The Jordan Peterson Thread

"Dr. Peterson"

Has he gone? I usually try to assume good faith, but, you know...

Reading that Nathan J. Robinson piece in Current Affairs, I totally get why he's saying this but to my mind it's the kind of (typically sociological) claim that would repel most JP enthusiasts (and potential converts):

I’m skeptical that free will matters very much (if at all), and I recognize that none us chooses either our nature or our nurture and that most of what we are is the inheritance of a billion-year process that we had no say over.

Honestly I don’t like that point of view either.

I don't see this spelled out that often, but I think one of the appeals to peterson in the trump era is that he provides a form of 'intellectual conservatism' for conservabros who are smart enough to know that mainstream trumpy conservatism is indefensible. so it's not just oprah for white bros or a reaction to identity politics, it's also someone filling in that Buckley void.

You can’t be anything you want but there’s a space for freedom with our constraints, and to me that’s the essence of human dignity. In my opinion. I know many others disagree. I don’t think this point of view is the same as saying everyone is “to blame” for how they fare in a profoundly unequal society—that seems like a perverse misuse of the idea of freedom.

Xp

Also, sorry re. off topic tangent

but the ideas

please god won't somebody think of the ideas

try to keep your eye on the ideas, treezy

I was going to say before you brought her up: the contrapoints video on jordan peterson is really good, and much more charitable and thoughtful than ilx on his general place in the world and value.

Contrapoints's newest video (on Ben Shapiro, with some swipes at Peterson) is lovely.

his political agenda included speaking out against the Liberal government in the last Ontario election

Was gonna say. I don't blame non-Canadians for not following but he openly campaigns against parties and leaders. Google "jordan peterson trudeau" or "jordan peterson wynne".

I have a friend who’s infected with JP brain worms and he just doesn’t hear the dog whistles. I think JP is quite good at choosing his words very carefully while also choosing his evidence very carefully to lean hard into the prejudices he inherited long ago growing up in his little Alberta town.

It certainly sounds reasonable to want a rational discussion about freedom, responsibility, authority, and how-should-we-best-live. Did we throw some baby out with the bath water when we overturned centuries of judeo-xtian hegemonic thought & man-in-the-grey-flannel-suit cultural normativity? Worth asking. But the conclusions he comes to are all foregone; he’s not arguing in good faith; when you follow him through his lines of “questioning”, they reveal themselves to be pure sophistry. You can figure out where every one of his will end up by reading the playbook of, like, Sarah Palin — the only difference between them is that he knows how to get there by building a bridge to conclusions instead of just jumping there.

And that’s why I can’t be arsed to engage anymore: it’s the same old shit, just in a more laboriously reasoned-out pile.

it's also someone filling in that Buckley void.

― iatee, Saturday, November 3, 2018 3:24 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

holy shit this is so fucking true

Oh man yes how has that not been pointed out before

Similar intellectual bankruptcy at work

great post HD

I don't see this spelled out that often, but I think one of the appeals to peterson in the trump era is that he provides a form of 'intellectual conservatism' for conservabros who are smart enough to know that mainstream trumpy conservatism is indefensible. so it's not just oprah for white bros or a reaction to identity politics, it's also someone filling in that Buckley void.

I tried to introduce Rothko to one of these people, a fellow teacher, and he responded with "They [my ~10 year-old students] will be able to paint like that pretty soon! I prefer things like the Sistine Chapel," and whirled back around in his chair. Weeks later he told someone else in the office that "Picasso is basically where art ended" and "if someone paints a dot, and calls it art, it's like, no it's not."

That smug, ignorant, knee-jerk classicism - modern art is decadent, easy, phony, etc. - is so consonant with the rest of the shtick.

his main project is not helping people but pushing right wing politics.

And "NO SAFE SPACES" coffee mugs, mousepads, etc.

