It starts:
If you want to appear very profound and convince people to take you seriously, but have nothing of value to say, there is a tried and tested method. First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like “if you’re too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of” or “many moral values are similar across human societies.” Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts. Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured. (It does help if you are male and Caucasian.)
Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say. This should be obvious to anyone who has spent even a few moments critically examining his writings and speeches, which are comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant. They are half nonsense, half banality. In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train.
2 comments:
So Nathan J. Robinson, a nobody communist Harvard sociology academic, has been put on this week's counter-propaganda roster by the American left to try to tear down Jordan Peterson with a series of empty argument-free projections that Peterson would never be popular on Planet Lefty because, as a practising clinical psychologist, he describes real world stuff that zombie leftoid prisoners of ideology could never in a million years understand.
Nice little echo chamber you have here, Steve, though, with nobody in it, the echo is a bit tinny. Which is obviously why you have to spend most of every day at the Cat.
Now who is that? Doesn't sound like JC. Why won't you reveal yourself?
As for Catallaxy - God it has an awful bunch of damaged personalities there now. And it works as a fetid breeding pond for rudeness, arrogance, homophobia, misogyny and ignorance. That's an echo chamber that I don't want to soil my hands on - although I do scan it for the purposes of being appalled and occasionally posting bits of it here for the purpose of ridicule.
Post a Comment