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I recently watched a podcast episode in which DHH got to plug his new Omarchy Quattro. He seemed almost manic at times. I think there is a phenomenon online in which Grey Tribe people get harassed by leftist extremists to the point of becoming extremists themselves, of demonstratively placing themselves in the opposite camp. I worry that we are witnessing a similar downturn here as what happened with Jordan Peterson. DHH slowly descending into increasingly extreme and uninformed opinions as he removes himself from any position where he might otherwise agree with the mob. In the process doing less of what he is good at, to instead say stupid shit on podcasts.
I think for a long time, there has been growing frustration in the tech world with having to kowtow to any demand made by leftists, or risk losing your entire network. DHH gets a lot of slack from non-leftists because he is proof that you can be a highly successful engineer who still has his own opinions about the world. And he is trying to make a space for other programmers who are tired of this. But for this to work, he needs to keep doing what he is good at first and foremost, which is to actually create things.
Jordan Peterson could have been a voice for reason in the world of education and psychology, but instead turned into a podcaster. DHH has a similar choice to make: Will he continue being an actual counterweight to the woke culture in open source software? Or will he change into someone who makes his money from pandering to Chuds?
I had this observation on John Cleede lately. It's almost difficult to be a milquetoast centrist figure with some vocal medium right views since you'll inevitably be treated like mega Hitler regardless. You either capitulate to the dog pile or just announce every thought
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I don’t think JBP is actually all that radical for a guy of his age and religious views. He’s all but come out as a conservative Christian of some stripe, he’s basically a 1980s conservative, which might be radical in current year, but in the era when he was growing up, things like “you cannot force me to affirm your pronouns” or “clean your room before you reform society” or whatever. Listening to the things he talks about on his channel don’t read as radical for a guy who’s at least 60, and in many cases is pretty progressive for his cohort.
That's the worst part. He called them by their preferred pronouns. But that's not nearly enough when caught up on the leading edge of the culture war.
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As someone who had a very minor failed attempt to get the media to accurately report on something, I get it.
This institution which you've relied on for so much exposes itself to you, personally, to be not at all trustworthy. You know there's no good reason for them to misreport, no national security implications, it's at most tribal allegiances and likely social pressure exerted among the journalists themselves. I suppose this is especially true if the subject of their misreporting is yourself and your political opinions, which you have perfect knowledge of.
You then no longer have this bedrock of information about the world to rely on. The implausible becomes plausible. At best you greatly narrow what you consider to be "knowledge" and regard almost everything else as practically unknowable, you'd have to go investigate for yourself if you want to really know anything.
You then do investigate some things for yourself and find out that the media has been greatly misrepresenting or lying about things, especially things of a political valence, and this sets you up to regard as plausible a great deal of things you found previously implausible.
And then if you're not very careful you'll soon be ready to believe a lot of stuff that doesn't actually check out.
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I'm not really following DHH, so I can't comment on him, but I'm not seeing it. Jordan Peterson didn't lose relevancy because of the benzos, because his daughter got involved with Andrew Tate. or even because he started dressing like a comic book villain - people could gloss over all of that. You could say he lost relevancy because he got got too close to Ben Shapiro and the neocons, and stopped having interesting thoughts about anything, arguably you could say that he lost relevancy because he got proven wrong, and his "clean your room" advice, while valuable, turned out to be insufficient, but the one thing you definitely cannot say is that he lost the opportunity to become a voice of reason in the world of education and psychology because he got "increasingly extreme". because a) like I mentioned before he's actually pretty mundane and boring, and b) we know for a fact that becoming extreme does not diminish your voice in education and psychology, which we can confirm by taking a quick glance at the absolute state of education and psychology.
This does raise an interesting question of what is the point of appealing to people who fancy themselves reasonable centrists? They'll do absolutely nothing to support you while you're sticking your neck out for them, and after you come under heavy fire for all your trouble, they'll call you an extremist anyway.
From my personal perspective, Jordan Peterson absolutely did lose relevancy because of the benzos. The core of Petersonism as I understood it was "if you act with agency and responsibility in your personal life, honour your tribe's gods, and display slightly more classical masculine virtue than that is normal for your society, you will be the big lobster." Big lobsters do not get themselves addicted to benzos.
I assume I am not alone in this.
Even if what he did go against the core of his message, most people are capable of understanding we're all human and we stumble sometimes. Aside from that, like I said, if he still had interesting things to say, most people would just gloss over it as time went by, they certainly look past far greater hypocrisies on a daily basis.
Also, I don't recall you expressing a lot of regard for Peterson to begin with, even before the Benzos.
I read Twelve Rules for Life and found it mildly useful. In the political context of the UK at the time, it was possible to recommend it to mentees in a way that it wasn't with other based/red-pilled/right-coded lifestyle advice. Given that I was happily married and professionally successful at the time Peterson went mainstream, I wasn't in the market for a full-on lifestyle guru relationship. But for young people who are looking for a secularish lifestyle guru, Peterson was one of the better options out there.
Even if you don't think the drugs shot Peterson's credibility, they definitely shot his workrate. You have to be prolific to survive in the online lifestyle guru industry.
I think the world would be a mildly better place if Peterson had not got addicted to benzos.
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I honestly agree with this. Young men would claim in private conversations and anonymously on the internet that Jordan Peterson had saved their life, that his perspective was reasonable and important, and it was bad to cancel him.
But when leftists turned up to block his lectures or disrupt his events, these "supporters" were nowhere to be found. Presumably they got scared of the mob and turned around.
A similar problem happened to the Men's Right's crowd. There were people willing to speak out against feminism and be a voice for men who were failed by the system. These people were praised in their online circles, but ultimately acted alone. The support was only there as long as it carried no personal risk. Pushing your way into a lecture hall blocked by young women who threatened to put your face on social media was simply too much to ask. Showing public support was too big a risk.
But at that point, is it really support at all?
That was probably some part of it. I suspect, however, that maybe a bigger reason is that they just didn't give enough of a shit to show up. There are so many easier and more fun things to do with one's day than traveling somewhere to support some online guy who helped you improve your life.
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Not the mob, but the juggernaut of state force behind them. Confrontations between left-wing mobs and right-wing defenders lead not only to injury but charges for the right-wing side. Even when the principal himself defended himself in a mild way, he was arrested.
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