I'm no WFB fan but comparing this mouth-breathing halfwit to him is a joke

just in a more laboriously reasoned-out pile

you can get something similar from the catholic church if you like, but in a MUCH bigger pile, and reasoned out by much smarter polemicists.

anyone that dismisses Rothko is fucking braindead

I'm no WFB fan but comparing this mouth-breathing halfwit to him is a joke

― k3vin k., Sunday, November 4, 2018 5:22 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's not an exact analogue - JP has the self-help charlatan side that afaik Buckley didn't. I mean, he founded the National Review, but he didn't sell t-shirt and mugs and mousepads like O'Reilly and Limbaugh. but as far as the people simply reading his books, listening to his lectures and interviews, I think there's a lot in common with JP & Buckley's appeal and their intellectual laziness. Buckley never did any of the reading and would almost always go off of cliff notes on Firing Line. he was a fraud hiding behind a steely veneer of intellectual pretension just like JP.

i agree with that

jp gettin dunked on again: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2018/nov/01/pity-jordan-peterson-lobster-analogy-replace-sense-humour?CMP=share_btn_tw

xps

fuck these ppl, standing in front of a Rothko is one of the most beautiful art gallery experiences of a lifetime. I've heard that kind of shit from garbage art tutors before and in the week when Roger Scrotum has been made a chair of the buildings commission in the UK, these fucking 19th c fetishists seem to be getting everywhere.

Buckley was a huge asshole but he also seemed to take an authentic pleasure in debate which is why his show was successful. I don’t think peterson has this quality. You can’t debate him.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/etienne_saint/40FE7AA1-2CF9-4176-A455-830BB761616A_zpsrgiraxym.jpeg

http://theitcrowd.wikia.com/wiki/Yesterday%27s_Jam?file=Denholmn-796555.jpg

Close but that guy has a mondrian painting in his office

Buckley was a huge asshole but he also seemed to take an authentic pleasure in debate which is why his show was successful. I don’t think peterson has this quality. You can’t debate him.

― Trϵϵship, Sunday, November 4, 2018 5:56 PM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think he took pleasure in winning debates. I've watched a fair amount of Firing Line, episodes from throughout its run, and Buckley is never swayed, he's never willing to be convinced otherwise and clearly has an agenda going into almost every interview.

Yeah for sure. But i think there is still a kind of zest for engagement there that makes him different than peterson and his melodramatic fantasies about evil social justice warriors. Not defending buckley, who was a bigot, but it’s an important difference and speakes to the (further) degenerarion of the right.

Liberals often watched firing line. Peterson’s videos are sermons not dialogues.

yeah that is a good point and an important distinction

re: degeneration / devolution

I'm no WFB fan but comparing this mouth-breathing halfwit to him is a joke

― k3vin k., Sunday, November 4, 2018 5:22 PM (fifty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the point wasn't that they're similar people but rather that they serve(d) similar purposes. if you consider yourself a smart person but you still have that deep tribal urge to support the republican football team, how do you do it today? in the bush era the neocon intellectuals still presented something resembling a coherent worldview. (those guys are the notably the only never trumpers left.) bush's republican party still had some academic economists on their side, now we have larry kudlow and nutjobs advocating trade wars.

an academic defense of trump's republican party is basically impossible, so the clever slight of hand is to just avoid the subject and dig down on stuff like political correctness and 'identity politics' - subjects where the left still has some internal debates going on, it's not that hard to find some college student saying something stupid. wfb would probably be on a similar beat because...what else is there? dems pretty much have a monopoly on the whole spectrum of coherent political philosophy.

basically I think that peterson wouldn't be a celebrity today if mitt romney were president.

I think that’s possible. I also think he rode a similar wave as trump—this kind of ambient grievance of many white men that needs an outlet. Peterson is more engaged in cultural politics than politics politics—you don’t hear about his views on the war in yemen.

i think the convergence between self-help and biz-seminar entrepreneurship and web 2.0 tech guruship and deinstitutionalized expertise and low-bar information accessibility and quick-fix lifestyle enhancement and self-radicalizing politics enabled by the internet and other trends - exemplified by the existence of ted talk videos - basically explains this chump as an opportunistic epiphenomenon of his time

^^^I think that's basically it. One metric I personally use for defining a cult-mindset is the need for constant reinforcement. I'm not convinced the contemporary form of right wing politics (as distinguished from the traditional sort) can survive without this reinforcement because it has only a tenuous connection to any actual/empirical experiences you might have. JP--much like someone like Rush Limbaugh or Fox News generally--provides a service for his audience by mitigating against a potentially hostile or ideology-threatening (and banal) reality. You know how sometimes you catch yourself arguing with someone in your head? These people more or less live this way and JP (or Rush, etc.) helpfully externalizes it. It's almost therapeutic.

