The Jordan Peterson Thread

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

whoever it was that said "oh, we need to *educate* these people" should read one of the many many NYT articles about how Trump voters still love Trump, despite the fact that he's done fuck all to help them

feel like this guy is just the latest version of Camille Paglia or Richard Dawkins or any number of other "controversial" academic media-figures that manages to push people's buttons. Eventually the luster/novelty fades and no one gives a shit anymore.

All these charlatans just stay in their circle. But the idea that he is 'the most influential intellectual' or whatever seems to have come and gone. At the end he has written a popular self-help book.

just another daddy figure who will disappoint in the end, i figure

Alas, the odds that Kanye gives him another signal boost in the next little bit are pretty solid

Listened to one of his interviews with Joe Rogan a few weeks ago. I like the self-help jibberjabber, but every five minutes it would be punctuated by "...and these postmodern neomarxists on the left want eqwolity of oatcome!" What might be a good self-help author who doesn't have issues?

And can someone explain the postmodernism thing to me? I don't know anything about postmodernist philosophy, but the art has always seemed very nice.

You want book recommendations, or you want an explanation of the whole 'postmodern marxism ruined western civilization' spiel?

re: self-help, I hear good things about David Smail's stuff.

Fred, book reccos for the self-help stuff. I'm hoping for just a precis on the postmodern boogieman.

the best 'postmodernism' is so amazing and ethical, i just don't get the kneejerk response.

any critique of power is so suggestive about all sorts of new possibilities, why are people so fucking scared of that? people suck

how's life if you want conservative up-its-own-ass self-help without so many explicit problems and a bit more openness from a poet's perspective check out 'iron john'.

really though everyone needs to read bell hooks

I've just always taken the 'postmodern marxism' thing to be like this: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/78mnny/unwrapping-the-conspiracy-theory-that-drives-the-alt-right Though less tainted by literal nazis.

For real postmodernism, I'd say read Lyotard. Short and good. The Postmodern Condition is the classic, that defines the problem as the lack of grand narratives. The Differend is even better, dealing with truth and politics, and Just Gaming is an attempt at defining a new ethics without narratives, based on gaming. 'Just Gaming' Get it?

i'd go with deleuze & guattari, derrida and foucault. there's more juice in a single paragraph written by any of them than anything this peterson shithead could possibly conceive of. i've only read a little but roland barthes is fun. alain badiou for something more contemporary. why are all these jordan peterson types scared so shitless of feminism? at it's best it's some of the most rigorous, bracing truth anyone can read!

i think science and technology studies has a lot of force to push back against the "science is god" people like maher. i.e. bruno latour, "we have never been modern," which is a pretty great title imo

We Have Never Been Modern is a 1991 book by Bruno Latour, originally published in French as Nous n'avons jamais été modernes : Essai d'anthropologie symétrique (English translation: 1993).[1]

The book is an "anthropology of science" that explores the dualistic distinction modernity makes between nature and society. Pre-modern peoples, argues Latour, made no such division. Contemporary matters of public concern such as global warming, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and emerging biotechnologies mix politics, science, popular and specialist discourse to such a degree that a tidy nature/culture dualism is no longer possible. This inconsistency has given rise to post-modern and anti-modern movements. Latour attempts to reconnect the social and natural worlds by arguing that the modernist distinction between nature and culture never existed. He claims we must rework our thinking to conceive of a "Parliament of Things" wherein natural phenomena, social phenomena and the discourse about them are not seen as separate objects to be studied by specialists, but as hybrids made and scrutinized by the public interaction of people, things and concepts.[2][3]

also: david harvey (geography background), who is very readable on space and capital

Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos is a fun one.

STS should be taught in high school

i uh waht

https://i.imgur.com/qCDdu4E.jpg

https://www.etsy.com/search?q=jordan%20peterson

i thought i'd found the worst manifestation of peterson fandom but you effortlessly beat it, kudos

Everyone hustling trying to make those JP bucks.

i don't know he seems more milo than dawkins. the alt-right stole a lot from the left, but the thing i'm most gratified about is their tendency to eat their own.

there is a very weird and very present vaporwave/alt-right crossover

there's also a strange convergence between the "incel" running down people in toronto and this thread

Shocking, utterly.

i mentioned the ATD mixtapes on the vaporwave thread a few weeks ago.
guess he is trying to pick up some traction give that he ditched the whole uk hip hop thing a few years ago when it was an obvious dead end for him.
other than the fact JP is really not my thing, the main problem is that JPs voice just aint right for vocal cut-up/mixtape action.

Man does this dude dish out well worn platitudes. He gets paid millions to coach on self help banalities like “control what you can control” - well duh. Only thing he says I think is helpful is how people need to find their own passion to feel connected, otherwise you may just feel empty working 9-5. But that’s obvious too

LOBSTERVATION COFFEE MUG

so did jordan peterson actually make that movie "the lobster"? i can't figure out what's going on anymore

this dude's so obsessed with helping the fringe lunatics see the light that it begs the question - who hurt U?

clearly his wallets not hurting with 36 thousand in donations a month

when i think lobsters i think Deleuze and Guattari so this whole thing would be tremendously confusing if i ever read anything about JorPee

my wife posted an old picture of me wearing a stupid novelty lobster hat on facebook yesterday and all i could think was 'shit i hope no-one thinks i'm a jordan peterson stan'

he has ruined lobsters for at least a generation imo

nah he's still a pond shrimp

God is a lobster or a double-claw, a double bind. It is not only the strata which pair up into twos at the very least, but in another fashion each strata is double (it will itself have many levels). Each strata presents, in effect, phenomena constitutive of a double articulation.

interesting piece by Wesley Yang: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a19834137/jordan-peterson-interview/

Yang's level of credulity toward JP is a bit troubling but I think he sort of successfully shows why someone who didn't know how to begin calling JP on his bullshit might find his message compelling

Perry Anderson to thread re: "postmodern Marxism"

'A bit troubling'? Lol

yang: "Increasingly one hears that the problem menacing the world today is not the excesses of masculinity, but masculinity itself. That masculinity itself must—and can—be eradicated."

who says this

all the bad people on ilx who must be trolled

got ya postmodern irony RIGHT HERE

Christ almighty at that interview, lol:

I noted that while we still read the canonical thinkers who presumed to address the big questions, nobody attempted to write in such a mode anymore. “People told me that the time for the great theories in psychology is over,” he said. “I said, ‘It might be over for you, but it’s not over for me.’ ”

Peterson made plain that he was speaking out against the enforced adoption of an unscientific political terminology, and not to denigrate the transgendered. Yet it was easy to call it an act of hate and harassment directed at a vulnerable minority, and many did.

Yes, seeing as there was no 'enforced adoption', it was quite easy to call it something else.

the police literally forced him to recognize somebody else's preferred mode of address rather than the absolutely correct scientific terminology handed down at the creation of time

language isn't science except when it is science when all of a sudden it's an absolutely transparent reference to unshakeable prelinguistic taxonomy