The Jordan Peterson Thread

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

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