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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

> The communists won World War II, and imposed an ideological purge of unprecedented savagery, universality, and thoroughness ... Liberal democratic cosmopolitanism didn’t win any arguments; it won a war, and got to impose itself by force.

That feeling when you’re so het up about the Modern World you conflate communism and “liberal democratic cosmopolitanism” as “tHE lEFt”.

The true travesty in intellectual diversity is the American right wing abandoning any semblance of intelligent debate. Cue Shapiro calling Andrew Neil a leftist, or almost anything written by Jordan Peterson.

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I've only read one of Jordan Peterson's books - 12 Rules of Life.

Haven't reread recently, but it was interesting at the time, and sort of helpful for keeping me motivated to get myself out of a bit of a rut. What parts of his writing did you find to be indicative of abandoning intelligent debate?

> What parts of his writing did you find to be indicative of abandoning intelligent debate?

It’s a set of truisms glossed up with some long words?

I hope you're standing straight now, because... you know... "To stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the world from the flood, guiding your people through the desert after they have escaped tyranny, making your way away from comfortable home and country, and speaking the prophetic word to those who ignore the widows and children."

As much as I love metaphors ("Metaphors of Movement" concept and therapy by Andrew Austin or in general metaphors explained by Lakoff in "Metaphors We Live by") - Peterson is simply fantasizing. It might seem to be deeply thought out, but it's not. Would love to share with you great article about his book, but it's unfortunately in Polish. If you care to know then google translator might help https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&u=https:/...

They're not the same of course but it's common to regard them both as left-wing ideologies. They are both descendants of the ideologies of those who sat to the left in the French National Assembly, as opposed to the conservatives who sat on the right. (Confusingly, the people who call themselves conservatives in the US are really mostly free-market liberals.)

As neo-Naziism and centre-right European movements both right wing ideologies, but you’d be a blockhead if you meaningfully tried to tie them together as the author has done.

> it's common to regard them both as left-wing ideologies

It definitely is common among people who want to advocate for far right beliefs but run into the slight issue of the most famous of those groups being culturally synonymous with evil. Simply defining the Nazis to the other side of the spectrum is a very convenient solution to that, and probably pretty convincing to most people who are usually not familiar enough with the history and politics of Weimar Germany to point out how utterly ridiculous of a statement that is. (The NSDAP was helped into power by the royalty-aligned conservatives to prevent a left victory, while the left fought the forces that would become the SS in the streets to try to stop them, before they were put into the first concentration camps. Coincidentally, they also sat on the furthest right side of parliament, opposite of the communists.)

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