Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "Jordan B Peterson"
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@robg4472 Hollywood figures and other leftist celebs: Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Kevin Spacey, Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon, Benicio del Toro, Don King, Michael Moore
Political figures: Gregory Meeks, Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders, Al Franken, Chesa Boudin
Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar, Ro Khanna and Tulsi Gabbard have mischaracterized the protests against Maduro and condemned President Donald Trump’s widely supported moves to help end Maduro’s dictatorship.
Is this news to you? Chavez/Maduro has fallen out of fashion recently, but they were all the rage at least up to the time Chavez died, with many celebs attending the funeral. An electorate that forgets on command is not conducive to the preservation of freedom.
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@southwestsaxon "and i can tell you this"
You can tell us this because of the freedom of speech in the British tradition. If you were living in the nations of your "parents country and heritage" you could not criticize it in that way.
"britains history and modern society is about EXTREME RACISM and IMPERIALISM." [sic]
It is only in the west in general, and the Anglosphere in particular, where the notion that racism is a bad thing has arose. In other cultures, it was not even recognized as a "thing" at all, good or bad. To look to the society that led the long crusade to end slavery as a bastion of racism and oppression is fundamentally absurd, as diametrically false as any statement uttered under the sun. The British partake of the vices that are the common condition of humanity. When this is coupled with power this WILL leave events that ill endure the light of historical inquiry. But the standards which you are using to judge those events are Western and British standards, which your parent culture would never have arrived at and under those same standards your parent culture fares far worse under historical judgement. When your parent culture obtained, and to this day when they obtain, power over other cultures what they have done, and continue to do, is far worse.
What the British and the west were most resented for in the Victorian era in your parent's neck of the woods is for abolishing slavery in the middle east. Like Neo-Confederate revisionists criticizing the Union and lionizing the Confederacy in the American Civil War, you try to sweep the slavery issue under the rug, and deny its centrality and relevance.
As for Western racism, again, "racism" is only a concept in the West and in places (like Japan) where western culture has influence. The rest of the world in general, and the Islamic world in particular routinely and openly oppress racial and religious minorities, and think nothing of it. This hypocrisy becomes elevated to a "principle" in modern leftist rhetoric when leftists say "Minorities can't be racist." The US is, in point of fact, the least racist multiracial society in the world, and has been at least since the 1970s. The most prevalent racism in the west is the PC racism promoted by the left, manifest in the US by a reversal of civil rights prohibition against segregation, for example. Your fondness for modern leftist rhetoric is a result of your falling into a trap that the modern left has set and baited for minorities. You are attracted by the sense of superiority the narrative gives you. This is a RACIST appeal. Intellectually, leftists can only give you what they have.
You have been welcomed to a great society. Seize and appreciate your good fortune with appropriate gratitude and loyalty. If the left succeeds in bringing the West down to the social level of your parent culture, as they seek to do, you will be very sorry, it will be too late, and there will be no place to escape to. Pray (and work) that this misfortune does not happen to you.
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@tobystewart4724 "subject to random price fluctuations and where I'm taxed by the drop"
The very policies you are supporting are responsible for much of the price fluctuations and all the extra taxes. Or did you think you were paying the taxes to the oil companies? You think subsidies are better than taxes? You are still paying for the whole shebang and losing value and autonomy to boot. Right now it's the fossil fuel taxes that are funding the "renewable" subsidies. If they get cut off, you will either see what the "renewable energy" really costs, or you will be taxed somewhere else, or you will pay via inflation as they print "money". If you think price fluctuations are fun, get a load of SUPPLY fluctuations, that's a whole new level of fun, and inherent to most "renewables" WHEN THEY'RE WORKING, and they are less mechanically reliable (particularly wind) because the tech is new and, frankly, experimental; and because renewable companies are environmental heroes to whom responsibility can never be imputed. We're already beginning to get a taste of that fun, and given the lead time on grid infrastructure, it WILL get worse before it gets better, even if policies improve immediately. Don't you love it when a plan comes together?
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@takkiejakkie5458 "Racism/classism/imperialism/dumb religious beliefs etc. etc."
Wow, what a diametric historical inversion! Racism, classism, and imperialism are only ever considered problematic in a Western context, that is because the West, AND ONLY THE WEST, (as a legacy of Christendom) is progressing past them. Elsewhere and elsewhen, they are endemic and taken for granted.
