The Jordan Peterson Thread

I did try.to figure out just what he liked about JBP, but it seemed to be pretty surface level stuff?

Oh shit, really? What did she say? I thought she was the one that wasn’t a comedian.

Sometimes I have opinions without having all the facts

yeahhh amber is legit the 'worst' chapo, her petty shit-talking led to major intra-org problems with the DSA's Disability Working Group as she has consistently worked to undermine people from the DWG who had legitimate concerns with the DSA's focus as 'wreckers' who are all mentally ill.

yeah admittedly that whole thing was a mess on all sides but hoo boy did she not handle that well, I'm glad she's no longer a major organizer

Ideological purity will be the death of us all.

I've never listened to Chapo nor care to, really, but if they've made amends, that's a commendable gesture in and of itself. Likewise, dissecting JP's core audience in order to figure out what makes him so magnetic does not mean you're giving brodudes a free pass (reminds me of then-French PM Manuel Valls belittling sociologists after the Paris attacks: 'to explain is to justify'.)

it would be generous to say they've made amends, but they've definitely discarded the most cringeworthy of their edgelord tendencies (except for the drug references)

It does suggest that the anti-intellectualism that exists on the right is related to some kind of sour grapes, that they really want and feel they should have more scholarly respect and credence than they do.

Yeah, it's the same thing with being anti-Hollywood. Whenever a "celebrity" is on their team, they fawn over him/her.

the chapo guys & their "listen to cumtown, it's really good!" brethren are considerably more malevolent as they think their Marxist bona fides mean they get a pass for using "autistic" as a punchline, and people are happy to explain to you why they deserve a pass because they have generally good politics. may they reflect with horror on their generally good politics be a comfort to them when they realize one morning what fucking beasts they've been to people whose daily lives contain more struggle & dignity than any one of them would be capable of contemplating.

― she carries a torch. two torches, actually (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Monday, November 5, 2018 8:08 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's also just so tiresome, there's this need to engage in cruelty to show how you'll "go there" and it's a badge of fearlessness or something like that. Like Vice Magazine back in the early days (now their badge of honor is to travel to "dangerous places".) Anyway the people who bear the brunt of cruelty w/Vice and w/this kind of thing are always the same people who have always borne the brunt.

Which suggests they have a kind of inferiority complex with regard to like, prestige cultural institutions. They resent this stuff but they crave validation from these same sources.

Xp granny

this need to engage in cruelty to show how you'll "go there" and it's a badge of fearlessness or something like that.

^^^otm

ppl who are obsessed with transgression are idiots

like, that think it's an end in and of itself, that wherever there's a line, there is an inherent virtue in crossing it

no disagreement here

Yeah i agree a million percent with that

Chapo never do this, you’re thinking of someone else

vs

Unfortunately I don’t have time to explain your error in conflating (the chapo hosts who do this with the ones who don’t, I guess? But we’ll never know what the arg here was gonna be oh well)

vs

I kinda feel like they do this less now than they used to

I'm not saying the Chapo guys are a prime example of that - I don't pay close enough attention to know, tbh - but there is this streak of that kind of thinking in libertarians, standup comics, JP fans, VICE, etc.

xp

Transgression for transgression's sake has been staid for a long time now.

wins, I'd forgotten about much of the stuff in the piece JCLC linked because it was from a couple of years back. it's public record and no one can say they're not the people who said awful things online. but if there's much problematic content in the last, say, 100 eps, I have missed it, and I've dropped other shows over that timespan for crossing lines

For the most part that attitude is on the alt right. Apart from chapo i don’t really see it much on the left.

Re pom xp

For the most part that attitude is on the alt right. Apart from chapo i don’t really see it much on the left.

― Trϵϵship, Monday, November 5, 2018 9:27 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really?

young lefties in britain on twitter who are maybe jeremy corbyn fans (and therefore supporting a fairly moderate social democrat) are all very into irony stalinism and guillotining the rich type jokes

Yeah but the rich deserve it

There's definitely a "lib triggering" itch among the very online left, but it tends to take the form of trying to make them seem politically milquetoast by sharing, idk, deliberately inflammatory cop-hating memes or whatever, as opposed to revanchist discriminatory garbage meant to inflict actual harm on marginalized communities

or yeah what jim said

to put it another way, #bothsides make memes and jokes about political violence but only one side actually acts on it

Jordan Peterson, delirious from his all-beef diet, pens a bizarre screed about a French journalist who asked him some pointed questions and whom he later dreamed about beating up. Just incredible stuff here. https://t.co/hXPrTbz4hF

— ishmael n. daro (@iD4RO) November 7, 2018

He's tearing down the masculine taboo against discussing your dreams.

Kidding aside, he does claim to be a Jungian, so this is par for the course.

It's 2:39 a.m. in Oslo and I've been attempting to have a bowel movement for the past 90 minutes

Have you tried eating more fibre?

