If you’re waiting around for someone with more power than it takes to stand in a road with a sign to do anything, you will be waiting until your dying day.

Which, to be clear, is exactly what I expect will happen. Impeding society is seen as worse than destroying society, so inaction will destroy society. Because on the other side of inaction by the working class, is the massive (and massively destructive) action that we currently facilitate. Which means we are the problem, and our only choice is whether to also be a part of the solution. The solution being the mobilization of the working class. Which naturally takes the form of small actions against system (like blocking traffic and doing PR stunts) when numbers are still small because that is exactly what the working class is capable of doing.

I’m sure I’ve already triggered enough lemmies so I’ll go ahead and add, that non-activists calling for activists to destroy infrastructure are not wrong - but they are harmful, not helpful. If they believe in the statement and if this is their true criticism of activists, then those individuals would become activists following their own ideas of what works. But people who are actually activists understand the enormous challenges in such a task while living in a modern security state, and more importantly that the culture is still too non-activist and anti-activist for these actions to catch on meaningfully. Society does not see itself as the problem here. The truth is that the people crying about traffic would be crying significantly more if their consumerism is in the slightest way impaired. They only want to be against the problem, without actually be against the problem.

I hope you all understand what this means mechanistically even if you disagree about where I place my values and judgment: Our families will all be coming to an untimely end. Those of us who are still alive when the cascades begin, will die. If you’re my age and nothing takes you out early, you will die due to climate change caused by our industrial society. If you’re rich you might live a few extra years and die in a bunker.

It also used to be a liberal arts program for developing critical thinkers, not a new form of trade school with an infinitely more predatory profit model.

Go figure - capitalism killed higher education, too!

But where is the government in this context? The license is through a private board.

the board’s ruling was an infringement on his free speech, but since they’re a private board

Free speech applies to the private sphere in Canada? It seems like that would have implications on every social media platform, search engine, and so on.

and ancient people sure did trip from time to time.

And that’s an understatement, lol.

Project Blue Book was a US military project for studying UFOs in the 50s and 60s. They collected reports, mostly. In UFO lore this part of the program was a cover, and in reality Blue Book was a plan to UFO-inspired projections into the sky (or other technologies up to and including reverse-engineered UFOs) in order to fake an alien invasion.

I believe that - unrelated to Project Blue Book - there are some declassified and/or leaked docs that show US agencies (mostly Intel community iirc although the Air Force is working on somewhat related tech [full spectrum, reportedly plasma-based]) have brainstormed essentially the same idea for other use cases, sometimes using religious imagery instead of UFOs based on the culture of the targets. I haven’t seen anything that officially indicates Blue Book had anything to do with a fake invasion for the purposes of domestic manipulation. It’s a powerful idea, though, they helps illustrate how growing power imbalances can be exploited in contemporary times. Some rich kids from Houston could buy drones and jump across the border to cause havoc among rural farmers in Mexico and go viral among bigots, if they could maintain their attention long enough to plan it.

Or do it to a developed country that still believes in religious myths - then you get the infamous Project Blue Book!

Maybe, but the way I see it, deprogramming from a toxic culture is attacking the problem at the source to prevent more symptoms from occurring.

I do see other issues here, so education isn’t my only concern. However there is a lot of evidence that education based in critical thinking makes individuals more resilient to cult-style tactics and rhetoric. eta: Cultists’ emotions are often weaponized for the organization’s benefit so this does directly address the emotional needs issue imo.

There are also systemic issues at play here, and many of those affect a much wider cross-section of the general population so they should be more easily addressed. And yet this population loves its identity politics while loathing inter-sectionality, meaning they are the very population standing in tribalist opposition to what their class allies are fighting for. This is another sign that education failed, and that better critical thinking would be an effective counter to influence by JBP and the rest of the IDW, as well as the right-wing hegemony that they support.

But you can certainly prevent emotional needs (and probably more relevant: pathological anxieties) that are born from misunderstandings of reality, which are quite common among Peterson’s audience.

I largely worry about the lack of education that leads to people finding him persuasive. At least, that seems like a slightly simpler issue to resolve.