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Apr 3, 2021Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

> What that study failed to show, however, is causality. ... Peterson used to say during his

> 2018 heyday that many of his fans came from the other direction. They’d start out as

> alt-right 4chan trolls...

I think this goes both ways. Personally, I follow Slate Star Codex, whose discussions of politics caused me to go from "typical Obama-era liberal progressive" to "conservatives and reactionaries make some good points but are still generally wrong" to seeing the pandemic, the abysmal response to it, the escalating culture war, the media's response to these events, &c., as signs that American government and society are fundamentally dysfunctional and that the neoreactionaries were basically right about the Cathedral. On the other hand, I've heard other readers say that they started out in the far right (as MRAs or neoreactionaries) and were inspired by SSC to adopt a less extreme and more carefully considered ideology: cf. https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lixeor/why_slate_star_codex_is_silicon_valleys_safe_space/gn6c1zs/

On the comparison of ideology to fashion, you might find https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ interesting; it makes a similar comparison in an effort to describe both the progressives and the anti-woke, although its specific predictions were wrong because the author based them on the ideas of his friends, which turned out to be unrepresentative.

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> Among them you find immigrants, atheists, second wave feminists, rationalists, Christians, conservatives, Muslims, libertarians, older liberals, Blacks, Latinos, racists, Asians, white nationalists, Jews, neoreactionary alt-right thinkers, female athletes, and whatever counts as a Nazi these days.

But... those are *all* Nazis...

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Here for deicide.

(Great article.)

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It's because the original study uses the old straight line ideological axis instead of the horseshoe one. "Free thinkers" are not anti-Woke, they're anti-ideological-rigidity, which is the defining characteristic of both the extreme right and the extreme left. But (I suspect) the study's authors betray their wokeness-bias by limiting the categories in such a way that IDW leftists get lumped with alt-right - such that their categories are actually "those that think like us" and "everybody else".

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re: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.12843v1.pdf

Didn't they admit the data was party in error?

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