The Jordan Peterson Thread

Yeah I got here and was like

Back in 2018, Jordan Peterson was something of a filter for freethinkers, those who were prepared to question the media narrative. This is no longer the case.

bingo. this "he used to be a man of IDEAS, now hes this cartoon" story, like the only reason he became a cause celebre in the first place was bc he could launder blatant transphobia using his credentials as a psychologist.

Yea, acting as if he's only become evil recently = lol. He's added level-ups to his terribleness attributes but he always had them

If you go out of your way to label yourself a free-thinker, generally you aren't. Your thoughts would speak for themselves if you were.

Didn’t this guys rise to fame come because he was whining about how misgendering someone would get you thrown in prison

He’s like the Dilbert guy, he’s gotten steadily crazier but idk if there was ever a time where they weren’t utter pieces of garbage

My first impression of him was that he was doing a Thinking Man's Pick Up Artist routine because it was about incels and 'clean up your room' (so you can get laid) so pretty sure he was garbage from birth.

xp That was the extreme mischaracterization of law/guidance that he went with, and instead of people realizing he was making shit up, he got a boost of weirdos following him so he leaned hard into… whatever reactionary bullshit would continue to draw attention

wish George Soros would pay him to stop tweeting

continue to draw attention

As George Carlin said, "That's the name of the job, you know? It's called DIG ME!"

just so hilarious

3/ In fact, wanting to nominate a woman while denying women exist "violates the principle of noncontradiction" proving that we have become logically and societally degenerate. pic.twitter.com/drta78bFHV

— bad_stats (@thebadstats) July 11, 2022

the intellectual center-right is concerned

Watch the videos in this thread. They combine remarkable ignorance with gravely deficient moral reasoning—all delivered with a veneer of faux sophistication. It’s sad to see. https://t.co/up1IcNoYyc

— David French (@DavidAFrench) July 11, 2022

so I guess this is how you do “God is Punishing (region or city) Because of Sin” in the post New Atheist/ Reddit era

They had to destroy the village before the pronouns got to it.

the intellectual center-right is concerned

sure, the same way they were "concerned" about trump and voted for him anyway. i get why people like jordan peterson, but why anybody gives a shit about the hand-wringing brigade is beyond me.

Multiple xposts to the convo upthread about how young men need JPB because there aren't other positive masculine figures giving them fatherly advice: I keep saying the world would be a better place if Andrew W.K. got even 1% of Jordan P's audience

"Clean your room"
vs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO35c9_6uM0

I know which helped me more!!

i get why people like jordan peterson, but why anybody gives a shit about the hand-wringing brigade is beyond me.

Literally nobody does, is the thing. They are "concerned" about lots of things and entirely ineffectual about all of them. I only posted French's tweet because I thought "remarkable ignorance with gravely deficient moral reasoning—all delivered with a veneer of faux sophistication" was a pretty good summation of Peterson. But it works almost as well for French et al.

"Remember the Holomodor? Do you even know what it was?"

Amazing

still mad that Andrew WK's ambassadorship was pulled because his music was too hardcore

Anyway gyac otm since at least 2018.

Just for posterity, want to make clear that, in spite of my slightly challopsy posts, I am not one of those "disillusioned former acolytes" - have never owned or read a Jordan Peterson book and am on record clowning him upthread as early as 2018.

yeah ftr I don’t buy this whole “heel turn” narrative that the substack guy is selling. but I did figure there must have been something there that appealed to people (however shitty in their own right) who weren’t angry online gamergate incel types. JP’s whole steez is so repellant and he was so obviously on the grift (partic by the time he made it into my consciousness) that I’d never really bothered to look into it.

Multiple xposts to the convo upthread about how young men need JPB because there aren't other positive masculine figures giving them fatherly advice

The guys from Jackass should be getting all that masculine role model money

Henry Rollins has really been leaving money on the table the last few years.

Sometimes I randomly get suggested short Jordan Peterson videos on youtube, and a fair number of them are completely innocuous seeming if you don't know who he is, like motivational cliches about becoming a better version of yourself, admittedly delivered with enough panache that they feel slightly fresh, or videos about how you should enjoy the few years when your kids are very young. I can totally see how someone could get sucked in by that stuff without starting from some kind of reactionary anti-trans position or something.

I feel like if you could diagram Peterson's whole thing it would be a triangle, with one corner being innocuous motivational/life advice kind of stuff, one corner being nonsensical babble about theology and mythology, and one corner being his bog standard reactionary views about gender, politics of "personal responsibility," anti-socialism, etc.

although tbf, while some of the life advice stuff is wholly innocuous, some of it funnels into the reactionary politics as well.

"Remember the Holomodor? Do you even know what it was?"

Amazing

― jmm

oh cool he's read my fanfiction where the crew of the enterprise travel with frodo in middle-earth in the holodeck

it's spelled "holomordor", though

Peterson literally called it the "holomodor," that's what the reference is

you got me, JP, I have no idea what that is

As I understand it, a mass famine in Ukraine during the Stalin era that some people believe was engineered by Stalin. FWIW, holocaust deniers love to bring it up as a "whatabout," and sometimes also suggest that it was caused by The Jews.

No, that's the holodomor

JP was talking about the holomordor

I also just don't get what he thinks he is doing rhetorically with it -- "You don't really care about the Ukrainians being attacked by Russia, because if you did, you would know more about another bad thing that happened to Ukrainians 90 years ago that was...also caused by Russia"?

