Are ethnic jokes inherently wrong, racist, or offensive?

[Simon Paynton]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

This article makes a good case for deeming him a Conservative. Some of his views and comments are very similar to religious conservatives.

I’m not convinced by this article.

[Davis]

It’s a culture war, and he’s spearheading one particular aspect of one side.  Wars are messy.

That sounds a little bit like you’re excusing the use of pointless bigotry, racism, transphobia along with manipulation, lies and deceit in the aim of defending your own ideology. Does the fact that a problem is messy ever justify any of this?

Maybe he could incorporate lessons from this in his third book.

How can he write about any lessons when his behaviour hasn’t changed and he sees nothing wrong with his own lies, manipulation and pandering to his audience?

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by Davis.

[Davis]

I simply don’t understand how JP could be considered liberal (socially) in any way considering his misogyny, family-values, christian-values, homophobia, transphobia, disinterest in the problems of marginalised people and his admiration for some far-right figures.

Simon could you give a loose definition of what being a liberal is (socially)? I am super curious what you think that means. Please give more than a single sentence answer.

[—]

Simon Paynton wrote:

@jakelafort – I’m disappointed that he seems to have acted like a bit of a dumbass…

I think ‘a bit of a dumbass’ might apply to the first video he made. At the time, he was relatively obscure. I think he said himself that he was surprised how much attention it got. While I think his talk was still irresponsible—especially for someone who should know about academic rigours—I get the impression it was just meant to be a one off commentary on a current event rather than a thorough analysis.

It’s after that that he really starts to disappoint. I don’t know what happened. If that’s how he always is, or if having people thrust attention his way went to his head. At the time, if you googled ‘bill c-16’ news results, his name would dominate the headlines on pages and pages of search results. If there were a time to tell the truth and take personal responsibility, that was it. He didn’t.

…and forgotten the welfare of transgender people who are being used as a weapon by both sides.

Eh. To a limited extent. I think after same-sex couples gained the right to marry in the US, there were some who needed a new battleground. Once you start in this polarized conflict, it’s probably pretty hard to give it up. That is not mutually exclusive with people actually caring about the issue.

That said, used as a weapon? Not so much. The whole ‘both sides’ rhetoric gets taken too far. There aren’t two sides. There are many sides, even within the more polarized camps.

I’ve heard one transgender activist say, publicly, (literally) that if you question publicly an aspect of transgender orthodoxy, a transgender person is going to kill themselves. How does that help anything at all? Is that not using people as a weapon? Sounds like a controlling narcissist to me.

You say ‘literally’, but without context, it’s difficult to parse. That claim usually follows along the lines of the abuse, stigmatization, inequality and isolation transgender people face can be quite extreme and leads to poor mental health and increases in suicidal ideation/death by suicide). By contributing to that abuse either directly or indirectly, the predictable outcome is deaths.

Now, saying “you’re killing trans people” to virtually everything is extreme, and I have seen some cases of people doing that. Narcissistic? Not really.

Maybe he could incorporate lessons from this in his third book. For example, he could have focused on “narcissism in political extremism” which I think is the real problem.

I don’t think he could do that. He’d have to see himself more clearly than he seems to. Ideally he’d accept he just doesn’t actually know much about this subject and step back at this point as far as I am concerned. While he is far from singularly responsible for dysfunction in social discourse, conversations I was having around transgender rights and awareness were much calmer before he threw the world’s most sedate tantrum.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

@Simon – One major point in the article is JP’s “belief that a lack of hierarchy and explicit rules results in chaos”. That is core conservative ideology. We are not assuming this is something he believes about political or social realities. These are ideas that he has repeated in lectures, speeches and written about.  Not just once, but over a number of years so we can see a pattern clearly emerge. There is no need to read between any lines that could lead us to jump to a false interpretation of how he thinks.