Well, the demagogues like rush limbaugh and now the US president make life exciting by giving listeners enemies and framing current events as a conflict driven narrative. Peterson is almost like a more refined version of this. He is telling his listeners that they, individually, need to maintain ethical integrity against the hordes of “ideologues” and he even ties it to a jungian idea of the “hero’s journey.” Antisocial right wing paranoia is the therapy he offers and he offers it *as therapy*

This guy is so abundantly full of shit

Jordan Peterson regurgitates Koch brother BS when asked about climate change. He is basically that Republican idiot who stood in Congress with a snowball in his hand as proof global warming doesn't exist, except he's considered a brain-genius by his lobster boy fanbase pic.twitter.com/QoF2qCB54Y

— ☀️👀 (@zei_nabq) November 4, 2018

One metric I personally use for defining a cult-mindset is the need for constant reinforcement. I'm not convinced the contemporary form of right wing politics (as distinguished from the traditional sort) can survive without this reinforcement because it has only a tenuous connection to any actual/empirical experiences you might have.

Wilhelm Reich described this phenomenon in 1933.

Raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta, Dr. Peterson has flown a hammer-head roll in a carbon-fiber stuntplane, piloted a mahogany racing sailboat around Alcatraz Island, explored an Arizona meteorite crater with a group of astronauts, built a Native American Long-House on the upper floor of his Toronto home, and been inducted into a Pacific Kwakwaka’wakw family

lmao

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/223436_action_man_raid_on_island_x_windows_front_cover.png

He really is the Steven Seagal of 'psychology'.

the US presidency isn't a factor in his popularity outside the US, and I suspect he'd do well there regardless as he has elsewhere bc he's hammering at these fault lines. he's had most success destroying journalists who are sufficiently convinced of his dumb-full-of-shitness that they come with lazy questions that betray some woolly thinking which he can unpick. there's more than enough bad thinking on the left for someone to make a career taking it apart.

a lot of his fans are especially impressed by his alleged calmness, which strikes me as odd since he seems to suffer through interviews, always on the verge of erupting in anger or bursting into tears, but I think he's addressing ppl who feel miserable and put upon in similar ways and who empathise with his noble struggle to remain a calm, rational destroyer in the face of self-satisfied lefties trying to score cheap points.

Correct. In Canada, especially, I don't get the sense that his popularity is directly tied to Trump's presidency. If anything, every JP fan I've met tends to strongly dislike the Donald.

Surely this one? xp

http://www.actionmanhq.co.uk/figures/adventurer-1970/action-man-adventurer-1970-1.jpg

Hanging out in the wild, sippin' on a mancan, roaring at normies – the markings of a true neo-Jungian bro.

I spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about how genuinely stupid this guy is

I think he's addressing ppl who feel miserable and put upon in similar ways and who empathise with his noble struggle to remain a calm, rational destroyer in the face of self-satisfied lefties trying to score cheap points.

I do sometimes wonder why so many people feel this way. (Unless there are more ilx lurkers than i thought). It seems like it’s not “the left” they resent as much as it is the elitist attitude of the educated, professional class. For people who feel ill at ease due to their lack of education, political correctness/woke culture can feel like just another sadistic language game, where they weren’t told the rules in advance but nevertheless risk being called a racist or sexist if they slip up. It doesn’t help that most people hear about the left’s changing social mores and standards from fox news, who paint it precisely this way, as a kind of persecution mania targeting people who aren’t caught up that gender is a social construct and racism is about strucural oppression not personal prejudice, etc.

I’m not sure it’s only white people who feel this aversion to woke culture either, although minorities do not have the option to turn right wing because the right in America is now explicitly racist. I’m sure this article made the rounds here.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majorities-dislike-political-correctness/572581/

Three quarters of African Americans oppose political correctness. This means that they are only four percentage points less likely than whites, and only five percentage points less likely than the average, to believe that political correctness is a problem...

While 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness, just 70 percent of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical about it. And while 87 percent who have never attended college think that political correctness has grown to be a problem, only 66 percent of those with a postgraduate degree share that sentiment.