Peter Boghossian has been needling people lately. Or maybe no more than usual, but he’s been doing it effectively enough that I hear about it even though I normally ignore him.

One reason I normally ignore him is his enthusiasm for pseudo-epigrammatic little quips that are actually just shallow and usually inaccurate oversimplifications. Yawn.

Like this one.

Why is it that nearly every male who’s a 3rd wave intersectional feminist is physically feeble & has terrible body habitus?

1. It isn’t.

2. Why do you ask?

3. What are you, six? Is this the playground? Is it Trump’s dining room? What are you doing jeering at people for not being Big n Strong enough?

4. The constant attacks on feminism get really tiresome, not to mention ugly.

And there was this.

If the left forgoes equality of outcome & the right agrees to steeper graduated income taxes then we can move toward equality of opportunity.

He’s so glib. He obviously fancies himself as a big thinker, but that’s what he comes up with.

The left doesn’t need to “forgo” equality of outcome because the left doesn’t demand or expect it in the first place. That label is bogus; it’s what the right says when it wants to pour scorn on progressive concerns about radically unequal outcomes and what is causing them. It’s entirely possible to think radically unequal outcomes have causes other than or in addition to a flawlessly pure relationship between outcomes and abilities, without therefore expecting all outcomes to be “equal.”

It’s not a matter of saying “fire all these white people right now and replace them with people of color.” It’s not a matter of saying all jobs must be 50/50 women and men. It’s a matter of looking into large disparities to find out what’s causing them and if it would be a good idea to try to reduce them.

Yet for some reason Peter Boghossian has a lot of admirers.