[squirrelicus]

It's worth all the down votes and more. I'm sure you can divide the down voters into a handful of camps. Those who are somehow convinced he has ties to the despicable alt right, those who are annoyed they keep hearing about him, and those who have actually heard him speak but, ianno, think taking responsibility and straightening yourself out is bad or something. Maybe they're just afraid of confronting their shadow.

[charliesome]

> Those who are somehow convinced he has ties to the despicable alt right,

When he's hosting two prominent alt right figures as guests on his podcast [0], I think it's pretty fair to say that he has ties to the alt right.

[0]: https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/11164318379565834...

[wesammikhail]

1. Ben Shapiro is alt-right. Yea and I shit cotton candy. https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-task-force-issue...

2. By that logic, Chris Wallace has ties to Russia too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHY8yG4mVzs

3. If Peterson is alt-right then so are you. Because I am pretty sure that in one way or another you associate yourself with someone who likes Peterson whether you know it or not. So you associate yourself with someone who associates themselves with Peterson who in turn associates himself with what you yourself would classify as alt-right. You disgust me you alt-right [insert insult here]. See how these things go? Maybe it´s best if we all just stopped with the stupid mental gymnastics.

[squirrelicus]

The first thing that must be said is that there is no true definition of alt-right. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

The second thing that must be said is that in order to communicate, we must use a consistent definition of the category for it to be useful.

The third thing that must be said is that when we argue "semantics", we're trying to figure out a shared definition of a category. Without it, there is no agreement. With it, arguments usually evaporate pretty quickly.

The left side of the aisle commits a dishonest fallacy constantly with respect to "alt-right". There is a category of despicable people. There is a category that includes non-despicable people. It's not right to waffle between the two to bolster rhetoric.

There is a category of despicable people that believe Western civilization is good because of its whiteness. These are the original "alt-right" people that everyone agrees are "alt-right". They are racist and pretty much everyone rejects them across the entire political spectrum. Maybe they number 100k globally with a very generous estimate.

There is a subset of those people who believe that enforcing ethnostate boundaries is good. They number maybe 10k globally, generously speaking. They are definitely "alt-right" by everyone's definitions.

There is a larger category that uses the word "alt" to imply simply an "alternative" right, which includes all conservatives that don't agree with traditional turn off the century neoconservative figures. So if you don't like Hannity and O'Reilly but do like Shapiro, then you're "alt-right" because you attach yourself to this new wave of conservative thought that doesn't agree with the old guard.

The definition here matters. People on the left want to stretch and shrink the definition to fit their rhetoric. But this is key here: the final category of alt-right doesn't really even overlap with the racist ethnostatists that everyone hates.

All that being said, Peterson isn't really even conservative. He just happens to be criticising more left leaning figures than right leaning figures because today, the left is far closer to totalitarianism than the right, in his estimation.

[badpun]

There are at least three more reasons why people dislike or even actively attack him:

- he says that there can be value in religion, and it for some reason triggers some people

- he's a critic of the "neo-Marxist post-modern left"

- he promotes emphasis on oneself before emphasis on collective, which in left's eyes is "reactionary". I.e. in his opinion, lots of people have vast room for personal improvement, which will in turn make their life better and easier - while in the left's eyes this is just a diversion, because the best way to life improvement is unionisation, political movements etc.