H.P. Lovecraft and the Alt.Right

Jordan Peterson is in danger of going full Stefan Molyneux. His rants about the omnipresence of Marxism are at times barely distinguishable from the far right, who are the audience he actively courts.

Peterson is a top-tier pseud. His rants on crypto-Marxism and his willful ignorance on the science of transsexualism make me feel like I'm huffing gasoline.

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He's masterclass in mental gymnastics though.

YouTube

He once said Trump must have a high IQ to have been a successful reality TV star. Idiocracy in motion. Go classical liberalism!

His attitude towards god actually doesn't bother me much. Probably because I'm so tired of the sceptic community and the GREAT MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS. His opinions on shadowy communist cabals, Donald Trump and other matters are what strike me as slimy and dishonest.

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I don't see anything wrong with what JP says in that clip.* Perhaps the weakest point is that he is pragmatic about truth. To the extent that any of us are agnostic but live by hypotheses 'as if' they were true, however, we're all pragmatic about truth, and it's not a bad rule of thumb concerning what people believe to look at what they act as if they believe (rather than what they might, for social or other reasons profess).

Changing the subject, the mention of ContraPoints prompted me to look up the YT channel, and I watched the following three videos:

The Left | ContraPoints - YouTube

Why I Quit Academia | ContraPoints - YouTube

Everyones a Little Bit Racist Sometimes (Response to ArmouredSkeptic) | ContraPoints - YouTube

I found them well presented and interesting. The jokey style was mentioned above. I actually found the humour pretty good for an amateur YT channel, though am increasing wary of the way humour can be used to fudge points in talk about politics.

The second of the two videos was particularly poignant for me, for reasons I won't go into. On the humour theme, the third made a strong and very amusing point about the use of phrases like "ripping you a new arsehole" (I'm assuming British spelling, as well as being superior, will avoid any automatic censorship here) used in online 'debate'.

In that connection, I find the approach in the videos above somewhat different to the ad hominem approach being taken in much of this thread; there doesn't seem to be much discussion of ideas here, just talking about people's reputations and then transferring of a negative reputation from one person to another supposedly associated with them.

*To be clear, the clip posted in this thread, not the one referenced by James.

Weird article on H-Peel on some alt-right website called Age of ####lords:

https://ageof####lords.com/from-cthu...about-feminism

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http://www.macleans.ca/opinion/is-jo...-smart-person/
Just to add one more thing about Peterson. This article nails him.

Quote Originally Posted by Nirvana In Karma

Weird article on H-Peel on some alt-right website called Age of ####lords: https://ageof####lords.com/from-cthu...about-feminism

The swearing broke your link, but the title: 'From Cthulhu to Cuck: What H. P. Lovecraft Can Teach Us About Feminism' made me cringe. What a bunch of tools. How do people fall for all this Trump/Brexit crap when it's phrased in such coarse and worthless terms? Bad ideas presented badly. Brazen anti-intellectualism.

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Quote Originally Posted by James

Quote Originally Posted by Nirvana In Karma Weird article on H-Peel on some alt-right website called Age of ####lords: https://ageof####lords.com/from-cthu...about-feminism The swearing broke your link, but the title: 'From Cthulhu to Cuck: What H. P. Lovecraft Can Teach Us About Feminism' made me cringe. What a bunch of tools. How do people fall for all this Trump/Brexit crap when it's phrased in such coarse and worthless terms? Bad ideas presented badly. Brazen anti-intellectualism.

"And oddly, all on the same premise that there is some unknown force, or actors that are known to them, but not to the general population."

It seems to be saying that there's a strong narrative of conspiracy on both the right and the left, although it's phrased in such a way that it, er, privileges the writer's own narrative to simply 'look like' a conspiracy narrative...

Pausing here, I'm reminded of the fact that, as often happens around politics, what should be a descriptive phrase has become a pejorative phrase: 'conspiracy theory' now means something like 'some wacko theory for which there is no evidence'. I mean, maybe most conspiracy theories are, but such a nuance to the phrase itself seems to suggest that it's impossible for an actual conspiracy to exist.

... so, resuming what I was saying, the writer, of course, privileges his own narrative merely to 'look like' its conspiracy mirror-image, the theory of patriarchy.

Author bias aside, I don't think it's a bad observation to ponder. I'm somewhat reminded of Voegelin's ideas about the Gnostic influence in politics. Quoting from Wikipedia:

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In his The New Science of Politics, Order and History, and Science, Politics and Gnosticism, Voegelin opposed what he believed to be unsound Gnostic influences in politics. He defined gnosis as "a purported direct, immediate apprehension or vision of truth without the need for critical reflection; the special gift of a spiritual and cognitive elite."[8] Gnosticism is a "type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality. Relying as it does on a claim to gnosis, gnosticism considers its knowledge not subject to criticism. Gnosticism may take transcendentalizing (as in the case of the Gnostic movement of late antiquity) or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism)."

I think every group has a tendency toward conspiracy theory because the human mind is always forming nonsensical patterns from chaos, and as a species we're all comically paranoid in one way or another, but it's hard to think of any dangerous conspiracy theory as widespread among the left as Cultural Marxism, which is a throwback to McCarthyism and has been used as an excuse to harass anybody to the left of Steve Bannon*, or the conspiracy theory that climate change is invented by foreigners to make western society weak, which will only lead to destruction.

There are all kinds of things wrong with the left, but people being overzealous in identifying a patriarchy don't concern me as much as these people because they're not nearly as dangerous, so I am wary of drawing equivalences because I don't see them.

*Actually, I say that, but it's a bad example because even Steve Bannon is now seen as a regressive leftist cuck for turning on Trump.