Comment by simpaticoder
4 days ago
Peterson fallen in a profoundly sad, but also illuminating, way. He obviously had a bit of NPD even from the start, which is true of virtually every public figure. The crack widened and finally split with the help of powerful drugs - fame, money, and Xanax, with a side of audience capture. He quickly went from "liberal Canadian rationalist with the gumption to push back against the left on principle" to just another unthinking right-wing parrot. His view of strength hurt him here, because he was in a crucible that broke him and yet he clearly could not admit it. Contrast him with someone like Sam Harris who, IMO, has been in the crucible for longer but who is far less pugnacious and has managed to maintain his sanity and his nuanced principles despite the forces that want bimodal commentary only.
Sam Harris is not a good example. Sam Harris used to go on hour long crash outs about Trump on his podcast. It became impossible to listen to. I've spoken to people both online and offline who have said that they stopped listening to him because it became unbearable.
Then there is this infamous quote in 2022.
> "Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement – I would not have cared."
I understand he is being hyperbolic, but honestly it wasn't that obvious though, because the aforementioned crash outs. He also allowed everyone to be quote mine him. It is an unforced error.
Generally I find Sam Harris tbh to be not particularly that interesting anyway. He gets a lot of mileage (like a lot of these personalities) from his elocution. He makes him sound insightful than he really is.
Well I guess we can agree to disagree because I think there's a lot about Trump to crash out about. It's difficult to understand how someone who so obviously a villain is so popular. It's disorienting and frustrating, like walking out of Star wars hearing people praise Darth Vader for how wonderful he was and how nasty Luke was to him. How The empire is a staple job Creator and the rebel alliance a bunch of filthy blooded miscreants who don't appreciate what they have...
If we are making Star Wars references. The whole lore of Sidious is how he and Plagueis manipulated various parties in the galaxy to gain power. In the story itself it explains how this can happen. The Jedi weren't really the good guys. They were an ossified monastic order that had lost its way.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are both rival elites vying for power to enrich themselves and their circle via the apparatus of the Republican and Democratic parties. They are both reprehensible, for different reasons. Voting for Trump was a middle finger to both establishment parties in the US (the Republicans didn't want him running for the party). There are no good guys here. They were both shit.
The crash out was due to the fact Sam Harris couldn't wrap his head around the fact that people were fed up of public figures that are similar to himself. Quite frankly, it is embarrassing. He appeared to do very little introspection on the matter. His whole brand is him trying to rationally understand what's happening, and he did the exact opposite.
Cory Doctorow, on the other hand, is another left-wing intellectual that did understand the sentiment and has made an effort to understand people he deeply disagrees with. Guess whose ideas are more relevant currently? It isn't Harris; Harris is irrelevant these days.
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I cancelled my subscription. Harris would always get lost in internet wars and definitely spent too much time reading idiots tweets and getting angry over them.
Sure, JD Vance is a cretin and Trump is vile. Can we please go back to intellectually interesting pursuits?