After video game tournament shooting, Reddit gamers are turning their anger towards … game journalists

Oh.. uhh. I was beaten to the punch by hours. I saw the story and rushed here to post it. Yep. I’m not just blindly posting. *cough* sorry.

Kindasortaharmless – the Kivila language is spoken in the Trobriand Islands.

Yes, sorry, KSH, I borked the spelling earlier, thus rendering Google totally useless. It’s Kilivila.

@Full Metal Ox – Yep. It also brings to mind Cliff Pervocracy’s “missing stair”. Though that one is really more about the work that people do behind the scenes to compensate for a problem that no one wants to confront openly.

The warning sign for me in that article (well, I mean, aside from the fact that it came out well after JP had proved himself to be an asshat) is the “self-educated in the humanities” bit. Obviously, it’s completely possible to be self-educated in any area; but it’s also more or less the definition of Dawkins Syndrome for privileged white guys who are brilliant in one area, particularly a more or less scientific one, to assume they’ll be brilliant in all others, and that the humanities aren’t hard. The fact that the guy on the hiring committee didn’t notice this is disturbing, though not surprising.

@Rapid Rabbit

it’s also more or less the definition of Dawkins Syndrome for privileged white guys who are brilliant in one area, particularly a more or less scientific one, to assume they’ll be brilliant in all others, and that the humanities aren’t hard.

Very well put. This is such a common assumption. And the limits to JP’s “self-education” are pretty obvious. From a recently published article on this (forgive the long quote; it’s just so good):

The term Peterson uses most ubiquitously, “post-modern neo-Marxism,” is pure piffle. While sauntering into legal discourse, he ends up arguing against crimes that do not exist. In an invited lecture that has “Marxist” in the title, he radiates confusion about what Marx did and did not write. Though he likes to rail elaborately against these philosophers, Peterson cannot seem to distinguish his Derrida from his Foucault, nor does he reference the titles of any of their books — a key practice when critiquing researchers whose arguments changed substantially over their careers — or the considerable scholarship that followed in their wake. He styles himself as a critic of historical fascism, yet he consistently downplays the essential role that anti-Semitism played in German Nazism.

Oh, lord, that conflating of Marxism and postmodernism. I got into a Twitter debate about racism in Australian politics with someone that, over the course of a week, pulled the subject matter more and more into how racial vilification were not only Orwellian but also the product of Cultural Marxism.

They didn’t actually use that term, mind you – they were far too genteel a conspiracy theorist for that. No, they just suggested that such laws were products of the thinking of one or another members of the Frankfurt School. Not any specific theories proposed by the academic in question, but its general vibe of “the ‘deconstrucion’ of western values”.

Now, leaving aside that Marxism is about a western as a philosophy can be – developed by two Germans in the UK describing the conditions of industrial capitalism in western Europe – the allusion to deconstruction implies the influence of Derrida, who was a child for most of the Frankfurt School’s existence and didn’t start publishing proper until after it was basically over as an academic phenomenon.

It was only after the debate had wound down that I realised the person I was arguing with worked for the bloody Daily Mail.

@Rapid Rabbit, Diptych

The Frankfurt School may have ended as an economic phenomenon, but alas, there are still politicians who subscribe to it… Here in Canada, we underwent eight years of a leader who swore by it. Bah

*is confused*
Which Frankfurt School are we talking about here? Not Adorno & Horkheimer, or…?

Also, Diptych, are you sure that wasn’t Chris Uhlmann in disguise? 😀

@Rabid Rabbit

Did you mean the Chicago School?

Man, lotta dang ol’ typos in that post. Sorry about that.

(I know next to nothing about either Marxism or postmodernism, so I consider myself competent to estimate how the typical alt-right audiences might perceive these things)

Suffice to say, Marxism is not particularly interested in deconstruction (a postmodernist concept referring to… I’m not an expert, but it’s basically the philosophy of language?), and postmodernism isn’t particularly interested in organising the proletariat and seizing control of the means of production (I’m not saying they’re never interested in doing that, but generally it’s a bit more abstract), and neither are particularly interested in undermining the west and bringing about its downfall (that’s an obvious far-right bugbear).

JP seems to fit neatly alongside Ayn Rand in the category of “writers who constantly criticise philosophers whose ideas they obviously don’t understand”. Among many other categories.

@Mish et al.

I have no idea how I managed to mix up Frankfurt and Chicago. It was late. Forget I said anything. Carry on.

believe the crap they spew. I always figured they just swore an oath when they signed on to propound nonsense when on company time.

I write a blog for my workplace, and I try to tilt it ever-so-slightly to the left, just enough to irk the bosses, but not enough to inflame….

As we’re in the railroad industry, the history of our interaction with the folk is… well, not very pleasant. My boss once asked me to write a blog post explaining why the railroad land “grants” were actually a very good thing, and, as you know, the “robber baron” era was substantially exaggerated by the modern liberal media….

… 🙁 🙁

I never did get that post done….

@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:

Out of curiosity, are you yourself a Trobriander?