Interesting that you think having no one around to help you but yourself helped you to be successful. I don’t take a lot of risks, but I’m much more willing to do so knowing I have a family that can support me if I fail. I’m willing to speak up in my job because I know I have protections by the government. I know that if I get laid off here, I have labor insurance to support me while I find a new job. These are no radical ideas. They’re things that help keep society moving along when people fall on hard times. They make people feel seen as humans. When you don’t feel supported, you get depressed. This makes me curious to know how conservatives can be so happy, knowing they need to have an attitude that they can only rely on themself. For me, I like having friends and family to rely on. It helps me feel connected with society as a whole. A government that understands worker protections and has social support in place acts as an extension of those connections to me. It’s nice to know I’m not alone in the world.
Well … you’ve got two completely distinct means of support there: your family, which is accessible to anyone whether you’re rich or poor (although obviously it helps to have rich relatives!), and the government or “society”. My personal view is that society, and the government, doesn’t care if I live or die, and that’s totally OK.
I had a really unpleasant experience just after graduation when I literally had no money for food. I went to the dole hole to see what they could do. The answer was “fuck off, we don’t care”. After I got over the initial shock, I figured out that this wasn’t inherently wrong and I’d just have to sort myself out as best I could, until I could get a job that paid more than minimum wage. So that’s what I did. And in retrospect that was a useful learning experience.
From what you wrote up there, it seems to me this all hinges upon some personality traits. I enjoy being self-reliant (which is not the same thing as “unsupported”). Some people, I suppose, desire more security. But while it might be natural to look to society for that support, it is not (IMO) reasonable to demand it. If you want to try some life choices that might result in failure, it’s up to you to prepare your own safety net.
I don’t think that’s what he’s saying. He’s just saying that you are ultimately responsible for yourself and you do have the ability to make a respectable life.
Thinking of how unfair the world is doesn’t help as much as putting yourself in the position to make things around you better. If you can make things around you better and help, maybe then I would think bigger picture.
After the last 2 years, I just want people to leave me alone. The government especially. I want them to leave my life alone and I want them to leave my business alone.
Indeed. I think the best that can be hoped for, in general, is a government that is not actively seeking to destroy you. Anything else is just icing on the cake.
Ha, c’mon now.
Probably not.
Employing people, or not, has very little to do with whether someone is a net positive benefit to society.
You were encouraged, but succeeded because people told you nobody cares if you succeeded? 
or you succeeded because people cared and encouraged you (and society gave you a fighting change by providing your family benefits and you an education)? But bootstraps!
Shit man, sometimes I feel like the only moderate around. 
I’m sure their kids will be happy when their mom can get paid going into the holidays.
I thought I was pretty clear about this, and Andrew read it correctly. My point was that the adults around me told me that, if I wanted certain things to happen, it was up to me to make it happen. Not only was nobody going to do it for me, it wouldn’t be possible for them to do it for me.
Nowhere have I said I did this all by myself. That would be stupid. Nobody does everything all by himself. I had encouragement and, yes, financial support. But my success (and continued support) was contingent on me actually (a) wanting to succeed and (b) making the effort. If I’d failed to uphold my end of the bargain, all of that support would have been withdrawn.
You cannot “help people” if they don’t want to be helped, and you particularly can’t help them if what you think they should want conflicts with what they actually want. As a teenager, my social circle (in the loosest sense) was mostly people who had no education, no ambition, and no prospects. Most of them were totally OK with that. They were happy. And in a slightly different universe I might also be living like that, and I’d probably still be happy. As I said above, being “poor” has certain upsides.
Thank you for your well considered response. I had noted I found it an interesting observation, because I too had noticed that.
Usually when we try to reach a conclusion we observe, then analyse and finally try to reach conclusions.
With regards the observing part, I would note that JP wasn’t the only person I saw this happening to, JK Rowling for instance sparked what I consider an over reaction to her opinion related to trans women in sports, apparently it didn’t matter how polite or to what length she went to in order to try and be respectful to that community. Years later her twitter feed is full of people wanting to rape and kill her, people in publishing houses threatening to quit if they published her book and more recently a 20 year celebration on Netflix (I think) over Harry Potter which she created except they decided to exclude JK Rowling.
Or James Damore in Google who triggered a massive backlash for his opinion piece he had written, perhaps part of it could have been written better, but the reaction to it was to me astonishing, I recall discussing with a friend and the first reaction was to hurl every expletive in the book at him. I was kind of taken back at the time thinking “really? what’s causing this overreaction”.
So, yes, I would agree, it’s an interesting phenomena, one that I too have been thinking about.
