Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

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Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby MacCruiskeen » Mon Mar 12, 2018 4:03 pm

strongly recommended, both talks

Russell Brand & Jordan Peterson (90 mins)


The Master and His Emissary: Conversation with Dr. Iain McGilchrist (30 mins)
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby MacCruiskeen » Mon Mar 12, 2018 5:34 pm

Damn, this guy is brilliant, and bracing. No wonder he's becoming so famous. No wonder his own students (and other audiences) are flocking so enthusiastically to his lectures.

He is a clinical and developmental psychologist. Surely he is giving good and vitally important advice here? Surely what he says is true and insightful?Note also what he says about the university itself, and about the opiates epidemic among unemployed working men.



Why has he been vilified in a dozen crappy reviews? What is so scary about him? I think it's his bravery.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Belligerent Savant » Mon Mar 12, 2018 6:42 pm

.

Excellent stuff -- thanks for sharing. Absorbing the content during downtime.

Haven't had the chance to read beyond the first 3 paragraphs of this yet, but passing along here:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018 ... asculinity



Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity
How did a once obscure academic become the Internet’s most revered—and reviled—intellectual?


Image

In February, 2000, The American Journal of Psychiatry published a concise review of a not-at-all-concise book. The book, “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief,” was nearly six hundred pages long, and, although it was published by the academic press Routledge, it fit neatly within no scholarly discipline. The reviewer, a sympathetic professor of psychiatry, bravely attempted to explain such forbidding phrases as “the grammatical structure of transformational mythology.” Then he admitted defeat. “Doing justice to this tome in a two-paragraph synopsis is impossible,” he concluded. “This is not a book to be abstracted and summarized.” But he expressed the hope that curious souls would nevertheless discover this curious book, and savor it “at leisure.”

Eighteen years later, the author of “Maps of Meaning,” Jordan B. Peterson, has produced a sequel, of sorts. It’s called “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,” and it has become an international blockbuster. Peterson, formerly an obscure professor, is now one of the most influential—and polarizing—public intellectuals in the English-speaking world. Lots of fans find him on YouTube, where he is an unusual sort of celebrity, a stern but mercurial lecturer who often holds forth for hours, mixing polemics with pep talks. Peterson grew up in Fairview, Canada, a small town in Northern Alberta, and he has a fondness for quaint slang; his accent and vocabulary combine to make him seem like a man out of time and out of place, especially in America. His central message is a thoroughgoing critique of modern liberal culture, which he views as suicidal in its eagerness to upend age-old verities. And he has learned to distill his wide-ranging theories into pithy sentences, including one that has become his de facto catchphrase, a possibly spurious quote that nevertheless captures his style and his substance: “Sort yourself out, bucko.”

Peterson is fifty-five, and his delayed success should give hope to underappreciated academics everywhere. For a few years, in the nineteen-nineties, he taught psychology at Harvard; by the time he published “Maps of Meaning,” in 1999, he was back in Canada—teaching at the University of Toronto, working as a clinical psychologist, and building a reputation, on television, as an acerbic pundit. His fame grew in 2016, during the debate over a Canadian bill known as C-16. The bill sought to expand human-rights law by adding “gender identity and gender expression” to the list of grounds upon which discrimination is prohibited. In a series of videotaped lectures, Peterson argued that such a law could be a serious infringement of free speech. His main focus was the issue of pronouns: many transgender or gender-nonbinary people use pronouns different from the ones they were assigned at birth—including, sometimes, “they,” in the singular, or nontraditional ones, like “ze.” The Ontario Human Rights Commission had found that, in a workplace or a school, “refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity” would probably be considered discrimination. Peterson resented the idea that the government might force him to use what he called neologisms of politically correct “authoritarians.” During one debate, recorded at the University of Toronto, he said, “I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.” Then he folded his arms, adding, “And that’s that!”

Such videos reached millions of online viewers, including plenty with no particular stake in Canadian human-rights legislation. To many people disturbed by reports of intolerant radicals on campus, Peterson was a rallying figure: a fearsomely self-assured debater, unintimidated by liberal condemnation. Students staged rowdy protests. The dean of the university sent him a letter warning that his pledge not to use certain pronouns revealed “discriminatory intentions”; the letter also warned, “The impact of your behavior runs the risk of undermining your ability to conduct essential components of your job as a faculty member.” Last fall, a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Ontario, was reprimanded by professors for showing her class a clip of one of Peterson’s debates. (The university later apologized.) The reprisals only raised Peterson’s profile, and he capitalized on the attention on his Patreon page, where devotees can pledge monthly payments in exchange for exclusive Q. & A. sessions and online courses.

Earlier this year, Peterson appeared on Channel 4 News, in Britain. The interviewer, Cathy Newman, asked what gave him the right to offend transgender people. He asked, cheerfully, what gave her the right to risk offending him. Newman paused for an excruciating few moments, and Peterson allowed himself a moment of triumph. “Ha! Gotcha,” he said. David Brooks, in the Times, said that Peterson reminded him of “a young William F. Buckley.” Tucker Carlson, on Fox News, called the exchange with Newman “one of the great interviews of all time.”

