Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

[Jerky]

No, Rory. That's not how the real world works. It isn't a collection of binary sets, one "side" always and forever doomed to be a perfect mirror image, shadow version, or reflection of the other.

Just for the record, I'm not against Patreon, per se. If I get back to publishing on a regular basis or get my comic started up, I might set up a Patreon account myself (and hope to be able to count on your support!). No... it's specifically the ways in which that platform has become a major fundraising arm of the alt-right, the Far Right, and neo-Fascists that I find odious and egregious.

Furthermore, I don't give a shit about Mensch, and Abramson and Garland HAVE no Patreon, you prevaricating poltroon.

And even if he did, contrary to your moronic "I know you are but what am I" counter-joust, Garland is NOT just "telling a certain type of intellectually insecure, defensive, resistance anti trump-Russia xenophobe pseudo expert exactly what they want to hear, over and over and over again".

These attempted insults of yours are weak sauce indeed. You got almost EVERYTHING wrong.

For instance, I am many things, but intellectually insecure isn't one of them. I'm OFFENSIVE, not defensive. I don't consider myself part of any organized "Resistance". I just call things as I see them. Now, you're sort of right when you call me "anti trump-Russia" (sic), because I'm not a fan of the ongoing results of that particular partnership. As far as xenophobia goes, however, it's the Trumpniks and the Kremlin who are feeding and furiously fanning those particular fires these days. As far as me "wanting to hear" accurate reportage, intelligent analysis and cogent cogitating on current events... yes, consider me different from you in that regard. I much prefer the real world to your preferred digs: the comfy/cozy confines of Julian Assange and/or Vladimir Putin's rancid fucking bowels.

J.

[Jerky]

MacC, by your logic, sounds like you're downright TERRIFIED of me for some reason!

Don't worry, old pal. I'm a lover, not a fighter!

All my love,
yer old pal forever, Jerky LeBoeuf, Esq.

[Rory]

Deleted

[MacCruiskeen]

You're reading the book, Mulligan? I haven't, yet. What is it, specifically, that you find so objectionably wrong about it?

As someone who gravitated more towards Richard Rorty than Derrida/Baudrillard (mostly because I found the latter too difficult to understand, blame my brain) the Neo-Marxist Postmodernists conspiracy he peddles is hilarious.

Why are you blaming Peterson for disliking the influence of two French postmodernist post-Marxist penseurs you yourself say you cannot understand? Why do you blame your brain? Is only your brain to blame?

[Jerky]

MacC, translated: "Why, I've never heard of this Peterson fellow... but he's ABSOLUTELY RIGHT about the Marxist PoMo plot, a-and how DARE Mulligan even mildly disagree with his take on the topic?!"

Strange, innit?

J.

[Jerky]

Mulligan, Rorty is well worth anyone's time. A second recommendation from me.

J.

[MacCruiskeen]

^^ Moderators: Why is this notorious troll still getting away with this incessant insufferable attention-seeking flamebait? Two full pages of it now. Enough.

[Jerky]

Moderators, why is this pot calling the kettle black YET AGAIN? Why do the real bully boys on this board insist on projecting their own behaviors onto the likes of myself, AD, and SLAD? Why, why, WHY?! It's just not FAIR I tells ya.

J.

[Mulligan]

You're reading the book, Mulligan? I haven't, yet. What is it, specifically, that you find so objectionably wrong about it?

As someone who gravitated more towards Richard Rorty than Derrida/Baudrillard (mostly because I found the latter too difficult to understand, blame my brain) the Neo-Marxist Postmodernists conspiracy he peddles is hilarious.

Why are you blaming Peterson for disliking the influence of two French postmodernist post-Marxist penseurs you yourself say you cannot understand? Why do you blame your brain? Is only your brain to blame?

He refers to them as NEO-Marxists, not post-Marxist, important distinction. And personally, I just found them obtuse, not some great Destroyer of Western Civilization which is what Peterson argues. That's kind of his thing. I previously mentioned Richard Rorty who took them to task better than I ever could-- Achieving Our Country is a book of his lectures but as good a place as any to start.

Peterson's book is a hodgepodge of self-help pap that has been repeated everywhere for as long as Self-Help books have been a genre (clean your room, talk precisely, care for yourself, take stock of who you surround yourself with, etc.), neuroscience (which I believe is actually Peterson's area of expertise, and of which I don't have too much to argue with), and sweeping proclamations about Western Civilization based on personal anecdotes, some of which are hilarious. This excerpt takes the cake for cringiest writing I've read this year:

"I remember taking my daughter to the playground once when she was about two. She was playing on the monkey bars, hanging in mid-air. A particularly provocative little monster of about the same age was standing above her on the same bar she was gripping. I watched him move towards her. Our eyes locked. He slowly and deliberately stepped on her hands, with increasing force, over and over, as he stared me down. He knew exactly what he was doing. Up yours, Daddy-O — that was his philosophy. He had already concluded that adults were contemptible, and that he could safely defy them. (Too bad, then, that he was destined to become one.) That was the hopeless future his parents had saddled him with. To his great and salutary shock, I picked him bodily off the playground structure, and threw him thirty feet down the field.