The reaction was utterly predictable - a project lead, hurling stereotypes, at a time when bro valley culture was being scrutinized (Uber was in the news a lot at that time), AND bringing unwanted external attention to a company that faces heavy competition to bring in the talent they want (to the tune of interns getting paid 6 figures).
Which implies it was reasonable to you, which is more the reason why people suggest you are progressive, because this is once again a dispute over progressive views.
It implies nothing about reasonableness, other than that I reasonably know it’s predictable because I know you don’t fuck with HR EEOC categories, you don’t embarrass the company publicly, and you sure as fuck don’t do both. That has nothing to do with politics, so it doesn’t matter if you’re a liberal at a gun company in Georgia ragging on Trump or a conservative going on about Bengazi at Clinton campaign headquarters - the basic message is don’t be a fucking dumbass; if you see that as a progressive message, well, you fucked in the head.
like the stereotype of bro valley culture? funny how it is ok to hurl some stereotypes, but others are verboten…
yes
everything has something to do with politics
Funny or not, that 1) was the situation at the time and 2) is partly an issue of law. So don’t be a dumbass.
Sort of, but not really. Don’t be a dumbass, and you can talk about the politics.
i can’t find a way to respond to this without risking poundsand thinking i’m a progressive messenger…
Ok calm down @Poundsand, I can see this has touched a raw nerve.
Why did JP antagonize the left so? One reason, because he pushed back at the idea of equality of outcome, interestingly the same thing James Damore was doing. He pushed back at the idea inequality of wages between men and women were solely due to sexisim, the interview below I suspect has been watched by most people on here and is painful to watch.
By pushing back against the idea we can look at institutions, corporations, leadership positions and claim if there is a disparate number of minorities or women or whatever the metric chosen and determine they are sexist, racist or whatever.
he stands in their way of a power grab, he is saying their conclusions are false, based on faulty reasoning and while there may be some truth in there, they are not based on factual analysis which as the woman in the interview says, she has no desire to know why these things are happening, only this needs to be corrected because her conclusions must be the right ones.
Unfortunately when talking to progressives, they can’t seem to understand what is being told to them. I thought JP in this interview was remarkably patient, despite the interviewer over and over saying “you mean x, y, z” and anyone watching realizes he didn’t say that at all.
because he was making very reasonable points and they had no way to engage with that.
edit: see the following for an example
It hasn’t, at all, but thanks for the concern. 
I don’t give a fuck about JP, so have no comment there.
Then you have no desire to look at why exactly both JP and James Damore set some people off in the way they did.
Objectively, you yourself claim to be an aerospace engineer, you know the proportion of men and women in University is widely skewed towards men, in my University it was about 100 to 1. It was in the UK, women could have chosen to study engineering, it seems they don’t like it, nothing would have stopped them.
So is it surprising Google, when asking the question related to equity of outcome with regards men and women in their workplace someone suggests men and woman might like different things therefore you can’t use equity of outcome as a measure of equality.
Which get’s in the way of those wanting to use equity of outcome to gain more power for their group or positions of power, or whatever they might hope to gain from pushing a theory that is faulty.
But does get them more power, and that is all they care about, they have been taught to think of a glass half empty rather than be thankful for a glass half full and to think in terms of tribes and what their tribe can get, even if it is unreasonable, even if society as a whole suffer, I get mine to hell with everyone else and what everyone else thinks of us.
People who get in the way of that, will get the JK Rowling, James Damore and JP treatment.
I think the thing going on with J.K. Rowling is different to what we observed with Jordan Peterson. Keep in mind that American-style “progressives” are a fringe phenomenon in the grand scheme of global politics reflecting “the left” about as much as conservative Christian evangelicals reflect “the right”. That said, I found that a lot of reasonable and highly intelligent left-wingers (not American-style “progressives”, who I’m happy to say I rarely associate with in the real world) berated JP as a dangerous cult leader, whereas the left-wingers I associated with (friends, fellow Labour Party members, members of the public I talk to as a Labour Party representative, etc.) tended to either be puzzled by or deeply unsettled by the reaction against Rowling. I got the impression too that some people went along with it because they thought it was the right thing to do, but I could tell their heart wasn’t really in it.
That said, even though American-style “progressives” don’t reflect the left as a whole, the ideology that everybody is a victim of society lacking individual agency is a central ideology of the entire left-wing landscape. It’s just that the traditional left-wingers, like I used to be, divide the battle on class lines (workers will always be victims under capitalism until the entire structure is brought down or radically overhauled), whereas American-style “progressives” ignore class (and are often outright hostile to the working class) and focus on issues that don’t actually threaten the ruling elite (which is probably why the ruling elite are so happy to champion their causes). Jordan Peterson goes against everything the left as a whole stands for, which is why even the highly intelligent anti-“progressive” left hate him so much and refuse to even listen to what he says.