The Jordan Peterson Thread

I wonder where he locates his own views in relation to postmodernism. They don't seem diametrically opposed. There was an interview where he argued for a pragmatist theory of truth and said that scientific truth is secondary and less important than the pragmatic truth of religion, which has to do with utility/morality/flourishing.

He argues that his views are rooted in biology and evolution — Darwinism, basically — in contrast to what he identifies as the social constructionism of the postmodernists. Though I'm less comfortable tossing these $5 words around than he is.

I like when he talks about religion and art, completely uninterested in his pronoun obsession, and his followers are p vile and pathetic for the most part. i do like listening to him speak though, he's entertaining as a pop philosopher. his obsession with postmodernists and marxists is also a little tiresome (i admittedly don't know much about either in depth, to the level where i could confidently call bullshit or not), but the transgender thing is really fuckin grating.

he's a total dipshit

I was just having a conversation about this with a coworker. It's a shame he has fallen into this b.s. rabbit hole. I like his lectures on Jung, religious archetypes, and "cultural dna." I find some of his arguments about the value of religious principles convincing—and I'm in no way religious. The biggest Peterson fan I know is an atheist, as I think many of his followers are. But this dude has a major chip on his shoulder about this pronoun issue. He's also clearly miffed from getting torn apart on Sam Harris's podcast. It's a bummer that he's so caught up in this shit, and with no end in sight.

Say what you want about Peterson, Sam Harris, and others of their ilk. I think it's a positive thing that these people are getting some attention. I don't remember any prominent philsophers or psychologists getting semi-mainstream attention before. And even if people are hearing these discussions through a Joe Rogan podcast, that's fine by me.

He is not getting attention for his scholarly work in psychology.

I was a fan of his from his appearances on The Agenda, a local current affairs show. And his Maps of Meaning is an interesting take on religious and mythological archetypes, in the Joseph Campbell and Northrop Frye vein. It's been disturbing to watch him elevated as this figurehead of the alt right, though I think it's also a consequence of the general polarization at the moment — he believes the "pronoun" issue (or specifically the vulnerability of our institutions like schools and the law to the machinations of radical leftists, which he sees as little different from Nazis) is a step on the path to the kind of murderous totalitarianism of the Soviet era.

If you mean Steve Paikin's The Agenda on TVO, that has always been good when I've watched it. The debate about gender was a very good and at times illuminating episode imo (although Peterson wasn't the best part of it).

It is pretty lazy and irresponsible to associate Peterson with the alt-right. I know plenty of liberals that follow him, as well as reasonable conservatives. He's getting pegged as alt-right by quite a few blogs now.

Though he isn't helping his cause by embracing Pepe, focusing his ire exclusively on the left, appearing on alt right media like The Rebel. He was on Fox & Friends this afternoon.

It's not lazy, he's embraced that group wholeheartedly. They're the reason 99% of the people who've heard of him have heard of him and they're the reason he can pull in $30k a month with his Patreon.

It is pretty lazy and irresponsible to associate Peterson with the alt-right. I know plenty of liberals that follow him, as well as reasonable conservatives. He's getting pegged as alt-right by quite a few blogs now.

― Benjamin-, Friday, November 10, 2017 2:23 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i know arguing with someone like you is a waste of time because you're not ever going to be arguing in good faith, but ...

jordan peterson is directly connected to the rebel, who hosted a crowdfunding campaign for him. he associates with the worst examples of the canadian alt-right, and has intentionally built a profile based on his transphobia which he has monetized.

like when you repeatedly appear getting interviewed by people like prison paul, the leader of the proud boys, you are being quite deliberate about who you want to associate with and why

a quick google confirms he was literally on fox and friends today

Marxism is a very broad social theory that extends far beyond its implementation in Soviet Russia and Mao’s China. Its core assertion is that whoever controls the means of production (the bourgeoisie in Marx’s writings) controls the ‘knowledge’ in society—the set of social norms, values and cultural conventions. This ‘ideology’ thus comes to be regarded as natural by everyone in society, even though it is only true in the sense that it benefits the bourgeoisie at the expense of the proletariat. Marx called this accepted ideology ‘false consciousness’.
Marxism experienced a revival in the social sciences in the 1960s as a theoretical framework for understanding how structures of power shape the social order. This approach to sociology went hand in hand with other emerging theories that questioned and challenged these relations of power (post-modernism, post-colonialism and post-structuralism in particular).
What Jordan Peterson is criticising, is a neo-marxist evaluation of how our society functions. In particular, people who believe that dominant cultural ideas are products of exploitative and oppressive elites. Which, for SJWs, is the white, cis-gendered, patriarchy.

See, the thing is, I'm not actually sure that this is an informed and coherent description of a real intellectual tradition, although, unlike Peterson, I recognize that intellectual history in philosophy and social science is not my area of specialization. (Marxism IS a modern grand narrative, for one thing, while I gather that postmodernism, insofar as I understand it to mean anything, involves some sort of scepticism of grand narratives.) It is more or less what he was saying on Fox and Friends, though, that postmodernism was when Marxism 'turned into' identity politics in the 60s, which seems very, very odd.