No, I didn’t. I just took my daughter somewhere else. But it would have been better for him if I had."

Peterson publishes a reading list of suggested books. I'd probably just bypass him entirely.

[Sounder]

Aside from the over wrought slanders, why do some people actually object to Jordan. It might be suggested that the pivot here is a bottom up verses a top down view on what is the proper way to relate to reality. From my POV a better world is more likely to manifest where the broad population is involved with evolving their consciousness, than would be the case where an expert class did all the thinking for the general population. It should be obvious that vested interests never work for the broad population.

Another element involved (in the hate) is the primacy of free speech over feelings. The trouble with making feelings primary is that it is a mushy metric that can be changed at any time and used to vilify anything that becomes a threat to the system.

Watch the ball, not the player.

[MacCruiskeen]

He refers to them as NEO-Marxists, not post-Marxist, important distinction. And personally, I just found them obtuse, not some great Destroyer of Western Civilization which is what Peterson argues.

In fact nearly all of them described themselves as Marxists and avowed his strong influence on their own work, and claimed to be carrying on his legacy. I think they obscured Marx's work from students's view for a whole generation, which is a pity to say the least.

By "obtuse" you mean "obscure", right? They are often obscure, and they have had a huge influence on higher education in The West™. And these students then became influential members of the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) in journalism, the media, and the academy especially. Would you say the influence of this obscurity on students, on culture, and on Western civilization generally has been positive or negative, on the whole? (How many of them blame their brains, as you do? What does it mean to submit to something one does not understand?)

not some great Destroyer of Western Civilization which is what Peterson argues.

Where does he say that they destroyed it? Clearly it still exists. Have postmodernist thinkers had a positive or negative effect on that civilization, in your view?

[Jerky]

Sounder, speaking only for myself, I don't HATE Peterson. In fact, some of the things he's written and said in videos, I not only don't find objectionable, but actually AGREE with him! (GASP!) I think he's got interesting things to say about shadow work and Jung, and even tho it's a bit woo-tastic, some of his hot takes on the history of religion are interesting and worthy of exploration (but personally, I don't mind a smidgen of woo).

Furthermore, I'm a free speech absolutist, so it certainly isn't his claims for "free speech" (which coming from him are disingenuous in the extreme, when you come to understand his wider project and semi-hidden agendas).

Some of the things I find objectionable in Peterson are his dishonesty, his arrogance, his obtuseness, his bizarre certainty that he fully grasps all he needs to understand re: topics about which he clearly hasn't got a bare minimum of understanding (postmodernism being one such topic). There's also his profound silliness, his constant appeal to emotion, his historical revisionism, his reactionary politics, his obvious and multifarious "issues" with the opposite sex, his attempts to cast himself as a martyr when really he's weeping all the way to the bank, his cynical appeals to the alt-right with his Patreon panhandling (cynical in that I suspect he frequently retweets and/or says things that he KNOWS are total bullshit just because he knows it will get a rise from his fan base, which is jam-packed with some of the very worst of the deplorables). You know... stuff like that.

Jerky

Aside from the over wrought slanders, why do some people actually object to Jordan. It might be suggested that the pivot here is a bottom up verses a top down view on what is the proper way to relate to reality. From my POV a better world is more likely to manifest where the broad population is involved with evolving their consciousness, than would be the case where an expert class did all the thinking for the general population. It should be obvious that vested interests never work for the broad population.

Another element involved (in the hate) is the primacy of free speech over feelings. The trouble with making feelings primary is that it is a mushy metric that can be changed at any time and used to vilify anything that becomes a threat to the system.

Watch the ball, not the player.

[MacCruiskeen]

^^ PWD

[Elvis]

Peterson makes me think. It seems he's spent a lifetime trying to figure out the way things should be done. Sure, he's provacative, he challenges people to think but many aren't up to the task. I don't necessarily have to agree or disagree with him, but I can be provoked into thinking about the complex stuff he deals in, and that's hard.

But a funny thing: I can totally see Peterson in the role of "mansplainer": when Rebecca Solnit so brilliantly described her dinner-host mansplainer—who was telling her all about "an important new book" without knowing she had written the book—I imagined a guy who both looks and expounds exactly like Peterson. I wonder if it was him?!


The Macleans puff doesn't even pretend to be objective. They even had to say, "To be clear, Jordan Peterson is not a neo-Nazi" while doing their worst to connect him with white nationalists etc. blah blah. No comparison with The New Yorker profile, which was pretty balanced and made me think.

[0_0]

But a funny thing: I can totally see Peterson in the role of "mansplainer": when Rebecca Solnit so brilliantly described her dinner-host mansplainer—who was telling her all about "an important new book" without knowing she had written the book—I imagined a guy who both looks and expounds exactly like Peterson. I wonder if it was him?!

he reminds me of this: