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Helen Pluckrose's avatar

Beautifully said. I find it both amusing and despair-inducing when people try to read Pete through their cynical, self-conscious, political agenda-driven Culture Wars Map. This requires the assumption that Pete is also cynical and self-conscious and politically agenda-driven. The reality is that he doesn’t even have the basics of these that would enable him to protect himself from those who do.

Being friends with Pete is equal parts asking in resigned despair “What the hell are you doing now and why did you think it was a good idea?” and just loving him for his huge heart.

I get closest to conveying this to people when I say to stop trying to locate him in a political framework and start seeing him in a humanistic philosophical one. The reason Pete is doing anything he is doing is because he is interested in it & wants to understand it. The reason Pete is doing anything in any particular place and with any particular people is because that’s where and who will allow him to do it. But that’s the intellectual thing & doesn’t get at the human side. There, I generally just think that I will listen to people bashing Pete for alleged bigotry when they show me that they have taken into their own homes even a fraction of the struggling humans of all identities that Pete has found on his travels due to his intense interest in and compassion for other individual humans.

(I have now been way too nice about the man so I shall add that he is also a crazy-making lunatic and if he is ever found dead with a teaspoon embedded in his jugular, it will be because he “edited” something I wrote or offered me life coaching advice).

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Richard Koffler's avatar

"if you looked at the world in a dissociated ideological way, where identity markers and words mean more than character and deeds." There is no better indicator of this disease than the comments in the New York Times and Washington Post where any questioning of or dissent with the identarian orthodoxy provokes instant deluges of baseless accusations of fascism, bigotry or worse.

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