Hacker News Reader

Comment by balaksakrionon | Hacker News Reader

I suspect the type of dismisiveness you show towards large swaths of the populace's opinions contributes to the success of folks like JBP and Sargon

View on HN

I suspect it does too, but probably for different reasons.

Criticism of "thought leaders" like these guys only strengthens the hold they have among the legions of young people who follow their words like gospel.

Any criticism of these figures for their platitude-heavy content and huckster-style marketing must also be a criticism of their followers as individuals, because they have bought into that mindset wholesale.

JBP, at least, generally seems to come off better than the people criticising him.

And young people have rebellious tendencies, they form countercultures. The current world culture tilts to left-progressivism, so there's a right-ish counterculture.

The problem is that many look at JBP interacting with clickbait and unethical journalists and conclude that he must be a great and honest thinker in comparison. Actual academics rarely engage with him, and not because they are afraid to or malicious but because he hasn't published much that can even be engaged with outside of psychology. The exception is Žižek, and we all saw how that went for Peterson.

On the contrary, the rise of my dismissiveness comes from the emergence and popularity of grifters like JBP and Sargon, who seem to only favor freedom of speech for bullying, but never seem to protest any actual freedom of speech issues at home or abroad (like Ortega gunning down protesters), in addition to having to listen to his fans parrot a lot of strange claims he had no qualifications to make or relevant knowledge of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com