I really like the cultural DNA and semiotics discussion and as a non-religious person I find the religious meta-narrative stuff fascinating. I don't know his past but he seems to have gained an audience beyond his students & academia and is pursuing them and catering to them regardless of their belief system/makeup. he's an opportunist. i'm not gonna give him money but the little pop philosophy clips of his lectures on youtube are fun to listen to as someone that's really into semiotics and grand narratives. his postmodern / marxist schtick isn't really any different than what DFW was talking about in Infinite Jest, coping with the loss of God and how we have satisfied that innate religious impulse within all of us through various 'false idols' or dead ends or whatever, whether it's drugs or food or social media or hive mind cliques. I like that he mentions the Gulag Archipelago and Solzhenitsyn in almost every interview he does.

his postmodern / marxist schtick isn't really any different than what DFW was talking about in Infinite Jest, coping with the loss of God and how we have satisfied that innate religious impulse within all of us through various 'false idols' or dead ends or whatever, whether it's drugs or food or social media or hive mind cliques.

I haven't read Infinite Jest but it makes me think more of Obama-era Glenn Beck or a million right-wing conspiracy theorists (see the Rich Higgins memo or a bunch of these, in Canada: Worst National Post Columnist).

Closer to Chomsky than Glenn Beck.

He has a vocabulary, but he's basically a "political correctness sucks, amirite?" troll. Fuck him.

(I try not to make a practice of posting on threads about people I hate/make me mad, but as a Canadian academic, this guy has been an unavoidable nuisance for the last year or so.)

That's where he gets his money, but that's far from all he talks about. To be fair I'm not at all interested in the internecine battles of Canadian academics.

^suggest ban

Perhaps he has a way to tie all this together and I'm just not aware, but yeah, it's really difficult for me to see "marxist post-modernism" as anything but a paradox.

To be fair I'm not at all interested in the internecine battles of Canadian academics.

He is literally talking about using his social media following to go 'as hard as [he] possibly can' after any courses, disciplines, or professors that his computer program judges to be 'postmodern' via a scan of keywords in course descriptions. This isn't about something he said on a tenure review committee.

ftr, Chomsky never tried to prevent students from being exposed to other ideas.

http://www.macleans.ca/opinion/is-jordan-peterson-the-stupid-mans-smart-person/

ha, that's a good one and i loved the distinction between post-modern neo-marxism and cultural marxism.

In the least shocking news ever, Bill Maher is having this asshole on his show next week.

Boring guy nobody pays attention to imo. Maher or Petersen whatever.

Shit, we already had a thread for this fuck?

There’s been months of bullshit about him on the alt-right thread.

Also, fuck this guy,he’s a despicable idiot grifter and a nihilist at heart. I hope his family abandons him and his funeral is a well-oiled procedure conducted by bureaucrats wearing disposable gloves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyw3Nl8LbFg

I’m waiting for the revelation that this guy has just been a Christoph Waltz character all along.

Bill Maher’s endless piping on about how he’s some arbiter of anti pc is laughable. Luckily Maher is so dumb that most guests can just shut him down

oh, come in.. I didn't see you out there... in the dark.

welcome... welcome to Lobster Manor... a respite, or perhaps, a trap? I jape, traveler, I jape...

I think if nothing else you will find the accommodations very... clean.

yes... very clean indeed. pic.twitter.com/FrB3B2Ucq6

— lvl45 CHAOS POTUS who thinks 'the pee won't leak' (@thetomzone) April 22, 2018

should I be surprised that every comment on that video is complaining about the woman on the panel for not shutting up and listening to Jordan Peterson

was trying to figure out who he reminded me of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYAzjJRZ6HA

He’s a little like Kermit the frog vocally.

My buddy tried to show me this clown’s video on the Illuminati and I shut it off in 30 seconds. His lectures are insufferable - somewhat more tolerable on Maher but yeah I couldn’t believe my otherwise intelligent friend likes this fuckhead. Escalated into my friend calling me a dick and my response was “sorry man, can’t go for that “

what about the illuminati though??

Sorry Evan what do you mean? He was talking about the eye of Horus on the bill etc

Just the usual paranoid ravings of a madman

ross otm, i can't even see the appeal w/ this guy at all

"all the lefties are telling you this, that's what the postmodernists do, they are totalitarian! " bla bla bla he is completely unlistenable

he totally bombed on the Overtime segment. they're all talking about Trump impeachment + everything developing now and JP pipes up "but what will happen to the people that like him/identified with him" ...but in many more words & just confused + stumbling. also Alex Wagner owned him with that line "wow you really know a lot about me for having just met me"

I don't know, I thought he brought up a completely reasonable point about the current divide and the inevitable mess with Trump loyalists when their king is deposed. The problem was that he was making a plea for considering MAGA feelings immediately on the heels of arguing that when "solving a problem" it is *necessary* to offend others, and Wagner pounced on that.

