No. He meant what he was very careful to say.
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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Because they think it is really true and feel wounded that people who think it isn't want to look at why they are drawn to these ideas. It's obvious to them. It's because it's true! So they keep on & on insisting people debate them on the rightness of their beliefs.
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Oh for chrissakes, he literally uses the phrase "snake oil". I don't agree with all of Peterson's ideas; attempting to nudge me into the "jilted believer" box is exactly the sort of condescension I'm talking about. People are annoyed because they've been mischaracterized. 1/
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Right. Is that not OK? Must we pretend this kind of thing has worth? Obviously people will be annoyed if they think it does. Same with anything some people think true & others don't. And of course, people feel annoyed if they think they're right & others don't.
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