Protestantism created the modern libertarian west. We (Protestants) implemented religious freedom, political freedom, academic freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press FIRST, and thus caused the academic, scientific, technological, and material progress that followed; and most of the rest of the world hasn't caught up with it yet. John 8:32 "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
When you attack the religious and ethical legacy of Athens and Jerusalem, you undermine the basis of your privileged starting point, and the moral basis for criticizing racism/classism/imperialism. These ills are greatly diminished in the West because of the Protestant legacy. If the wolves succeed in destroying the vestiges of Christianity, the ubiquity of racism/classism/imperialism will once again reassert itself, as it does invariably outside.
But it is historically unlikely that they will thus succeed. The Romans tried to wipe us out. The Huns tried to wipe us out. The Islamic Caliphate tried to wipe us out. The Pope tried to wipe us out. The Nazis planned to wipe us out if they won the war. The Soviets and their empire tried to wipe us out. We're still here. It's the anvil, you see, that wears out the hammers; not the other way around.
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If you will tolerate my repost from above, I hope that those interested in this thread might find this of interest as well:
55:44 About the heresy criticism. JP-paraphrase"God's grace enables us, but we still have to do the work. How can both of these be true simultaneously? And the answer depends on your view of time." As a believer, I agree, and so did C.S. Lewis.
About heresy. The Bible is full of paradoxes, (Jesus was human and divine, the Godhead is Three and One, etc.) and one of the most common forms heresy takes is to "resolve" the paradox by denying one side of the paradox to uphold the other. Exhortations to moral purity abound in both the Old and New Testaments, as does the assertion that we are empowered to do good by grace. If moral exhortation (or even moral exhortation without immediately invoking grace) is heresy, then the New Testament is full of heresy. The paradox is perhaps most starkly stated in:
Phil 2:12 So then, my beloved, even as you have always obeyed, not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
Phil 2:13 For it is God who works in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure.
C.S. Lewis:
“On Calvinism, both the statement that our final destination is already settled and the view that it still may be either Heaven or hell, seem to me to imply the ultimate reality of Time, which I don’t believe in. The controversy is one I can’t join on either side for I think that in the real (timeless) world it is meaningless…All that Calvinist question — Free-Will and Predestination, is to my mind undiscussable, insoluble. Of course (say us) if a man repents God will accept him. Ah yes, (say they) but the fact of his repenting shows that God has already moved him to do so. This at any rate leaves us with the fact that in any concrete case the question never arrives as a practical one. But I suspect it is really a meaningless question. The difference between Freedom and Necessity is fairly clear on the bodily level: we know the difference between making our teeth chatter on purpose and just finding them chattering with cold. It begins to be less clear when we talk of human love (leaving out the erotic kind). ‘Do I like him because I choose or because I must?’ — there are cases where this has an answer, but others where it seems to me to mean nothing. When we carry it up to relations between God and Man, has the distinction perhaps become nonsensical? After all, when we are most free, it is only with a freedom God has given us: and when our will is most influenced by Grace, it is still our will. And if what our will does is not ‘voluntary’, and if ‘voluntary’ does not mean ‘free’, what are we talking about? I’d leave it all alone.”
and elsewhere
“The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together into one amazing sentence. The first half is, ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’—which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, “For it is God who worketh in you”—which looks as if God did everything and we nothing. I am afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in Christianity. I am puzzled, but I am not surprised. You see, we are now trying to understand, and to separate into water-tight compartments, what exactly God does and what man does when God and man are working together. And, of course, we begin by thinking it is like two men working together, so that you could say, “He did this bit and I did that.” But this way of thinking breaks down. God is not like that. He is inside you as well as outside: even if we could understand who did what, I do not think human language could properly express it.”
/end of quotes
So much for the theology, but that does not fully cover the inappropriateness of the criticism. Dr. Peterson is not presenting his ideas as a Christian theologian, rather he is giving psychological and practical moral advice, and pointing to a source of more. Do you really thing that the state of not being a Christian absolves one of the responsibility of attempting moral behavior? If you do, then you are the heretic. If you don't your criticism of JP is beside the point. Not all of those to whom he is speaking and writing are Christians.
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I'm a big JP fan, but this doesn't hold up. You're saying:
A. Putin is acquisitive and ambitious and wants to reestablish the Russian empire coterminous with the Soviet.
B. Putin says (and may well believe) that a leftist/atheist/morally libertine subversion has consumed the west and threatens Russia.