"If you really care so much about 9/11, then why don't you remember Pearl Harbor?"

yeah it's absolutely nonsense

his bringing it up as a gotcha, that is

holodomor was definitely not nonsense and very serious

It's just so funny how he can't even give these shitty arguments without mangling them

nowadays the key to being seen as a truth-teller = respond "are you tRiGgErEd?" after every criticism

Do you even Holomodor, bro?

i got an fb ad for this guy out of the blue (fb is the worst for showing you right wing loony ads) and i've been noticing this thread being revived for a few weeks now. idly wondering if and why he's spending a lot of money on ads lately - is there some new book coming out or something?

he has a new show on Ben Shapiro's network

I got an ad for some kind of class he's doing, like a right-wing Werner Herzog Masterclass site.

jp is unworthy of being forced to eat his shoe on camera tbh

It would be a good exercise for him to push a boat overland between the Don and Humber Rivers.

he has a new show on Ben Shapiro's network

I got a Facebook ad for the Daily Wire a little while ago promising me that if I subscribed I could watch a video of Shapiro and Peterson in conversation. I lol'd at the idea that this something someone would pay for.

the all shoe leather diet is surely his next step

yeah ftr I don’t buy this whole “heel turn” narrative that the substack guy is selling. but I did figure there must have been _something_ there that appealed to people (however shitty in their own right) who weren’t angry online gamergate incel types. JP’s whole steez is so repellant and he was so obviously on the grift (partic by the time he made it into my consciousness) that I’d never really bothered to look into it.

at least youse came out of the darkness, kudos

James Hillman is good for all your post-Jungian needs

I have enjoyed Michael Meade's "Living Myth" podcast, though it does require a higher-than-average tolerance for earnest hippie speak.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar goes after Peterson in his email newsletter this week.

Jordan B. Peterson is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. He has announced his bold decision to publicly martyr himself—like all good cult leaders—by choosing death over retracting a recent tweet that got him suspended by Twitter. “The suspension will not be lifted unless I delete the hateful tweet in question,” he announced. “And I would rather die than do that.” Death wasn’t one of the options in Twitters’ terms of service agreement, but Peterson is nothing if not self-importantly melodramatic. He sees himself as a cultural lightning rod absorbing the charged bolts of wokism that is setting ablaze traditional values. In reality, he’s just an embittered crank.

...

Here’s the surprise I promised: I agree with Peterson. Not about what he wrote, which is offensive, ill-informed, and childish—akin to scribbling obscenities on the bathroom stall in middle school—but we must draw a clear line between hate speech and hateful speech. Hate speech promotes violence and biased actions against groups. Hateful speech spews irrational anger that is hurtful. Granted that line can get fuzzy because hateful can quickly become hate, but it’s important that we are vigilant in making that distinction so as not to quash free speech. His comments were more buffoonish than hate and he should have the right to be a buffoon.

...

Much of Peterson’s fame and infamy is the result of YouTube debates he does with other YouTubers, mostly with people that agree with him. On those occasions when he debates people who don’t agree with him, his tactic is similar to Ben Shapiro’s: name-drop famous writers and thinkers, keep changing the subject so he never has to fully defend his position, throw out irrelevant facts and studies so he sounds smart. You would be hard-pressed to know what Peterson’s thesis is during a debate.

In his debate with secularist Matt Dillahunty, Peterson kept straying from the question at hand so much that Dillahunty’s frustration as he kept trying to bring him back to the point was evident. Peterson knew he couldn’t logically win so he just talked about whatever popped into his mind.

I don’t care for debates—whether on YouTube or presidential. They are designed purely for entertainment value and to get more subscribers who already agree with them, not to clarify complex issues. Someone mentions a fact or statistic but there’s no time to look it up to see if it’s a legit study or fact. So the process has the veneer of reason when it’s mostly emotion.

I have seen some debates in which Peterson was so outmatched that I was embarrassed for him, especially those with Dillahunty and neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris. He would ramble pointlessly only to have his fans comment how he “destroyed” the opponent, which is a testament to the inability of his followers to distinguish logic. They think because they can’t understand what he’s saying, he must be really smart. The reason they can’t understand him is because there are so many logical fallacies he uses: slippery slope, false dilemma, name-calling, poisoning the well, and so forth that they should be used in critical thinking classes as examples of what not to do. That’s why one columnist referred to him as “the stupid man’s smart person.”

The whole thing is worth reading.

this was before he busted out with the TERC stuff, the C standing for Conservative

This always confuses me because in Canada his public fame only occurred *as a result* of his transphobia, but tbf I don't expect non-Canadians to be aware of Canadian politics. And of course it's possible even in Canada that people were into him before his Bill C-16 lies went viral (though his podcast began a couple months after he released his videos about the bill & "political correctness").

I'm not trying to bust anyone here; I had to double check the timeline myself. But I'm wary of revisionist narratives like the link posted upthread (not your story hardcore) becoming accepted, because there was never a non-professional-transphobe JP in my version of reality. Plus the 'cultural marxism' bullshit gyac mentioned was also there from the start: his incompetent lying about the history of philosophy should have been discrediting from the beginning, never mind his political affiliations.

I feel like this must have been noted itt before, but TIL Peterson's middle name is Bernt