About 35 minutes in, he discusses the incompetence of universities, and seques into the war on competence at about 40.

The whole thing is worth watching, of course. He seems to pack more good sense into any given ten minutes of verbiage than anyone I know of. Lewis & Chesterton & and others certainly have as much good to impart, but they do it more liesurely, I think, even when speaking.

This has been my go-to link of the day, but in an hour of JP talking he covers just about every topic that’s roiling the zeitgeist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6H2HmKDbZA
From the Aspen Ideas Festival, recorded Tuesday, June 26, 2018. Jordan Peterson, author of the best-selling 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, may be one of the most famous intellectuals in North America today. He also may be among the most misunderstood. His fans say that he’s saved their lives, and detractors say that he’s the gateway drug to the alt-right. Who is this psychologist-philosopher whom so many of us had never heard of two years ago, and what does he really believe?

Featuring Jordan Peterson in conversation with Bari Weiss. Hosted in the St. Regis Hotel Ballroom, Aspen, Colorado.

(Bari, to her credit, asked infrequent but interesting questions, and then just got out of his way. There is also audience agreement and applause at lines you might not expect in Aspen.)

I think your posting is especially poignant.

And useful. Much more useful than most of the mud-slinging finger-pointing namecalling comments. Anybody can do that. Yet most of our commenters have form for offering thoughtful, interesting comments in other discussions; I do not mean to trash individuals.

Your own comments help to point out some of the real difficulties that Mr. Packer faces as he tries, even now, to figure things out without having entirely to re-place himself in the world.

Whether he ever comes entirely into the Light (*g*), it’s commendable that he has more than just a glimmer of the problem; and has had the cojones to put it before the public.

I imagine it will reach some of the people who are also caught in the trap, but have (perhaps without quite recognizing it) begun squirming a bit at its confines. Perhaps it will cause them to continue pondering the problem and facing the realities of the present version of their ideological milieu’s positions and projects, and of the agendas of their own élites.

I’m particularly impressed by yours at September 16, 2019 at 3:53 pm. I was never any sort of leftie, nor librul … basically a Classical Liberal and still a conservativish-libertarianish type. And still I’ve had to make some changes in the way I see the world and my place in it.

(For instance. David Horowitz burned his final New Left bridge when he voted for Pres. Reagan in 1984. He’d have been 45 at the time. He’d spent the previous 10 years trying to work himself out of the Trap — to re-position himself in his own mind and in the world. In his biographical article at

https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/11/david-horowitz-journey-left-right/ ,

Jamie Glazov writes:

Horowitz’s change of heart was of a somewhat di?erent character from the conversions of the ex-Communists who had traveled to the Right before him. Unlike the contributors to “The God That Failed,” for instance, most of whom remained men of the Left, Horowitz made a comprehensive break with the radical worldview.

)

Thank you.

.

Aesop,

As usual you bring a good deal of useful material to light, and good commentary to go with it. Thanks, as always.

.

Mike K,

Thank you too, for reminding us that there are spots of light here and there.

And that the SATs were once pretty good.

From Matt Continetti:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/public-schools-story-shows-radical-left-transformation-american-education/

Packer’s article vividly describes the “progress” critical race theory has made as it percolates through American public education. He is a man of the left disturbed by a rising generation of left-wing ideology and activism. It has happened before. When the New Left politics of Tom Hayden began appearing on university campuses in the 1960s, social democrats and anti-Communist liberals found themselves appalled. Irving Howe debated Hayden for hours. Norman Podhoretz, shocked by the anti-Americanism of “the Movement,” moved right. “A neoconservative,” Irving Kristol quipped, “is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.”

Packer is too liberal, and too careful, to say whether he is willing to press charges against the corruption of American public education by radicals intent on social transformation. Time and again, radicals have displaced liberals only because the liberals, wracked with guilt, lack the will to stop them. “Watching your children grow up gives you a startlingly vivid image of the world you’re going to leave them,” Packer writes. “I can’t say I’m sanguine.”

None of us should be.

This is preface for the most interesting part of liberal writer George Packer’s widely noticed recent Atlantic essay, “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids.” The article details his dismay at the identity politics/standards-shredding orthodoxy that has overtaken New York’s public schools under leftist Mayor Bill de Blasio. (Is he still a candidate for president, by the way? I’ve lost track. . .) Packer here sounds like a late-60s liberal who is about to move to a New York suburb for better schools for his kids.

Worth reading the whole thing if you have time, but the interesting part to me begins in section 5, as it tracks with a theory I first hatched in conversation with Charles Murray back around 2015 or 2016, namely, that the left had descended into a rage because things hadn’t gone according to plan under their “lightworker,” Obama. Think of it as “Obama Disappointment Syndrome.” Here’s Packer noticing it just the same way:
…
Packer hopes that “one day the fever will break,” but what if it doesn’t? If Packer is right in his diagnosis—and I think he is—Democrats are cruising to a crushing defeat in next year’s election if they nominate a hard progressive candidate (which is all of them right bow, isn’t it?), or run on a hard “progressive” platform of slavery reparations, transgender bathrooms, banning fracking for oil and gas, etc. Joe Biden may be the Hubert Humphrey or Ed Muskie of this election cycle—throwbacks to and older liberalism—but we recall what happened to them as the 1972 Democratic primaries wore on.

(For you young ‘uns out there, yes, there was a time when Woody Allen was funny.)

+10

(Wish I’d said that).

It’s a wonderful (if totally self-indulgent) trick, because it enables one subjectively to be right under all circumstances, no matter how badly and obviously things go disastrously wrong.

You certainly aren’t the only person with a quick conversion, nor do I think it “weird.” But I do believe, from personal observation, that a slow and difficult process is much more common. That’s particularly true for someone like Packer who is both older and whose livelihood (and I assume social life and community standing and self-image and perhaps even marital tranquility) depends on his remaining a member of the liberal in-group.