I don't know that much about Peterson, but from what I understand he would be aligned with believers in progress like Pinker, and therefore not "reactionary".
The article doesn't have to be perfectly balanced in criticism of different political groups of course, but if you can read it start to finish and think it doesn't have an obvious bias then I think you're deluding yourself. I picked an extract that seemed to me the post obviously politically focused, but if I wanted to choose a positive mention of a left-wing person, or a negative mention of a right-wing person, I could have chosen about forty different clauses.
> I don't know that much about Peterson, but from what I understand he would be aligned with believers in progress like Pinker, and therefore not "reactionary".
The belief in "progress" does not disqualify one from being a reactionary (and I don't mean to make any specific comment on Peterson or Pinker since I've only read critiques of certain aspects of their thought, so I don't feel qualified to judge them as wholes).
>but if I wanted to choose a positive mention of a left-wing person, or a negative mention of a right-wing person, I could have chosen about forty different clauses.
That part is easy if you think the article is as you suggested: "the real purpose is the simple, everyday attack on those who have different political opinions to the author."
Besides, you left out the part of the excerpt you chose which alluded more to the actual central criticism the previous comment was pointing out:
"...tied in some vague way to academia, which they use to validate their anti-intellectualism while passing their feelings off as philosophy and, worse, as (mis)guides for the misguided."
> I don't know that much about Peterson, but from what I understand he would be aligned with believers in progress like Pinker, and therefore not "reactionary".
At least on a wide range of social issues, I can't think of a better example of the advocacy of a return to the (romanticized) past that defines a reactionary as Peterson.
But whether Peterson is or is not a reactionary is really beside the point.
> but if I wanted to choose a positive mention of a left-wing person, or a negative mention of a right-wing person, I could have chosen about forty different clauses.
Well, if you wanted to find negative mentions of public intellectuals of any stripe, you'd find plenty, but no, you couldn't find many positive mentions irrespective of politics because there are very few. (The only clearly positive mention of a current figure outside of the conclusion is of Ta-Nehisi Coates, and only positive in regard to dropping his Atlantic column; I suppose the description of Zola’s seminal piece as sort of the archetype from which public intellectualism has devolved is positive, but outside of the far and alt-right, public anti-anti-Semitism isn't exactly a position dividing the right from the left these days.)
It's true that the three figures used as examples of the new model at the end are left-leaning figures, but they aren't praised (insomuch as the emergent model is praised) for their viewpoints, which differ little from the left-wing figures that are criticized, but for their manner of engagement.
As much as you are desperately grasping at straws to make this about left-vs-right, that's very much not what this piece is about.
The article doesn't have to be perfectly balanced in criticism of different political groups of course, but if you can read it start to finish and think it doesn't have an obvious bias then I think you're deluding yourself. I picked an extract that seemed to me the post obviously politically focused, but if I wanted to choose a positive mention of a left-wing person, or a negative mention of a right-wing person, I could have chosen about forty different clauses.