Which is a kind of superpower that makes him hard to criticize. Whenever he commits to a fact or something, that's easy to disprove, and people do it all the time. But, when he just says something about cultural marxism or whatever, it's so hard to unpack what he's actually saying that it's hard to prove he's wrong.

That lets his followers say that he's so smart that even the leftist intellectuals can't take him down. Obviously they don't understand what he's saying either, but that doesn't matter. It lets them adore him as some kind of intellectual hero.

Peterson's got the act of a public intellectual down pat. He's never seen without a suit or with a smile, he has a distinguished haircut and a trimmed beard. He shows no sense of humour and uses big sciencey-sounding words.

That lets him have a symbiotic relationship with incels. He makes money selling them things like books, they get to point to a "public intellectual" who's on their side.

[–] HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He gish gallops word salads.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

But not in an obvious way like say Ben Shapiro. He does it using words that sound plausibly scientificalish.

I just want someone to say to him "So, they say when you truly understand something, you can break it down so that other people can understand it. So, break down what 'cultural marxism' is so that one of these poor young men you worry so much about can understand what you mean".

I'm sure he'd try to deflect, try to gallop, try something. But, I would bet that a good interviewer, just keeping him focused on those two words, would show he has no idea what he's talking about.

[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh I know this one, it's called being "Not Even Wrong"

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think so. Not even wrong is for something where you can understand what they're saying, but what they're saying is so nonsensical that it's not even wrong. Peterson instead uses words that seem like they could belong together but that are borrowed from many different fields to end up with something that sounds like it could plausibly mean something if you could unpack the words he's using, for example, in a debate he said this: "We lose the metaphorical substrate of our ethos."

That's not "not even wrong", it's just words that have never been used in that order by anyone else, so they could essentially mean anything. Unless you can get him to explain what he means by those words, you can't say that he's wrong. But, he's using those words to deliberately obfuscate what he's saying, and if you ask him to explain what it means, he'll just drive the conversation somewhere else.

[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

I can easily deduce from his inability to elaborate, that he has no idea what he means and likes those words together.