Chris I’ve held Peter B in high esteem for years.
I seek out his presentations and read his work.
Something was amiss with his thinking, during your interview today.
It was as though his preformed belief in the importance of his way of applying epistemology was interfering with his ability to truly listen to your arguments and reply to them appropriately.
It’s as though he’s become lost in his own ideology.
He appears to be struggling to deal with the fact that the progressive cause he once championed is not just externally incoherent but deserves to be seriously considered as possibly evil.
Some of Peter’s comments that I found revealing:
• “[When it comes to conversations] I won’t take a side”
• “Just to be very clear I am absolutely not a Trump fan”
• “There’ll be a proliferation of conspiracy theories”
• The “Men [today] speaking to young [white] men are toxic [for example Andrew] Tate” – seemingly tarring Jordan Peterson with the same brush without acknowledging his status and positive influence on many men.
Peter seemed to be stuck on the idea that the “Right” focuses primary on DEI as their explanation for WHY everything is wrong – that the Right is wrongly weighting DEI as the cause of our social problems. I would have liked to hear more about how he came to this conclusion.
My impression is that many on the right focus on DEI because it’s one of the few concrete manifestations that they can identify, of a deeper attack occurring against our society. Maybe it would be more helpful for Peter to explore this deeper aspect of “the Right’s” fears about what is happening and why?
He also very unfortunately derailed one of your discussion points into this area, into a focus on the [Right’s] obsession with DEI and its overfocus on what women can and can’t do, rather than what we should be doing, which is looking at individual merit. His argument was poorly coherent, given its genesis, but he lost all credibility for me when he backed it up by comparing a [way too short for the job] SS woman who was unable even to holster her gun (and yes, this is captured on video) and who even blind-Freddy could see was behaving like medical student at a resus; with the competence of one Brienne-of-Tarth, a 6’3 fictional giant from the Game of Thrones TV series.
Peter also made a lot of the fact that the aims of DEI are NOT in the mission statements of the Companies that DEI operate in, as though this somehow illustrates something important about the underlying companies and the fact that there is an intrinsic disconnect. I would see it the opposite; the lack of congruency between a company’s mission statement and its DEI actions would suggest to me that that company is being actively dishonest.
Later, without a trace of irony, he described his take that “the Far Left is mentally impaired and [Peter, are you sure you didn’t mean “but”?] the Far Right is mentally retarded” and then went right on to give the example of [far left] Kamala Harris being a [mentally retarded] “Moron”!
Peter, I will continue to be generous in my assumptions about your undisclosed deeper conflicts…
I was recently scammed. I have no idea of the identity of those who scammed me but scam me they did. It was a malignant experience.
I was left with few facts, but those that have remained most real to me are:
• “THEY” who scam, are real actors, and one’s inability to NAME them in no way diminishes this fact.
[C/W Peter again –“Who are THEY? Tell me? WHO? – said in a way that felt more “gotcha” than graceful]
• THEY who scammed me were not being “incompetent”. They were malign -their desire to take what was mine for themselves, and their glee in achieving that outcome, is real.
• This IS how real people behave. I would argue that this behaviour is at least as prevalent as gross incompetence .
Peter’s insistence that gross incompetence is even still in the ballpark with regard to the Trump assassination attempt was probably the most remarkable to me. I didn’t feel he was really interested in absorbing your research into the audio files. His fixation on having a “video” to prove what went on was, frankly, bizarre.
You then made the incisive comment that either way, if it’s an inside job, or incompetence so severe you can’t tell the difference, then we have a big problem, to which Peter somehow answered by drawing our attention to African American Surgeons.
Your calm at this time Chris, was a credit to you. And when you spoke of the Butler rally roof slope being less than that of a disability ramp, and you pointed out that two lots of snipers were happily ensconced on a far steeper sloped roof, Peter again changed the subject!
I wondered in fact if Peter’s insistence that people [in the West, on the Left] would struggle mightily to cross the divide between bad thoughts and bad actions, was more a reflection on his struggle with his own past, than being a reflection on reality.
This was impressed on me further when he revealed his belief that “dirty bombs will be snuck into Western Countries within the next few years”.
Hang-fire a minute there Peter, you are attributing deliberate, malign, brutal motives to non-westerners with little [?any] concrete evidence to back up your position on this, with not even so much as a shout-out to the fact that maybe these people too, are somehow going down this pathway because they are good, but incompetent people, being manipulated by others.
I suspect that if you had gone down the good but incompetent people pathway, then you would need to acknowledge also the presence of a THEY doing the manipulation of these incompetent people, and then, by your own standards, you would be obliged to name the THEY.
Could it be that it’s helpful to focus on people’s malign motives but only on those occasions when it helps one avoid the appearance of possibly being a considered a conspiracy theorist?
I do think Peter’s comment that maybe he was being “myopic” was his most insightful.
But his follow up – that he thinks “we possess some unique difficulties now” and which he rationalised by saying that “I don’t remember this as a kid growing up” is somewhat more problematic. It’s a fine comment to make when you’re talking about the insects disappearing; the concrete fact of insects present vs insects absent. It’s a completely different ballgame to believe that your ability, as a teenager, to discern the nature of adult interactions on a national scale carries any weight at all in determining the uniqueness of society today.
I would argue the opposite - that although we have dressed our windows differently in the new millennium, the human dramas directing those issues are the same as they have ever been.
He then reduced the answer to the dilemma of the human condition as it has for ever been, into “We need to focus on K-12 education”. I get what he was saying but it’s like he’s missing the bigger picture behind even education.
Chris you earned your stripes big time for me today, in the way you dealt with Peter’s analysis of the facts. One could say, you were a good friend to him and you reached out across a divide I’m not sure he even consciously recognised that he was maintaining.
