Started skimming this and immediately started to wonder this guy's credentials, especially when I got to the parts on UBI and communism and how "governments distort markets". Like how can you write a book called "The World After Capital" with such a thin understanding of capitalism and the very very obvious prior art here, Marxism.
No conspiracy needed. AZ wants to appear friendly to self driving car companies (e.g. they already don't regulate them as hard as CA.). A single undesirable being taken out isn't gonna change that.
Plus it's not like AZ has a long history of pedestrian friendliness anyway. It's practically engineered to harm them, with 2mi between crosswalks
This is capitalism working. Not from the viewpoint of the academic justifiers of capitalism, but the from the viewpoint of people that have an actual vested interest in capitalism (aka the ones whose opinion actually matters and the ones who are the reason why we have this system in the first place).
Thought this link was relevant here due to a couple of things that are coming our way in the U.S: (1) upcoming Supreme Court ruling that may destroy public unions, and (2) the Koch's upcoming plan for national right to work law to destroy blue state private unions:
Jordan Peterson fans are the most tedious and pedantic logic nerds I've ever encountered. Reading his subreddit and his stans on Twitter you'd think his main teachings were (1) Argue dictionary definitions for hours, (2) Never respond to someone's central point, just pick out secondary or tertiary sentences and point out their logical fallacies, and (3) If all else fails, say "that's not an argument" with no explanation.
(1) You don't care enough about definitions to argue over them until they're settled? How do you expect a discussion to be resolved, then?
(2) You don't care if secondary or tertiary points are illogical? If they're not important, or if the logical flaws can't be fixed, why do such secondary/tertiary points continue to be included along with the central point? It makes no sense to blame Peterson's camp for this in any case. The opposition should fix their damned arguments.
(3) Can you cite an example of a logical argument presented by JP's opposition that is dismissed with "that's not an argument"? Please make sure what you cite is an actual logical/dialectical statement, and not rhetoric/sophistry... that's the typical problem with neoliberal/postmodern/progressive language.
JP's philosophy needs to be attacked on several fronts, most notably his ridiculous attempts to give religion and particularly Christianity a validity beyond mere myth and collections of historical cultural wisdom, such as it was. But the complaints you raise are absurd.
I've only recently watch a few talks by Jordan Peterson, and haven't read the debate around him, but:
> (2) You don't care if secondary or tertiary points are illogical? If they're not important, or if the logical flaws can't be fixed, why do such secondary/tertiary points continue to be included along with the central point? It makes no sense to blame Peterson's camp for this in any case.
When you are discussing social movements the "opposition" is open ended. When you can pluck your examples from literally thousands of arguments and articulations, it's easy to pick out some ill-conceived notion, or simply misinterpret by taking it out of its context.
For instance, I watched a video where he talks about White Privilege (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbDggKqt3KA), and he quotes one seminal piece (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peggy_McIntosh#Invisible_Knaps...), but that essay simply introduced the phrase to many people and opened a conversation. And he points out that some of the items may be class privilege instead of race privilege (though of course he wouldn't say "class" because that's Marxist!) So?
> The opposition should fix their damned arguments.
No one's going to go back 30 years and rewrite the Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack to clarify whatever confusion Jordan Peterson had with it. There's no hope so long as he plays the critic and selects the material he prefers to refute.
He's decided to engage with social movements. It's why he's popular, he's reacting to something that feels familiar to many people. If he engaged with any specific argument most people wouldn't care what he said, because most people don't care about any specific argument. You can't engage logically with a social movement, because there's no single logical basis, and there's no underlying authority which can be refuted.
I think it's more that pre-reddit/twitter/facebook we all had separate online forums, chat rooms, etc and now it's all centralized to the same few sites.
For example before reddit we didn't have popular fascist subforums hosted on the same site as a liberal politics subforum, where people could cross-post and PM between them.
This is a good point. I used to frequent DemocraticUnderground back in the 2004 days during the Kerry campaign. It was as bad an echo chamber as anything we see today. The alternative site was FreeRepublic (or 'freepers', as we called them). However, the fact that you didn't have to go to that site or see those people's opinions if you didn't want to, made a big difference to how vitriolic the whole thing felt.
Then went back to the preface for the money shot:
> As a Venture Capitalist (“VC”)....