Whenever I read Peterson I can't quite process the fact that he's a real person, not an unsympathetic character in someone else's novel. I mean, I'm 99% sure he is real, but there is always that nagging doubt that he will turn out to be an Ali G style joke.

One of the unchillest guys

Is this guy seriously popular these days or something. I wound up watching several minutes of a video that archive.org have of him talking about Carl Rogers last night before thinking it might not be the best thing I could be doing with my time.
Was just looking for stuff on Rogers then realised it was him this video was by.

On the subway yesterday evening I had the opportunity to observe up close and at length two early-20s screwfaced scrawny white dudes holding the same pole but completely not talking to or even looking at each other so I only deduced they were together because they were wearing similar all-black outfits (including black denim henley shirts) and, tellingly, holding their shoulders back in what looked like a careful Petersonian effort.

There was a tallowy odor on the train as well but that could have come from anywhere.

he is seriously popular, yes. his book is still at #3 on the Amazon charts. xp

Lot of assumptions about those guys mick

If peterson is encouraging people to let go of entrenched self loathing and “stand up straight” that is positive. The problem, for me, is that he is telling people that it is “the left” and feminism that made them hate themselves in the first place. Which is extremely destructive.

sometimes maybe there are aspects of the self that should be loathed

He's got a colouring book dedicated to him, how lovely
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jordan-Peterson-Adult-Coloring-Book/dp/1985721740/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1541685848&sr=1-11&keywords=jordan+peterson

Two of my cousins in India, in their early 20s, were telling me about how they had a Jordan Peterson phase. Dude is global, it seems.

The NP piece actually made me genuinely worry about him for a moment.

Didn’t that article by his former mentor hint that he had pretty grandiose tendencies and fame probably wouldn’t be good for him?

A little more than hint iirc

Yeah i water down a lot of what i write with qualifiers. Got 2 stand up

given the extent to which he's warped the minds of countless young men I can't being myself to do anything but hope he meets a painful and embarrassing fate as a result of his dumbass life choices -- it might be the only thing that successfully ends his cult of personality (and even then not entirely)

Been thinking more & more about the extent to which the Public Square nowadays is comprised of brilliant people trying to get folks to accept obvious answers to fairly simple political Qs. Meanwhile the heavy Qs - "What does it mean to live a good life?" - are left to charlatans.

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) November 12, 2018

http://bostonreview.net/politics/wajahat-ali-pankaj-mishra-empires-racketeers

PM: I think the fact that we have to ask this question shows how serious the problem has become. Many people we think of as intellectuals—our “thought leaders”—are basically global professionals, adept movers in the networks of Oxbridge, the Ivy League, the London School of Economics, think tanks, Davos, and Aspen. The result, as we see more clearly after Trump, has been a stultifying sameness in the public intellectual sphere: loud echo chambers in which you have a whole class of writers and journalists saying the same things over and over again. This is why our political crisis today is, first and foremost, a global intellectual crisis—the result of a feckless homogenization of thought.

We have had these academic superstars who went on about knowledge and power but were themselves busy climbing social ladders. Even writers and intellectuals with a great deal of integrity and courage have become too professionalized, too career-oriented, and too concerned not to upset their peers—not to mention those they regard as their more famous and successful superiors. This professional docility has allowed figures such as Ferguson to flourish, and that is why criticism drives them to hysteria today.

There is hope, though. It is true that Trump has opened up space for all kinds of intellectual racketeers, who pose as members of an intellectual Maquis while trying to save or advance their professional careers. These dead-end centrists—most of whom moonlighted as laptop bombers during the Iraq War and often advised the Clintons, Blair, Bush, and Obama—still dominate many high-circulation periodicals. They present a huge but neglected problem. You can get rid of incompetent or venal rulers through the democratic process, but there is nothing you can do with the deadweight at the highest editorial levels of mainstream media. These figures who were wrong or clueless about every major domestic and foreign policy issue—from Russia in the 1990s to Iraq and the financial crisis—remain entrenched, starving the public of much-needed fresh ideas and compounding the political calamity of elite centrism with a massive intellectual and moral failure.

But in response, the intellectual culture of the left is flourishing once again after many barren decades—often outside its usual setting of academia, in small magazines and webzines, including these very pages. Many academics—a few names attest to their range: Amia Srinivasan, Adam Tooze, Kate Manne, Samuel Moyn, Aziz Rana, Nancy Maclean, Quinn Slobodian, Jennifer Pitts, Corey Robin—have stepped into the fray with complex yet accessible analyses of the impasse we inhabit today. Bold charlatans such as Jordan Peterson will no doubt induce awe at the Atlantic, and Enlightenment-mongers such as Steven Pinker will continue to impress many rich dullards, but they will also be taken to the cleaners by historians and anthropologists.

Hopefully this will be the fucker's undoing

Jordan Peterson argues Hitler and the Nazis were doing what was only normal and logical "given the circumstances", thus exculpating them

that's textbook Nazi apologiapic.twitter.com/Ul8nYMze3B

— ☀️👀 (@zei_nabq) November 28, 2018