“Lukianoff and Haidt share some benefactors and allies with the well-established right that funded Bloom and D’Souza. (Lukianoff works at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit group that receives funding from the Scaife and Olin families.) But, reading The Coddling of the American Mind, I was more struck by their points of proximity to the newer Trumpist right.”
“Lukianoff and Haidt quote “Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at the Brookings Institution””
“The rhetorical appeal, here, shares a structure with the appeal that carried the enemy in chief of political correctness to the White House”
“This is the incredulity of people who have never feared being stereotyped. It can turn to indignation, fast.”
“the two-step from shame to rage about shame may be what brings it closest to the Trumpists”
“Nassim Taleb, whose book Antifragile Haidt and Lukianoff credit with one of their core beliefs and cite repeatedly as inspiration, is a fixture of the far right “manosphere” that gathers on Reddit/pol and returnofkings.com.”
“The commonality raises questions about the proximity of their enthusiasm for CBT to the vogue for “Stoic” self-help in the Red Pill community,”
“Lilla admits to envying the effectiveness of the “right-wing media complex”. It is hard to imagine that Haidt does not feel some such stirrings about Peterson, who is, after all, selling more copies of self-help books ”
“Lukianoff and Haidt quote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago as an epigraph and key inspiration; Peterson, who frequently lectures on the book, wrote the introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition Penguin will publish in November.”
This is a kind of anti-fallacy. You take the mere presence of these comparisons to undermine the rest of the substantive argument that their claims are wrong.
Just a couple of examples:
the framing leaves no room to consider how historical and social change might legitimately change institutions or individuals, or that individuals might want to change their world. (This framing also explains how they can write hundreds of pages about what’s wrong with contemporary higher education and not mention debt or adjuncts.) The authors cite the “folk wisdom” “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child”. They call this attitude “pragmatic”. The prospect that a group of children might get together to build a new road themselves is not one they can countenance.
Or the quote in my original comment, which if you remove the apparently distracting "Like Trump", is entirely substantive:
the authors romanticise a past before “identity” but get fuzzy and impatient when history itself comes up. “Most of these schools once excluded women and people of colour,” they reflect. “But does that mean that women and people of colour should think of themselves as ‘colonised populations’ today?” You could approach this question by looking at data on racialised inequality in the US, access to universities, or gendered violence. They don’t. They leave it as a rhetorical question for “common sense” to answer.
And:
They argue that intersectionality theory divides people into good and bad. But the scholars they quote do not use this moral language; those scholars talk about privilege and power.
What's an anti-fallacy? Seems to be the opposite of a fallacy, so that's a good thing, I guess.
> You take the mere presence of these comparisons to undermine
No, I take the fact that the text is full of these sentences to "undermine" (aka: disprove) your incorrect assertion that
"That's not what the review does at all. "
and
"That's one or two sentences of it"
That is exactly what the review does and that's a lot more than one or two sentences. Alas, there's a limit to post length on HN and just pasting the entire review gets old.
Interestingly, the fact that your claims turned out to be utterly and completely false did not change your conclusion one iota (see: motivated reasoning[1]), you just switched to other "reasons".
No, I do not find the rest of her ranting in any way "substantive". For example, you quote:
"The prospect that a group of children might get together to build a new road themselves is not one they can countenance."
Well, here's what the reply I referenced has to say to that exact sentence:
"Far from this being something the authors are unable to countenance, encouraging children to build new roads themselves is exactly what the authors hope to achieve. But this can’t happen if adults prepare roads rather than children."
And of course, "not one they can countenance" is not language that has a place in a serious review. You can say what's in the book or not, you just don't have access to the authors' state of mind. But the ad-hominem is what this is about, so "can't countenance" it is.
The rest is, again, unsubstantiated ranting. The authors "romanticise" the past. Where? How? Is this bad? Why? Nothing. Where do they get "fuzzy"? This is not a history book, saying they did not research something they neither intended nor claimed to have researched seems somewhat silly.
> "good and bad" vs. "privilege and power"
That seems a very slim "error" to hang your critique on. If, in fact, it is an error.
Some of the terminology used: "matrix of domination", "vectors of oppression and privilege", "oppressive measures", "domination always involves the objectification of the dominated; all forms of oppression imply the devaluation of the subjectivity of the oppressed."[2]
Now you can try to claim that all these terms do not carry any moral judgement whatsoever. I think you'll have a hard time with it.
“Lukianoff and Haidt share some benefactors and allies with the well-established right that funded Bloom and D’Souza. (Lukianoff works at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit group that receives funding from the Scaife and Olin families.) But, reading The Coddling of the American Mind, I was more struck by their points of proximity to the newer Trumpist right.”
“Lukianoff and Haidt quote “Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at the Brookings Institution””
“The rhetorical appeal, here, shares a structure with the appeal that carried the enemy in chief of political correctness to the White House”
“This is the incredulity of people who have never feared being stereotyped. It can turn to indignation, fast.”
“the two-step from shame to rage about shame may be what brings it closest to the Trumpists”
“Nassim Taleb, whose book Antifragile Haidt and Lukianoff credit with one of their core beliefs and cite repeatedly as inspiration, is a fixture of the far right “manosphere” that gathers on Reddit/pol and returnofkings.com.”
“The commonality raises questions about the proximity of their enthusiasm for CBT to the vogue for “Stoic” self-help in the Red Pill community,”
“Lilla admits to envying the effectiveness of the “right-wing media complex”. It is hard to imagine that Haidt does not feel some such stirrings about Peterson, who is, after all, selling more copies of self-help books ”
“Lukianoff and Haidt quote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago as an epigraph and key inspiration; Peterson, who frequently lectures on the book, wrote the introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition Penguin will publish in November.”