing to begin with.

The question is comparable to "if -2,3 was a positive whole number, what would it be?" — BlueBanana

I disagree. "If -2,3 was a positive whole number" is an absurdity because (-2,3) is an ordered pair, which is, by definition, not a positive whole number. The assumption that "democracy is inherently good" doesn't contradict the definition of democracy. Note that it's not an assumption that I hold.

Not if the democratic constitution says that the abolishment of democracy is not allowed. — Πετροκότσυφας

Not even if it's democratically voted for?

f your definition of "democratic" implies that defense of democracy is undemocratic, then sure, it is. — Πετροκότσυφας

Well, you just said that the only way to avoid a self-defeating democracy was to limit people's voting, which is undemocratic. If people can't abolish their current form of government by means of voting, then their current government is undemocratic.

So the only way not to allow for a self-defeating democracy is to be undemocratic. It's almost as if democracy is self-negating or something!