JP would do well to read A Theory of Moral Sentiments referenced in the article and grasp the concept of Adam Smiths’ “impartial spectator” and develop his own greater sense of “self-command” which would lead him to develop greater empathy towards others.  Maybe disengaged young men should read it too and not a “pulpit fiction” book of rules heavily wrapped in biblical quotes.  At times his book reads like a Bible study lesson which, I am sure you will agree, is a trait shared by all “classical liberal” writers and something a conservative would never do !!

[Simon Paynton]

Davis wrote:

Simon could you give a loose definition of what being a liberal is (socially)? I am super curious what you think that means. Please give more than a single sentence answer.

As far as I’m concerned, a classical liberal is someone who celebrates a diversity of ideas, and the fact that people are allowed to voice them: and an intolerance of intolerance.  This seems very much in line with JP’s core beef with the Left.  He sees them as intolerant.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

One major point in the article is JP’s “belief that a lack of hierarchy and explicit rules results in chaos”. That is core conservative ideology.

It’s also not not liberal, in my opinion.  Personal responsibility was a big favourite of Mrs Thatcher (Conservative prime minister).  Oh dear.  I don’t like personal responsibility now, because Mrs Thatcher liked it.

I had a frustrating / productive conversation with someone on Facebook fairly recently.  I showed her my critique of patriarchy, suggesting that it’s an evolved psychology.  She said I wasn’t allowed to think that, on ideological grounds – because evolved psychology enables racism ( … etc. ).  (Apparently, people are motivated by money and nothing else, since that’s what Marx thought.)  This is exactly the kind of thing JP hates.  I think it’s super-dumb as well.  It’s a shame that JP had to put transgender people in the firing line, in the process.

[Simon Paynton]

Davis wrote:

Does the fact that a problem is messy ever justify any of this?

My point is, wars are bad because they are messy.  Don’t have wars.  That’s my point.

[Davis]

A classical liberal is someone who celebrates a diversity of ideas, and the fact that people are allowed to voice them: and an intolerance of intolerance

Simon if you are going to use a classical liberal definition (something almost nobody does anymore) then you should be up front about that with people. This is probably the source of your confusion here. In most contexts these days, in a social/political sense: liberal is similar to being “progressive”. Of course it can get confusing if you add economic-liberalism or continental European or Australian politics into the fold but let’s not do that.

But even by classical liberalism: JP is hardly one at all. He is against many civil liberties including things like gay adoption, laws which protect certain forms of gender equality and we have already seen just how shallow his dedication is to “free speech”. He is a classical liberal in tone, but not in action.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

It’s a shame that JP had to put transgender people in the firing line,

Yes, it is shameful. But shining a spotlight on the “target” while handing out bullets steeped in conservative rhetoric and polishing them with his academic credentials makes it rather more than shameful.

[Simon Paynton]

I agree with his mission – tackling ideological censorship of free thinking – but I think the way he went about it might have been questionable.

[Simon Paynton]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

the concept of Adam Smiths’ “impartial spectator”

Wasn’t he talking about impartiality in the context of fairness and justice?  As in, “justice is blind”.

[jakelafort]

Davis, that is great.

We Americans cherish our freedom to drop dead in the event we get sick and haven’t insurance or means. What is the alternative? A nanny state! Ewww. As long as free market capitalism is entrenched and controlling our lawmakers and social policy all is well.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

We are born with an innate or evolved moral sense that develops as we mature. Leaving outliers like psychopaths and sociopaths aside, most of us understand that we are social creatures and that morality is based upon our sense of society and our place in it. While we must first look after ourselves in a selfish manner, we learn to better empathize with others and know what actions to commend or to see as unacceptable. To keep the society intact and prosperous is to the benefit of all that live in it. This is where Justice and Fairness come in.

We can ask ourselves if an “impartial observer” would approve of our actions and would empathize with our emotional responses to said actions. If it is so then we are “doing the right thing”. It is “good” for us and therefore good for society. Therefore, we can be considered to be morally mature and possess “self-command” as Smith would call it. We are each independent people who live in a society of independents that, via “self-command”, are constantly benefiting each other by having this virtue. Even by just “doing no harm” we are making society a better society for all. If some of us start doing good then our society prospers further.