this guy set his minions on me a couple weeks ago:

One activist, Sean Michaels @stgramophone, objects to me & the great & callow cowards at @Metropolisbleu dissociate themselves from @MtPressClub event honoring courageous Saudi dissident Raif Badawi (https://t.co/47ANcuIZSq) @BarbaraRKay @DMillardHaskell @benshapiro @joerogan pic.twitter.com/OKbWiflxQX

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) April 11, 2018

let me put it this way: for acolytes of a self-help guru, they are not a very pleasant group of people

ugh this guy just drips self-satisfaction, he's so overly mannered in his poses and countenance, he's just deeply in love with himself. no wonder he appeals to red pill shitheads.

I don't know, I thought he brought up a completely reasonable point about the current divide and the inevitable mess with Trump loyalists when their king is deposed. The problem was that he was making a plea for considering MAGA feelings immediately on the heels of arguing that when "solving a problem" it is *necessary* to offend others, and Wagner pounced on that.

― DACA Flocka Flame (Hadrian VIII), Monday, April 23, 2018 1:38 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Right, the way everyone responded to it (m/l "not talking down to people or telling them they're dumb") was otm, but Peterson was essentially just hemming and hawing trying not to say exactly that, "what about their feelings?" which is especially rich after his whole "right to be offended" thing (which is otm).

He's never going to go away, is he

I mean the way they portrayed him on the show elided all of the worst stuff JP has said. In isolation he came off OK on the show. Would've been nice if they quoted or played clips of what he's actually said about transpeople.

He's never going to go away, is he

I think like a lot of these figures his audience will dwindle to a small amount of true believers (and then continue to shrink) rather soon. He's not canny enough to reinvent himself in order to keep up with the modern attention cycle. Only someone like Trump can do that and he had to become president to do it.

Thought this was a fairly decent yarn

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve

lmao at "daughter based unwellness"

the best part of the first meat madness bout was that the daughter kind of casually dropped that she was still promoting the meat diet but only did it partially, briefly for herself. this was while she was supposedly still feeding her dad all meat!

between that and the sketchy russian benzo detox trip, I am sure they're just using him as a testing ground

lmao at "meat-based daughter"

kind of interesting if you look up CIRS, it's a chronic inflammation thing that's linked to water-damaged buildings, i.e. illness caused by mold

it also is one of the few diagnoses for those symptoms that has am imputed cause -- the symptoms themselves could be indicative of long covid or, hear me out, eating an all red-meat diet

yeah you gotta wonder how many of his symptoms could be attributed to scurvy

Why does his daughter have so much influence over what he eats and what kind of medical care her gets?

jp is basically a mythological/metaphorical figure living among us is how I break it down

power grab when he was initially sick, iirc

(xps) Because, when out of the spotlight, he appears to be a dribbling basket case?

Professor Rational Misogynist Man of Order ends up deeply disordered, enfeebled, and under the demonic control of his religious wackadoo grifter daughter. it was foreordained

in case you're wondering, her instagram is shilling for some guy's "how to purify yourself from toxic mold" grift

think I see what's happening here

Terrifying

dude goes round claiming that being a psychology PHD makes him a doctor; but his jungian shadow knows he really isn't, and expresses that by repeatedly doing things that real doctors would know are batshit and dangerous.

re the idea of SS witches, it prob isn't that far-fetched if the details in "Men who stare at Goats" is also all true (and afaik it was? I mean the fact it existed, not anyone actually killing goats with their mind).

Bedknobs and Broomsticks is the authoritative account of witches fighting nazis.

how's he doing? i thought i read a BSKY post lasy night that the hospital announced he was on the way out but googling around this morning i think i may just have dremt this

would laugh if a hospital was announcing that an asshat patient was about to die

"i'm afraid that patient doesnt suck enough for us to give out this information"

https://ibb.co/93wJCHLC

Intellectual Dark Onlyfans

xp hahahaha

As much info as there is:

https://boingboing.net/2025/10/15/jordan-peterson-critically-ill-with-pneumonia-neuropathy-and-sepsis.html

Nothing a tbone won’t cure

"We don't have a better explanation for his neurological symptoms at the moment other than spiritual attacks," she said in the video.

So much of the history of the right embedded in this sentence.

Mikhaila

oh my god this name is too good. our best novelists couldn't even.

Another odd fact is that her husband's name is Jordan.

no he's just known as Katie Price now

Mikhaila Strakhan, a reference for the Brits there

Whose hubbie may or may not be called Jordan Strakhan

Peterson married Tammy Roberts in 1989,[8] with whom he has a daughter, Mikhaila, who is named after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev

Lol

hey, it could have been Borisa instead

or vladimira

one of the reasons it's so funny to me is because mckayla is such a red state redneck name.

Oh she is much more dangerous than these rural mckaylas.

Canadian Mikhailas are keen perceivers of spiritual attacks