C. Russia has economic incentives to control Ukraine.
D. Putin considers Ukraine part of Russia's proper sphere of influence.
E. Putin is determined, locally popular, and controls a substantial nuclear arsenal.
The obvious response is "What aspect of this situation, as you have characterized it , differs from the Cold War? To remind you:
A. The USSR was acquisitive and ambitious and sought to extent Soviet hegemony by military and political means.
B. The USSR said that capitalism enslaved the West and threatens Russia
C. Russia had economic incentives to control the world.
D. The USSR considered western Europe part of their proper sphere of influence.
E. The USSR was determined, had domestic political control, and controlled a (relatively speaking) more powerful conventional and nuclear arsenal than Putin does.
The historical comparison with Hitler is well taken. Both the strategic situation and the justification for the acquisition of Putin's acquisition of Crimea, for example, exactly parallel those of Hitler's acquisition of Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, and the subsequent invasion of the remainder of those respective countries. But the parallel with the Cold War is even more acute. If we had responded to the Soviet threat as you advocate we respond to the much lesser threat of Putin, we would now be slaves. Of course, we cannot forecast the future with any certainty, but history tells us that, all other things being equal (and such equality must be the default assumption given that we don't know the future) the best time to thwart a serial aggressor is the earliest possible time. This isn't the first time Putin has invaded a neighbor (Georgia, Crimea), and we have no reason to believe that capitulation will make it the last. Further:
A. Reestablishing the hegemony exerted by the Soviet Union would involve the conquest of Latvia, Lithuania, and the former Warsaw Pact countries, including Poland.
B. What does your clinical expertise and experience tell you about the PRACTICALITY of flattering the delusions of the deluded?
C. The economic incentives you mention do not constitute what would be considered in a court of law to be mitigating factors, but what such a court would call MOTIVE.
D. A formative principle of modern civilization is that one's sphere of influence ends where one's neighbor's nose begins. Russian populism may regard Ukraine as a part of the greater Russian culture, but this Russian view is a product of a century of self serving propaganda by Russian governments. For Ukrainians, Russian hegemony has been oppressive and bloody. Putin's stated desire of a pro-Russian government in Ukraine is, for historical reasons, incompatible with a DEMOCRATIC government in Ukraine, and changing THAT state of affairs would involve at minimum a few decades of establishing themselves as a good neighbor. Doubling down on the historical oppression will not "win the hearts and minds" of Ukrainians.
E. You impress upon us the gravity of the dangers that face us. Yet you're nearly as old as I am! Is this a new concept to you? Freedom has always lived under the threat of violence and under that of nuclear violence from geriatric autocrats since the 1950s. Assertions in the 90s of the "end of history" were predictably premature (as well as self serving on the part of the advocates. I never bought the notion for a minute). Every neighbor we feed to an aggressor strengthens the aggressor materially and in terms of morale, and undermines the MORAL case for us to maintain our continued freedom. We either favor democratic self-determination or we don't.
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55:44 About the heresy criticism. JP-paraphrase"God's grace enables us, but we still have to do the work. How can both of these be true simultaneously? And the answer depends on your view of time." As a believer, I agree, and so did C.S. Lewis.
About heresy. The Bible is full of paradoxes, (Jesus was human and divine, the Godhead is Three and One, etc.) and one of the most common forms heresy takes is to "resolve" the paradox by denying one side of the paradox to uphold the other. Exhortations to moral purity abound in both the Old and New Testaments, as does the assertion that we are empowered to do good by grace. If moral exhortation (or even moral exhortation without immediately invoking grace) is heresy, then the New Testament is full of heresy. The paradox is perhaps most starkly stated in:
Phil 2:12 So then, my beloved, even as you have always obeyed, not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
Phil 2:13 For it is God who works in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure.
C.S. Lewis:
“On Calvinism, both the statement that our final destination is already settled and the view that it still may be either Heaven or hell, seem to me to imply the ultimate reality of Time, which I don’t believe in. The controversy is one I can’t join on either side for I think that in the real (timeless) world it is meaningless…All that Calvinist question — Free-Will and Predestination, is to my mind undiscussable, insoluble. Of course (say us) if a man repents God will accept him. Ah yes, (say they) but the fact of his repenting shows that God has already moved him to do so. This at any rate leaves us with the fact that in any concrete case the question never arrives as a practical one. But I suspect it is really a meaningless question. The difference between Freedom and Necessity is fairly clear on the bodily level: we know the difference between making our teeth chatter on purpose and just finding them chattering with cold. It begins to be less clear when we talk of human love (leaving out the erotic kind). ‘Do I like him because I choose or because I must?’ — there are cases where this has an answer, but others where it seems to me to mean nothing. When we carry it up to relations between God and Man, has the distinction perhaps become nonsensical? After all, when we are most free, it is only with a freedom God has given us: and when our will is most influenced by Grace, it is still our will. And if what our will does is not ‘voluntary’, and if ‘voluntary’ does not mean ‘free’, what are we talking about? I’d leave it all alone.”
