The Jordan Peterson Thread

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.

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

feel like you kind of answered your own question there

cant spell yelploaf without foelplay

Fuck peterson and i hope he's going through hell, he deserves it.

Before this he and his idiot acolytes would 100% have said that addicts just need to “let go of their victim mindset” and deserve no sympathy. Personally I’m losing zero sleep over the the idea that irredeemable alt right cunts are having a shit time of it while making the world a worse place - I think it’s good

^^^^

Before this he and his idiot acolytes would 100% have said that addicts just need to “let go of their victim mindset” and deserve no sympathy. Personally I’m losing zero sleep over the the idea that irredeemable alt right cunts are having a shit time of it while making the world a worse place - I think it’s good

― YouGov to see it (wins)

no, disagree. i don't think it's good that chuds are having a hard time of it and are miserable, because shit they always have been. there have been articles and talk and interviews and these people are consistently angry and terrified and consumed with self-hatred and maybe the problem isn't that they're not SUFFERING enough, abuse, violence, addiction, these are cycles, you can't punch a nazi hard enough to make them stop being a nazi. yes of course jordan peterson deserves to suffer for what he's done, but benzo addiction is not and never will be "justice".

what i'd like to see? i'd like to see him go through this and learn something from the hell of benzo withdrawal, learn how to treat people with kindness and compassion, to maybe take a little broader view of things or see things from a different perspective.

it doesn't seem terribly likely but, even though i was no jordan peterson, i certainly was once much more of an asshole than i am now. so i know it's possible.

i have limited sympathy to give, and i tend not to use it on people who spend their professional careers working to hurt me. and yet clonazepam withdrawal was the worst fucking thing i have ever gone through in my entire life. i am lucky to be alive. anybody going through that, even if they're jordan fucking peterson, gets at least a little bit of my sympathy.

Those are really good and noble sentiments rush and I don't disagree at all and I would like to bet 50 quid that Peterson takes something from this experience that he manages to turn into more hateful, destructive public rhetoric that serves to make the world a bit worse of a place for many people

I appreciate everyone's comments in response to my earlier question. To be clear - I do not like or support JP nor was I trolling. I had limited exposure to him before he became the odious firebrand he is now.

yelp, i took your comments in good faith. i just couldn’t resist rearranging the letters of your name.

Those are really good and noble sentiments rush and I don't disagree at all and I would like to bet 50 quid that Peterson takes something from this experience that he manages to turn into more hateful, destructive public rhetoric that serves to make the world a bit worse of a place for many people

― Fox Pithole Britain (Noodle Vague)

oh, sure, i don't for a second expect peterson will come out of this experience a kinder and better person any more than i expect hrt will restore my hairline to where it was when i was 20. hope is a rare enough gift that i take it wherever i can find it. i've found for myself that not hoping doesn't really lessen the likely disappointment to come.

rushomancy otm. For one thing becoming dependent on benzodiazepines while your wife battles cancer is the sort of shitty life event that I find hard to view as funny/good when it happens to anyone, ymmv. But also Peterson seems a little less villainous when I know that for as much of a bullshit-peddling huckster he is, for all the millions he’s made off his stupid book and lectures, he’s now wealthy and famous and totally miserable and can’t even go out for a nice meal.

maybe the incident suggests that he has not found the secret to a happy + fulfilling life and should stop preaching that he has

But also Peterson seems a little less villainous when I know that for as much of a bullshit-peddling huckster he is, for all the millions he’s made off his stupid book and lectures, he’s now wealthy and famous and totally miserable and can’t even go out for a nice meal.

― JoeStork

Hate to keep pushing back on this and running my mouth, but no, no, that's not quite where I'm coming from either. The fact that he's suffering right now makes him not one iota less evil or dangerous. His being totally miserable doesn't negate or obviate the fact that he became rich and famous peddling hatred and intolerance.

The only moral here is that there is no moral. Someone getting addicted to drugs has, as far as I can tell, basically zero causal relationship to whether they are a "good" or "bad" person. There is no cosmic justice. It rains on the just and unjust alike. Linus Van Pelt is on record as considering that a good system, but most of the rest of us seem to have a little trouble accepting it with that much equanimity.

maybe the incident suggests that he has not found the secret to a happy + fulfilling life and should stop preaching that he has

― Mordy, Sunday, September 22, 2019 11:47 AM (twenty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah i recall watching a clip of him on majority report talking about what magic it was that he got better sleep or felt less anxious because he was eating beef only and failed to mention it was beef and benzos, hmm

call me captain sunshine but I just don’t see Peterson coming out the other side of this any way but worse

Mordy otm. To have published something called "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos" and to have entered rehab 18 months later, for whatever reason and under whatever circumstances, is not something to cheer, but it should discredit you as a self-help expert.

the sequel practically writes and markets itself

there and back again

The Habit

lmao

hiyoooo

Lol

the incelmarillion

beren

I got into a discussion on the Jordan Peterson subreddit, I told a guy he was being silly for telling someone he argued “like a little girl, like a scared little girl,” got this extremely good response:

Because of your extremely low post karma it appears you're too weak to present your own opinion or belief, likely for fear of censure.

Now that I think about it, you appear to have all the traits of the child of a "devouring mother" and you're on a mission to earn her respect once and for all ... but haven't even yet considered the possibility of your own independence.

So you're out visiting subs that don't conform to your own political views to share the malice your mother so often bestowed upon you.

You can deny and deflect all you want, but mocking me won't change the fact that you're just a shriveled soul.

You don't know shit about racism, only the political posturing you've adopted to please your mother.

what were you

what did you hope

it doesn't matter

good questions all