Jordan Peterson & Bret Weinstein on Fascism and Far Right

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I'm watching this on Youtube, it's JRE 1006. Fascinating topic and they're discussing the sociology of Charlottesville as well as what they're concerned about in the patterns.

Weinstein is the (liberal) professor at Evergreen State College who was hounded off campus by a leftist mob. In related news from the actions-have-consequences department:

Evergreen State College faces $2.1M budget shortfall, cites enrollment drop, issues layoff notices

Administrators at The Evergreen State College have announced that the embattled school faces a massive $2.1 million budget shortfall due in part to a drop in enrollment, and the institution has already handed out some temporary layoff notices as officials grapple with balancing the books.

In an Aug. 28 memo to the campus community titled “Enrollment and Budget Update,” officials report that fall 2017-18 registration is down about 5 percent, from 3,922 students to 3,713. But the problem is nearly all of the students they lost are nonresidents, who traditionally pay a much higher tuition to attend, officials explained in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The College Fix.

Combined with a shortfall in funding from state coffers to shoulder a mandatory cost-of-living salary increase and a rise in the general cost of operations, and the school must find a way to resolve a $2.1 million shortfall for the fiscal year that began July 1, according to the memo.

“This creates the need for significant budget cuts in the immediate future,” the memo states, adding that the university late last month already handed out temporary layoff notices to 17 facilities staff members.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/36145/

Brendan's awesome.

Listened to 60 seconds of that Brendan O Neill thing and it was hilarious. How anyone could get so many 'facts' round the wrong way in such a short space of time is astounding

to generalise about a group of people numbering millions by using 1 cliched anecdote and claiming that is how they all are suggests an element of desperation to your debate. That guy seems angry,

I listened to traven's video to see if Brendan had lost his mind and I'd missed the whole thing.

Could you tell us what truths about millennials you're arguing that he missed? Aside from voicing disagreement with him you're not exactly making clear why or how.

Within the first 20 seconds, he suggests that the EU is undemocratic, which is just cobblers. The EU holds elections regularly.

Before that, he suggested that supporting the EU is not radical. It is - there's never been anything like it before. It's international co-operation on an incredible scale which has only recently been expanded to include lots of countries who until recently weren't remotely considered viable members. It's raising standards all across the continent and we can see it making our lives better. Sure, it's supported by lots of mainstream people, but those people are themselves pretty radical in lots of ways. Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn't mean they aren't radical! It would be like if there was a referendum on breathing. When a radical idea is also obviously a good idea, it's no surprise when it's still considered radical a generation later.

There are not many millennials revolting against racial equality. Millennials are critical of old people's ideas about what racial equality means. We still judge people based on their character rather than their physical characteristics, but we acknowledge that we need to treat someone differently if they've spent their life experiencing racism. For O'Neill's generation, you're anti-racist if you say you are anti-racist. Young people today want to see receipts. They're challenging the established order and trying to find ways to actually achieve equality.

Millennials are not opposed to sexual liberation. Indeed, we're much more open to it than previous generations! The 60s got the wagon started, but feminists then were quite conservative. Supporting the idea of consent isn't being anti-sex, it's pro-sex, but anti-rape. People calling "regretted sex" rape are very rare. Having sex with someone who is too drunk to consent is rape.

Millennials are not opposed to freedom of speech, and indeed we exercise it far more than our fore-bearers ever did. It seems utterly ludicrous for a crusty old conservative to attack the Twitter generation for not valuing diversity of opinion. I also think he's romanticising how his generation viewed dissenting opinions. He cites bans of the Sun on campuses - well, those have been going on since the days of Thatcher when they published a fake article about victims of the Hillsborough disaster.

He then calls environmentalism "the most anti-human ideology you can imagine". Yes there are extremists, but frankly we don't care about them - I've never heard anyone my age cite Lovelock and I know loads of ecologists... Seriously, how can one negatively compare the moderate "turn out lights in other rooms and gradually replace fossil fuels with nuclear and renewables" position which young people tend to hold today with, say, communism, or Nazism?

Therapy culture - yes, I'd say a large portion of young people subscribe to this, but that's probably because of the body of evidence which supports it - one in three of us has a mental health issue.

I will agree that young people often steer quite close to their parents' ideas of what "radical" means. They favour re-nationalising industries and ending student loans, even though those ideas are only radical in the sense that they are returning to socialist ideas of the past. But on the plus side, they do favour radical ideas on things like equal rights, immigration, UBI, localism, and YIMBYism.

Interesting indeed. I got to 22 minutes and heard a reflective moment from JP which adds weight to my earlier guess about his temperament.

