He didn't say "many comments", Helen. He said "the comments". You give him too much credit.
You can think James and Douglas Murray mistaken about the passion he is inspiring & insist that he's just normally popular but I'd urge you to look at the figures of how many people are going to see him, how much money is contributed each month to his goals, the language they use
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If you think there is a chance they are right about his immense popularity & people finding him inspirational, what would you suggest would be the right way to say so? Because I think James got it. He was charitable & complimentary everywhere he could be. That was a lot.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Right, but that's not the issue. It's not the degree of passion or the numbers, it's the automatic (and deeply nihilistic) assumption that people experiencing intense connection with anset of ideas are being duped. That's the bad faith--you can disagree with him, fine, but
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It's not automatic. It's to do with the ideas. If you think they are wrong, you necessarily think people who think they are right are mistaken. We don't have to believe all belief systems are equally valid. Some are just wrong & people who believe them mistaken.
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How can we ever criticise anything if it is bad faith to say people are wrong about it?
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It's fine to say ideas are wrong, and that people are wrong for expressing them, but if you don't attempt to explain WHY they're wrong, it's not really criticism it's just character assasination. Perhaps, as you say in the other response, he's written well & extensively about
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No, honestly, people can write about social phenomena and psychology and movements. It really is OK. Gurwinder Bhogal wrote an excellent thing on the appeal of fundamentalist Islam. He didn't need to include why Islam isn't true.
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In the same way, religious people can write about this without first having to explain why God is real. We know that people have different views on this - theist/atheist, pragmatist/empiricist. They can write all sorts of things from those perspectives.
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I agree with you. But if you write about social/psychological phenomena in a way that characterizes a broad swath of people (particularly in the latter case, where you're interpreting their internal proceses as well as external characteristics) as rubes, you should expect them
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Neither 'rubes' nor 'dupes' appears in that piece. This is clearly how you feel about someone giving a psychological explanation for the attraction to Peterson's rhetoric. It is v similar to how religious people feel when people look at the psychological reasons for their belief
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