Self-help books or submission to the higher power of imaginary gods won’t do much to make society a better place for anyone who believes in Justice and Fairness. If enough people with self-command get together then meaningful changes to society will (and do) happen. People with self-command will tackle inequality by listening to those suffering from the inequalities pointed out to them. Once a commitment is made to bring about those changes society benefits. Once they are legally guaranteed (under Justice) then we are all on a winner.  Any impartial observer would salute them.

But if we tell people to pull up their socks and become responsible for themselves while complaining that some members of our society should not have the same rights as us or that Justice should not be afforded to them as it is to others, then you are reneging on your duty to other members of your society. If you preach that all animals are equal but some are more equal than others while saying that you have studied totalitarian regimes for 40 years and don’t see the irony (if irony is the correct word) then you are just not a liberal and I have switched off, except to warn others.

[TheEncogitationer]

Fellow Unbelievers,

Am I the only one in the world who responds to Jordan Peterson with “Meh?”

Everybody is either: “He’s like a modern-day Amos, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and John the Baptist rolled into one!” or “He’s the shit I scraped off my bicycle tires after the Critical Mass ride through CHAZ/CHOP!”

I haven’t read or watched much of him because what I have seen is so turgid.  He takes so long to say so little.  This may be a weakness of career YouTubers, but it is also a barrier to attention and understanding any viewpoint, especially in a get-up-and-go age with a million things demanding attention.

Yes, he, like anyone else, has a right to free expression and forced expression is as dangerous to free expression as supressed expression.

As often as I encounter–and sometimes engage in–accidental mis-gendering (it’s easy to do with babies and toddlers,) I would never want that to be considered something worth One Penny’s fine or one minute’s incarceration.

At the same time, what I have heard Jordan Peterson say about diet, God, religion, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn leaves me highly in doubt of his intellect and Enlightenmnent/Classical Liberal street cred.

His Beef-and-Bottle Diet sounds too insane to believe that he would actually do that.  If he does, he has to be living on some seriously backlogged borrowed time.  I hope for their sakes none of his followers are dumb enough to emulate that.

Something struck me about his pronouncements about God.  He once said: “I don’t believe God exists, but I act like he does.”  So to Jordan Peterson, the idea of God is like some mnemonic device to use to keep people straight, otherwise bad things happen?

And Jordan Peterson has clearly never read a Bible or critically analyzed Judeo-Christian thought when he parrots Dostoevsky’s dictum: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

Doesn’t the entire text of atrocities in The Bible show that evidently, everything is permitted with a God?  Doesn’t Isaiah 45:7, The Book of Job, and Matthew 19:26 all punctuate that message explicitly?

And if Jordan Peterson is going to cite a dissenter from the Soviet and Communist tyranny, he could have done way better than Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.  While Solzhenitsyn did great at exposing the cruelties of the Soviet Gulag system, he equally condemned the Secularism, commercialism, and permissiveless of the U.S. and the West.  He even went back to Russia and palled around with former-KGB man Putin.  A lot of other dissenters didn’t trust or like Solzhenitsyn.

Jordan Peterson as The Red Skull?  That’s going a bit far.  Jordan’s more like The Red Lobster, something that crawls to the top of the bucket only to get boiled anyway and over-billed as haut cuisine.  I’ll work for my food, but I won’t work to eat it.  (Now a GMO lobster bred without a shell, that might be something worth trying!)

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by TheEncogitationer. Reason: Cleaning my room of spelling errors, without JP telling me to do so

[Davis]

Enco, rationalwiki says it best when referring to JP:

His statements are notoriously incoherent, vague, jargon-laden, and ambiguous, which allows him to hand-wave criticism as mere misrepresentations of his babbling gibberish.

[Author]

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