The Jordan Peterson Thread

is that aled jones??

slam a phobe (with an egg)

Predictably, nothing happened:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/20/jordan-peterson-slavoj-zizek-happiness-capitalism-marxism

the quintessential quillette article:

https://quillette.com/2019/07/26/why-isnt-jordan-peterson-on-this-list-of-the-worlds-top-fifty-intellectuals/

(Russell) Brand’s continuing influence on the political culture in England, at least, is often underestimated.

lol counterpoint, it isn't.

Who wrote that fuckin headline?

probably the manbaby piece of shit who wrote the article.

David Goodhart, and his successor as editor Bronwen Maddox (2010-2016), described Prospect as “contrarian,” or “a magazine which gives voice to the argumentative centre ground.” But, in truth, Prospect was, until 2016, the voice of the London-based liberal Establishment.

a shocking revelation

this is solid

Andrew Scott
July 26, 2019

How does one measure others’ “intellectualism” in any way? Why would anyone take such a list seriously? How could such a list be anything other than a self-serving popularity contest? How arrogant to consider oneself qualified to identify, evaluate, and rank great intellects and top thinkers.

It’s like a GQ article about what real men do. Real men don’t read that crap.

Reply

Martin28
July 26, 2019
To not include Jordan Peterson is a sin. To ignore Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a crime.

according to Trump's new executive order

The interviewer and stand-up comic Joe Rogan (for example) reaches over 5.8 million subscribers on his YouTube channel. Discussions on The Joe Rogan Experience frequently range around complex issues in current affairs and philosophy. Why has Rogan been left off Prospect’s list?

indeed, why?

https://nypost.com/2019/09/20/jordan-peterson-enters-rehab-after-wifes-cancer-diagnosis/

I want to see Peterson as a Soundcloud rapper photoshops

Can't bring myself to feel any glee over this

The constant crying makes more sense in the context of him being addicted to clonazepam.

lol

tried to make me eat some fibre, I said no no no

His daughter replaced opioid constipation with 36oz of red meat a day constipation, that's rough.

there should be a strip about him in viz

Can't bring myself to feel any glee over this

Same. He has yet to reach the DJT tier of schadenfreude.

my god can you imagine being stuck in rehab and fucking Peterson shows up at group

I’m amazed that anybody could be as strongly opinionated as JP while regularly dosing with klonopin, unless something else is going on beyond anxiety.

I'm never amazed at how much cognitive dissonance anybody's capable of tbh

OK maybe sometimes a little amazed

having been a clonazepam addict i cannot gloat over anybody else having to go through that. i wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. in peterson's case, that's not necessarily a theoretical statement.

I had already forgotten about this man's existence.

I was gonna say he really fell off the radar (predictably) but I guess his wife's illness had something to do with that.

Yucking it up at his addiction seems low for this forum. I'm aware of JP from Maps of Meaning and his appearances on Joe Rogan. He didn't come off to me then as the alt-right hero that it appears he is now. Perhaps fame fueled his vanity and provocateur instincts. I'm no apologist but this thread hammers his boiled salt beef, no xir broad points and misses his scholarship on mythology and history. I had The Gulag Archipelago on my bookshelf for years. JP encouraged me to read it. Is there no merit to JP?

OK maybe sometimes a little amazed

Is there no merit to JP?

― Yelploaf

nope, thanks for asking

misses his scholarship on mythology and history

xxp - I'm not gonna die on this hill but when you say there is no merit to JP, what is the scope of your assessment? Is it his regressive fanbase that he doesn't distance himself from that is the deal-breaker, his contemptible dandy persona, his hucksterish self-improvement philosopy/business, his deep understanding and synthesis of niche academia? Just curious.

It is my understanding based on reviews of/essays on his work that his "scholarship on mythology and history" is largely half-baked, surface-level bullshit. So basically, if he was forced to stand or fall based on his academic work no one would ever have heard of him, and it's only his career as a chud whisperer that's of any interest at all. It's good that he inspired you to read a book, but that should not be taken as a sign that his own work has any value.

I'm no apologist but this thread hammers his boiled salt beef, no xir broad points and misses his scholarship on mythology and history.

having dipped into maps of meaning (sensing a fellow mesopotamian mythology obsessive) it's precisely this stuff that scares me about him, tbh more so than tilting against pronouns. he probably doesn't think of himself this way or even consider his historical/mythological/philosophical stuff "political" but in the future where we come out the other side of this transitional period having installed full functioning fascism, everything jordan peterson feels about life and the universe, from the bottom up, stands ready to confer legitimacy upon it and finally make him the court intellectual he'd like to be. he has a corporatist vision of history in which strife and conflict are varieties of moral illness inhibiting the harmonious function of the different organs he thinks it's chaos-dragon talk to call classes. he somehow takes from the metamorphic psychedelia of ancient mythology reassurance about the clarity and immutability of gender categories. he grows more strident and categorical at the same rate that he grows more mushily mystical. this last one is a particularly red flag imo and there are books you could read about the things he talks about that aren't trying to sell you on rightwing mythopoetics while either pretending not to or not realizing it.