and elsewhere
“The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together into one amazing sentence. The first half is, ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’—which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, “For it is God who worketh in you”—which looks as if God did everything and we nothing. I am afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in Christianity. I am puzzled, but I am not surprised. You see, we are now trying to understand, and to separate into water-tight compartments, what exactly God does and what man does when God and man are working together. And, of course, we begin by thinking it is like two men working together, so that you could say, “He did this bit and I did that.” But this way of thinking breaks down. God is not like that. He is inside you as well as outside: even if we could understand who did what, I do not think human language could properly express it.”
/end of quotes
So much for the theology, but that does not fully cover the inappropriateness of the criticism. Dr. Peterson is not presenting his ideas as a Christian theologian, rather he is giving psychological and practical moral advice, and pointing to a source of more. Do you really thing that the state of not being a Christian absolves one of the responsibility of attempting moral behavior? If you do, then you are the heretic. If you don't your criticism of JP is beside the point. Not all of those to whom he is speaking and writing are Christians.
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" That any people who are persecuted for 2,000 years are doing something wrong?"
Longer than that, actually, if you read the Old Testament or know intertestamental history. Can you name any people in this very unjust world who WERE consistently persecuted FOR DOING WRONG? If you don't know that that is not the way this world works you don't know much. If you listened to the video, JP gave a nice succinct PSYCHOLOGICAL explanation for the phenomena in this very video (and you would do well to heed, he knows his psychology). To review: there are these people, foreigners, outsiders, who thrive in our midst, and this provides an occasion for a temptation to envy. You can account for the thriving in two ways. Either they are more industrious, or smarter, or work together more harmoniously than you (but you can't accept that because it would reflect poorly on you, and doesn't flatter or excuse your ENVY), or you can assume that they must be cheating or stealing (and that flatters your ENVY and pride). You don't have to ask the teacher, just look in your own heart, you know it's there: ENVY. Christians have a supplementary explanation for it. This world is in the hands of an malignant spirit, Satan, who hates God and assaults every thing God loves or does. You hate them for thriving in your country and hate them for going home and thriving there.
Consider what the ambassador tells us Israel is thriving in in Israel: TECH. Jews thriving in banking, or trade, can be shoehorned into your self-flattering fantasies of Jewish calumny. But TECH? How does cheating and stealing make you a good computer programmer? It can't. Having a culture that values learning and work helps you develop your mind, but that is a legitimately earned accomplishment, whether you like it or not.
"Could Henry Kissinger's explanation be true? "
I suppose there's a first time for everything. But in his case, it's not the way to bet.
"address to the matter of Ashkenazic Jews not being Semitic,"
It's not an issue, it's an attempt at slander. And if it were true, how would it justify hating them? It doesn't even disrupt the historic claim to the Levant if true, since the Old Testament provides for proselytes. Jewish converts are Jewish. Most of you groypers are inconsistent with each other and yourselves. You say that it is the Jewish religion that prompts Jews to hostility and domination plots toward gentiles and Christians and that Zionism is part of the plot, then when you list subversive Jews in places of power you list atheist Jews whose family has never darkened the door of a synagogue, sometimes for generations, and who are more hostile to Israel than you are. You say the Jews are to be blamed because they killed Christ, then you say modern Jews are not descendants of the Old and New Testament Jews. You deny the historical holocaust by way of trying to improve the image of Nazis, then call for a holocaust. If a holocaust is bad, why are you calling for one? If it is not bad, why do you spend so much energy trying to deny the 20th century European one? Not only are each of your claims unsupported and absurd in isolation, they don't even fit together into a consistent lie.