It seems that they realize that the students who hassled BW differ from the people standing up to the actual violent neo-nazis in Charlottesville. Students who felt safe menacing liberal professors failed to protect the peaceful protest that the Nazis stomped at the University on Friday. Antifa arrived Saturday, if you check the timeline. On that basis, you can't conflate the two group's of leftists. By that I mean that the students who rage about how many pronouns we need have no power. Many can't finish a paper without help from mommy.

The real Antifa protecting counter-protesters from actual violent neo-nazis have bigger problems, right? They can be effective because they can focus and will commit to a simple course of action. Punch Nazis. The world has become a target-rich environment.

But, to try to combine the two groups in order to imagine a terrifying oppressive force doesn't seem realistic to me. The Evergreen President allowed that mess to happen. He should have consulted his social psychology professors.

I can't say anything about most students or most campuses, but the lessons of the Evergreen mess seem pretty obvious. There are reasonably smart people at Universities.

So far, in addition to that info, I like BW better than other Evolutionary social scientists. We recognize Nazis as a threat very easily, but not so much other plausible dangers.

I understand Joe's function a little better in this one. Those two guests are awful smart.

Close to one hour in, JP has stayed cool and focused. Compared to early videos, I don't see much reason to take offense. I don't see any reason for BW to insist that he sounds un-PC talking about science. JP should get a chance to rewrite that ruling to have the desired social goal AND have scientific credibility.

The main reason I got on him is he posted something of an ink-blot. I don't mind people disagreeing with something, I'm just not wild about it when it never touches down.

Otherwise we're really sparking off a debate over something traven posted.

Jonathan Haidt touched on that in some of his videos - ie. that there is a common denominator in the places where this is happening. It's not commuter schools but places where you have 18-22 living on or near campus for most of the duration and particularly it's happening less at places primarily focused on STEM or business, more at the liberal arts and social-sciences oriented colleges.

It pisses me off that they clearly believe we ought to do something about social justice, but people will miss that point. They express it in terms of micro-economics, and people who don't understand won't appreciate what a massive change in society that represents. They propose a radical change in fairly bland terms.

The IQ thing is important as well. I've heard Jordan mention that the US armed forces, after careful study, made the decision that people with IQ under 83 could not be trained in anything that wouldn't end up counterproductive. It's bad enough that already covers about 1/6th of the population and it's likely that the number you need to be gainfully employed, as the new economy is realized, could be closer the 90's, even the low 100's eventually, and it could be that almost anyone with a disability - regardless of IQ - may have a nearly impossible time getting in any door. Our culture is already starting to ask some hard questions about this, as well it should. As that number creeps upward though it'll get to the point where it can't be buried under liberal or conservative rhetoric anymore - ie. something will have to be done. It's disgusting to see as much human suffering go on in the interim as it does but this has been the entire course of human history for the most part, ie. mobilizing people to get things done or worse, get things done while giving up the things that make them feel superior in one way or another (like the belief that they just worked harder or are better than people they passed), is incredibly difficult.

Yeah. Capitalism doesn't have the tools for this.

I'll probably have more after I watch the rest

At the 107 minute mark, I feel really irritated at the way these guys love to pick on the left. I accept a lot of their critique, and look to change attitudes within my circle. However, when JP says that people on the right can agree that no one wants poor people to decide to burn the whole system down, and insists that the correlation between crime/social instability and inequality is well-accepted, although the mechanism is not entirely understood, he leaves out the predictable response from conservatives:

Don't take what's mine, get tougher on crime.

JP must know that's the response, and he doesn't have any more of an answer for how to fix that, than to explain to a Marxist that they can't logically also be a post-modernist. However, he gets off on making the left look like crazies for their denial of reality while basically glossing over the same issues on the right.

He seems to have upped the first part of that equation increasingly so it seems like he's headed more toward a sensible balance.

I think the thing that's really a shame though is that the left is still waiting to have voices that are this sharp, and unfortunately it seems like postmodernism and it's theories of handling social conduct has done a lot to paralyze that opportunity. I mean maybe there's Noam Chomsky but it sounds like his opinion, at least per the overton window, is drifting to the center and I won't be surprised if a lot of people on the left disown him in the next year or so.

I didn't watch any more today, because a discussion with a couple of friends which we had expected to last 3 hours or so ended up going 7 hours. Interestingly, a lot of the material from this had relevance to the issues we discussed, which loosely gathered up ways of facilitating people organizing, political theory and game theory, the theory of game design and a few other random topics.

Fundamentally, though, we all want to make the world a better place and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. We also all like pertinent criticism and dislike easy outrage. One person has someone whom they know well who actually pulls the SJW/snowflake business on a regular basis, lashing out at people who use the wrong pronoun of the month. However, it also sounds like this individual has much bigger problems of their own creation which will limit their effectiveness.