also everything about his personal presence suggests to me a bottomless and barely restrained hunger for something tbh. he is the classic type that you read about decades later like "before the regime came to power, he struggled with depression and despite his success often seemed adrift, but"

counterpoint tho: of the party guests in "who goes nazi?", maybe there is a little of him in this one

Mr. G is a very intellectual young man who was an infant prodigy. He has been concerned with general ideas since the age of ten and has one of those minds that can scintillatingly rationalize everything. I have known him for ten years and in that time have heard him enthusiastically explain Marx, social credit, technocracy, Keynesian economics, Chestertonian distributism, and everything else one can imagine. Mr. G will never be a Nazi, because he will never be anything. His brain operates quite apart from the rest of his apparatus. He will certainly be able, however, fully to explain and apologize for Nazism if it ever comes along. But Mr. G is always a “deviationist.” When he played with communism he was a Trotskyist; when he talked of Keynes it was to suggest improvement; Chesterton’s economic ideas were all right but he was too bound to Catholic philosophy. So we may be sure that Mr. G would be a Nazi with purse-lipped qualifications. He would certainly be purged.

don't think so tho.

he grows more strident and categorical at the same rate that he grows more mushily mystical. this last one is a particularly red flag imo and there are books you could read about the things he talks about that aren't trying to sell you on rightwing mythopoetics while either pretending not to or not realizing it.

yes
he peddles garbage ideas from ancient times as well as today. if we are trying to identify the problem, his followers are definitely part of the problem for me, personally, but if forced to identify a thing HE specifically is doing i think this comes close

on the other hand i really do need to clean my room today

It's mostly that dudes who chat on about how great traditional gender roles are clearly don't think women are people. Whether the dude is a nobody spouting non sequiturs on forums, or a somebody writing hefty books, is not really that important a factor when it comes to spotting this 'tell'.

yes
it's especially easy to detect if you are a woman and one of his followers engages you in a conversation about gender

In Canada, he has been very prominent as a right-wing activist and media personality. He gets regularly published in the National Post and has been privately consulted by the Premier of Ontario on policy. This is what my animosity is based on. I've never commented on his scholarly work one way or the other since I haven't read it and probably wouldn't be qualified anyway; afaict, though, his activism and self-help has become a larger part of what he does? As a political force with regards to academia itself, I think he can be actively dangerous, as per the OP.

It's like, there are statements people come out with, in person or on paper, which while perhaps they don't qualify as an ad hominem or insult as such, and may be uttered ever so professionally or politely, are CLEARLY already weaponised and the whole point of making the utterance is to attack.

That's what JP's mystification of gender is, as far as I can see; I get the same feeling around polite xtian fundy types, the surface patter is about valuing the 'family' but come on, the fear and hate of gayness is palpable.

I'm no apologist but this thread hammers his boiled salt beef

The cliche about ignoring everything before 'but' holds true again.

He’s a small-town Alberta boy, the brightest kid in Vegreville, who has (probably mostly unconsciously) built up a semi-scholarly justification for his own prejudices.

I know 2 people from Vegreville, both about JP’s age. They are both legit neo-Nazis. FWIW.

A friend of mine wrote this about Peterson's scholarly work: https://medium.com/s/story/jordan-peterson-is-a-very-poor-researcher-whose-own-sources-contradict-his-claims-464633558b75

v good piece being much less vague than i was

Subsequent translators have elaborated on Heidel’s assessment of Enuma Elish as politically motivated pastiche. W.G. Lambert, writing in 1965, proclaims the creation epic to be “not a norm of Babylonian or Sumerian cosmology,” but rather “a sectarian and aberrant combination of mythological threads” that cobbles together a narrative from various traditions “perverted to such an extent that conclusions based on this text alone are suspect.” Ola Wikander, a contemporary scholar who translated Enuma Elish into Swedish in 2005, believes a single writer authored the work, incorporating elements from earlier myths to fit an agenda that is likely concerned with justifying the transition from collective rule to monarchy.

what a coincidence

I take clonazepam and if I miss a dose it feels like I'm having a heart attack. it's a heavy duty med, going cold turkey is not only insane it can kill you, any doctor would've urged him not to. understandable impulse though and I hope he & his wife recover.

xxp - I'm not gonna die on this hill but when you say there is no merit to JP, what is the scope of your assessment? Is it his regressive fanbase that he doesn't distance himself from that is the deal-breaker, his contemptible dandy persona, his hucksterish self-improvement philosopy/business, his deep understanding and synthesis of niche academia? Just curious.

― Yelploaf

he's made his reputation campaigning against trans people, and i'm a trans person. dude can go fuck himself.

yeah (to rushomancy but also LL and sund4r) i should not have cast as secondary the effects of his actual aggressive political work. just meant to show that he is not some rigorous bronze age scholar who attacks trans people on the weekends: his woo-woo reactionary authoritarianism goes all the way down.