The Jordan Peterson Thread

nah

look, a boy can dream.

he's not going to get hurt by going further to the right

it would be hilarious if he did an abrupt about face and stanned hard for Hillary 2020 or something

Meh. Hardly the smoking gun we'd like it to be, if we go by that snippet.

i wish that video clip said what the description claims it does so i could send it to my jewish peterson fan friend but peterson is more or less saying what some historians have been arguing about the germans for years - that their genocidal antisemitism was misdirected anger from WW1 and their economic conditions.

i think they edited out the bit where he explains that the poor Germans didn't get dragged kicking and screaming into WWI against their will

i think the primary cause of the shoah was virulent german antisemitism going back centuries and embedded in their religion and folk traditions not misdirected anger over WWI. that disclaimer given, my impression is that WW1 was mostly executed by the kaiser and military w/ little civilian oversight so i'm not sure "regular germans are to blame for suffering during ww1 bc they loved it so" totally holds. but "regular germans aren't to blame for the shoah bc they suffered during ww1" if he does indeed say that somewhere is obvious bullshit. victims don't get a pass for victimizing others (and i do agree that a lot of the time "this was why they did it" strays into apologetics - but i'd have to see more from JP to affirm that's what he is doing here and not just repeating CW about the cause of the war).

like don't even socialists make this argument? "populist fascism is appealing when ppl are suffering and so we need to provide a better answer to their suffering than scapegoatism"

sure, i don't really mean the entirety of the German people. but to think about Nazism as a *product* of German defeat in WWI overlooks that history of antisemitism and Prussian imperialism, freely expressed by the Kaiser and the ruling elites before and during WWI. it's just as easy to say that the rise of the Nazis came about because the German people failed to learn the lessons of that war than because they were reacting to the suffering it entailed. it's also important to put it in the context of the European nations' failure to deal with the problems of post-war Germany, so there's more than enough "blame" to go round. but I think JP is at least trying to give Nazism a decontextualized pseudo-evolutionary fight or flight explanation and conveniently ignoring the values in Prussian militarism which have a close relationship to some of the values he praises himself.

i agree 100% but a lot of ppl many of whom are on the left are perfectly satisfied with this "suffering causes bigotry" argument and i'm not prepared to call them all holocaust apologists so where does that leave us with jp

i was trying to respond with some nuance to him, i agree with you and don't think that clip is a Nazi apology but i do think it's shallow and self-serving as per usual

They should put the Victor Klemperer Dairies on the school curriculum to help counter revisionism, he describes incidents of 40's virulent german antisemitism coming from children who weren't even a thought during WW1.

i think the primary cause of the shoah was virulent german antisemitism going back centuries and embedded in their religion and folk traditions not misdirected anger over WWI.

This is really the crux of it but the holocaust is so poorly taught about in Europe that the centuries of bigotry and persecution of Jewish people is not explained as well as it should be. ThAt could go for a lot of political education but it’s particularly shameful for something that’s in living memory for so many people.

Where the leftist argument is, I think, is not that the holocaust happened because of economic anxiety but rather that the people were angry and afraid and that the Nazis drew on centuries of antisemitism to give them a convenient scapegoat. It’s less “suffering causes bigotry” aiui and more “scapegoating and persecuting minorities is bad and has led to genocide so let’s not do it and deal with why people are angry/deflect their anger to somewhere else”.

But re: JP, I am more reluctant to ascribe good intentions in this context because:

- he is a Christian fundamentalist
- he constantly goes on about “cultural Marxism” which is not too far removed from “cultural Bolshevism”
- he’s also a vocal “anti-communist” and ime that kind of thinking goes hand in hand with coded and not so coded antisemitism?
- he’s an outright authoritarian

otm, there are legitimate modulations of his basic argument but it's particularly odious coming from him

also tho lol at his claim that hitler's antisemitism was inspired by positive crowd feedback as tho the dude hadn't written an entire book on the theme long before he was leading those rallies

I can't help but feel this is all a dark prelude to the 12 Rules being enshrined into Canada's constitution

amusing that JP's theory here so closely mirrors Scott Adams' theory as to why Trump so often says racist shit in public, with the caveat being that Adams then spends hours arguing that Trump and his supporters actually aren't racist and just have quaint little concerns about the economy and crime while JP as far as I know is not actually defending Hitler yet

That clip is over a year old, btw, so I doubt that it will be his undoing.

He is such a dimwit.

the best critique of JP is that he's a shallow + superficial thinker

^^^^^
i wish someone would send that fucking memo to the BBC

He wouldn't be as massively successful otherwise.

xp

yeah I've definitely come to think of him less as a smart guy with bad ideas and more as just another dude who's proficiency at public speaking masks the fact that he's basically a giant dumbass

He's good at public speaking is he?

things he is good at

- eating beef

...that's all I got

he's obviously a successful / "good" evangelist, but of course the same could be said of Falwell, Robertson, etc.

Wait, JP is an evang christian?! Arent most of his fans neckbeard athiests?

no, that's one of the crucial differences between him and other "logic masters" or whatever. Christianity isn't what he's pushing, but he does go beyond "I'm a spiritual person" with stuff like "Christ is a meta-hero." it's part of the whole aspirational, motivational speech - also part and parcel with his whole trad "don't throw the baby out of the bathwater" thing

again, the skeleton key to JP is that piece that one of his former colleagues wrote. he wanted to start a church years ago. he's living his dream rn

I don’t think he’s evangelical but he’s def a Christian, I think he kinda plays down the specifics to appeal to a broader demographic. He’s got a super dumb argument that even if you profess to be an atheist you’re not, as long as you have a moral code that generally aligns with Christian teachings.

His philosopht is much dumber than Christianity

Wait, JP is an evang christian?! Arent most of his fans neckbeard athiests?

― Stoop Crone (Trayce), Wednesday, November 28, 2018 2:31 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

some of his fans get upset about his christianity but most of the non-christian ones seem to get by it easily enough and it helps of course that he doesn't foreground it.

some people who are very peterson-adjacent are put off by his christianity, which is funny because being christian is the most innocuous thing about the man

I should clarify, he operates as an evangelist, not an evangelical christian, if that makes sense. his talks/events are sermons, and obviously informed by actual religious sermons

i thought that he was just into christianity for the archetypes

I think that's the only stuff he talks about at length but he's definitely a practicing Christian

that's too bad. christians have enough bad PR.

Yes, Stuart Murdoch's one too.

75% of americans identify as christian

Neither Jordan or Stuart have that excuse.

zing.

i feel like christianity is such a broad net that you can't draw inferences about what someone is like based on the fact that they are christian. like, my parents have nothing to do with peterson's lobster morality and i don't think murdoch does either.

I know, I was just poking fun at ILM's patron saint.

ah

when I found out ILM's origin story was based around that insipid tapioca cunt - I dug out my CB radio and never touched the internet again.

ILX tries to act hard but it’s actually much more twee than I am

The softest place on the net

Vox Day (Theodore Beale) is so mad that Jordan Peterson outshone him that he wrote a whole book about it.

Milo, who is also mad he's irrelevant now, wrote the foreword. pic.twitter.com/UutWcQ89uH

— Jared Holt (@jaredlholt) November 29, 2018

Lol @ "I'm a smart person. Really smart, actually."

Taken straight from the 'very stable genius' playbook.

Ha, is this the very expensive education he was referring to?:

Yiannopoulos was educated at Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury from which he has said he was expelled.[22] He attended the University of Manchester but dropped out before graduating; he then read English at Wolfson College, Cambridge, but was sent down[1]