As for your theory, listen to it objectively: "Yea, sure guys I have this idea. Lets pretend to be Jews in late Roman Europe and the middle-east so we can be persecuted instead of converting to Christianity, so we can become a part of mainstream Roman and Byzantine society. I don't foresee any problems with this plan." It is not something a bunch of Machiavellian plotters would do. IT CONVEYS NO ADVANTAGE. There might have been places and times where converting to Judaism might have conveyed pecuniary or tactical advantage. There and then was not among them.
"And, critically, ex-Soviet Ashkenazim hold the vast majority of political power in Israel."
What's so damning about escaping the Soviet Union? If you think that coming from a communist country tends to make one love communism, you haven't met many Cubans. The socialist background of many of the immigrants blinkered Israel's political imagination for a while, but they're mostly over it. Netanyahu looks like he may be coming back into power as the coalition which ousted him falls apart, and he is a conservative, who revolutionized the Israeli economy with free market reforms. Once again I refer you to the entrepreneurial prosperity in TECH in Israel. That simply doesn't, and can't, happen in socialist countries.
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Agree with most of this except "Robots don't pay taxes". That would be true if the world tax structure were a "head tax", and everybody payed the same regardless of income. In fact it is not population that is taxed but income=profit. If technology increases productivity, it will also increase tax revenue and, all other things being equal, the purchasing power of the revenue collected. The purchasing power of currency is proportional to the ratio of money supply to the supply of goods and services. We don't live on income tax return paper, we live on goods and services.
The question is "Are robots really going to be as good as they claim?" That is the question, and I'm afraid the answer is "No". They say that near human level AI is less than 5 years away. They said the same thing when I was 5. They have been periodically saying the same thing all my life. I am 63. Forgive me, but I find the "imminent inevitability" of this development less plausible with every passing year. According to Roger Penrose, what Goedel's Theorem really proves is that understanding is not algorithmic.
I am not against AI research, we keep getting useful and informative stuff from it. We also keep not getting human level intelligence. There is some hope that technology in some form, even partly electronics and information processing, will increase productivity enough to get us through, if we also renew our civilization. But we can't advance our productivity and choke off our industrial activity at the same time. All the reigning political obsessions are perverse. We are forming a bucket brigade carrying water FROM the burning building TO the sinking ship in the harbor.
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@Elliotbbi "Could someone please explain clearly what the meaning of "woke" is? I'm confused."
Certainly. "Woke" is the successor to "politically correct". "Politically correct" is a translation of a Russian phrase from the Soviet era. It was a recognition of Soviet enforcement of dogmatic "truth". When official non-acceptance of a fact is causing a problem, and your friend is contemplating saying the unsayable in public, you say, "You may be factually correct, but you are politically incorrect." This usage filtered its way into the Western left, and, as leftist authoritarian memes tend to do in a freer society, began to become so noxious that nobody would use it outside of dark sarcasm as a contemptuous term of ridicule. And we all would have lived happily ever after.
This tends to happen to leftist euphemisms once the sane folk figure out what the cryptic terminology means. Hence the restless reinvention of new leftist euphemisms. The waxing leftist power bloc, deprived of "politically correct" needed a new euphemism for their suppression of "wrongthink". Since they were more and more indoctrinating young folk in their causes du jour as a result of the "long march through the institutions" having locked down key institutions of higher learning and the teacher's unions for primary and secondary schools, it was convenient to couch the party line as an awakening to inspire and relate to their new charges/victims. They needed a shibboleth adjective to separate the sheep from the goats, and settled on the stylishly hip-hop sounding "woke".
It was a shortcut for the authoritarian notion that anyone who challenged the establishment position on various issues calculated to divide the society and empower the authorities, such as alphabet "community" dogma, discrimination on the basis of race or sex, certain "environmental" issues, should be slandered, marginalized, cancelled, fired, jailed, or killed. Residual love of freedom in the West resulted in this euphemism sharing the fate of former euphemisms, being used ironically or sarcastically by their intended victims, to the point that they could no longer use the term in public without risking being laughed out of the room.
Since the term is now used almost exclusively by freedom loving folk, some latecomers and youth quite innocently get the impression that the term was coined by conservatives as a derisive term for leftists. No, the leftists coined and defined the term and now that their intended victims are wise to it, will have to devise another (and so on, lather, rinse repeat). In the meantime they will have to make do with calling their victims names, suing them, censoring them, arresting them, and assaulting them.
I hope you found this lesson helpful, and if you have any further questions, don't hesitate to ask. It may take me a while to reply. The side which tries to settle a question of fact by the use of force is the obscurantist side, every time. That's how you know who the bad guys are.
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