| > Is it really that controversial though? Yes. > I'm nearly 40 and I feel like had Jordan Peterson said a lot of what he says now when I was at University it would have been of almost no note whatsoever. Whether it would have been controversial in another context is irrelevant to whether it is controversial, which is never an inherent feature of an utterance and always a statement about its relation to a particular context. But, yes, I'm nearly 45 and a lot of it would have been controversial when I was in college (in fact, a lot of it is almost identical to controversial things right-wing speakers were saying when I was in college; the only exception of note seems to be the factual controversy over his description of the content of specific current laws.) > "Enforcing equality of outcomes though imbalanced policy is less desirable than giving equality of choice and letting other natural variables dictate the outcome" seems such an uncontroversial statement as to be almost self-evident, and yet... ...it's been a controversial statement from the right for four or five decades or so, and only not earlier because before then the right was almost uniformly overtly opposed to equality of choice, and didn't need to engage in elaborate concern trolling of this form. It's not controversial because anyone disagrees that equality of choice and opportunity is the ideal, it's controversial as a criticism of specific policies because it assumed that equality of opportunities/choice is not their goal, and, where those laws directly address material circumstance as part of their mechanism, assumes that the circumstances addressed are immaterial to equality of choice/opportunity. |
Yes, this is something I've noticed. How when he talks about equality he assumes the premise that everybody is talking about "equality of outcome" rather than "equality of opportunity" which may be the case to a certain extent, but nobody that's actually studied inequality to any serious degree believes this.