Given the popularity of these online debates, it can be easy to forget that arguing against political correctness is not Peterson’s main occupation. He remains a psychology professor by trade, and he still spends much of his time doing something like therapy. Anyone in need of his counsel can find plenty of it in “12 Rules for Life.” The book is far easier to comprehend than its predecessor, though it may confuse those who know Peterson only as a culture warrior. One of his many fans is PewDiePie, a Swedish video gamer who is known as the most widely viewed YouTube personality in the world—his channel has more than sixty million subscribers. In a video review of “12 Rules for Life,” PewDiePie confessed that the book had surprised him. “It’s a self-help book!” he said. “I don’t think I ever would have read a self-help book.” (He nonetheless declared that Peterson’s book, at least the parts he read, was “very interesting.”) Peterson himself embraces the self-help genre, to a point. The book is built around forthright and perhaps impractically specific advice, from Chapter 1, “Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back,” to Chapter 12, “Pet a Cat When You Encounter One on the Street.” Political polemic plays a relatively small role; Peterson’s goal is less to help his readers change the world than to help them find a stable place within it. One of his most compelling maxims is strikingly modest: “You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.” Of course, he is famous today precisely because he has determined that, in a range of circumstances, there are good reasons to buck the popular tide. He is, by turns, a defender of conformity and a critic of it, and he thinks that if readers pay close attention, they, too, can learn when to be which.

Like many conversion stories, Peterson’s begins with a crisis of faith—a series of them, in fact. He was raised Protestant, and as a boy he was sent to confirmation class, where he asked the teacher to defend the literal truth of Biblical creation stories. The teacher’s response was convincing neither to Peterson nor, Peterson suspected, to the teacher himself. In “Maps of Meaning,” he remembered his reaction. “Religion was for the ignorant, weak, and superstitious,” he wrote. “I stopped attending church, and joined the modern world.” He turned first to socialism and then to political science, seeking an explanation for “the general social and political insanity and evil of the world,” and each time finding himself unsatisfied. (This was the Cold War era, and Peterson was preoccupied by the possibility of nuclear annihilation.) The question was, he decided, a psychological one, so he sought psychological answers, and eventually earned a Ph.D. from McGill University, having written a thesis examining the heritability of alcoholism.

All the while, Peterson was also pursuing a grander, stranger project. He had fallen under the sway of Carl Jung, the mystical Swiss psychology pioneer who interpreted modern life as an endless drama, haunted by ancient myths. (Peterson calls Jung “ever-terrifying,” which is a very Jungian sort of compliment.) In “Maps of Meaning,” Peterson drew from Jung, and from evolutionary psychology: he wanted to show that modern culture is “natural,” having evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to reflect and meet our human needs. Then, rather audaciously, he sought to explain exactly how our minds work, illustrating his theory with elaborate geometric diagrams (“The Constituent Elements of Experience as Personality, Territory, and Process”) that seemed to have been created for the purpose of torturing undergraduates.

The new book replaces charts with cheerful drawings of Peterson’s children acting out his advice. In the foreword, Peterson’s friend Norman Doidge, a prominent psychiatrist, tells about meeting him at an outdoor lunch at the house of a mutual friend; Peterson was wearing cowboy boots, and determinedly ignoring a swarm of bees. “He had this odd habit,” Doidge writes, “of speaking about the deepest questions to whoever was at this table—most of them new acquaintances—as though he were just making small talk.”

Throughout the book, Peterson supplies small and strange interjections of autobiography. He recalls the time an old friend named Ed came to visit, accompanied by another guy who was, in Peterson’s estimation, “stoned out of his gourd.” Alarmed, Peterson staged a kind of intervention. “I took Ed aside and told him politely that he had to leave,” Peterson writes. “I said that he shouldn’t have brought his useless bastard of a companion.” Ed took his friend and left—fearing, perhaps, to discover what a less polite admonition would have sounded like.

Peterson has a way of making even the mildest pronouncement sound like the dying declaration of a political prisoner. In “Maps of Meaning,” he traced this sense of urgency to a feeling of fraudulence that overcame him in college. When he started to speak, he would hear a voice telling him, “You don’t believe that. That isn’t true.” To ward off mental breakdown, he resolved not to say anything unless he was sure he believed it; this practice calmed the inner voice, and in time it shaped his rhetorical style, which is forceful but careful. In “12 Rules for Life,” Peterson recounts a similar experience when, as a psychologist, he worked with a client diagnosed with paranoia. He says that such patients are “almost uncanny in their ability to detect mixed motives, judgment, and falsehood,” and so he redoubled his efforts to say only what he meant. “You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you,” he writes. Peterson seems to have found that this approach works on much of the general population, too.

If he once had a tendency to shut himself up, Peterson has wholly overcome it. “Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding,” he proclaims (Rule 11), but the expected riff about “overprotected” children leads elsewhere: to a grim story about a troubled friend who committed suicide, and then to a remembrance of a professor who boasted that he and his wife had made an ethical decision to have only one child, and from there to an argument that both the unhappy friend and the arrogant professor were “anti-human, to the core.” Elsewhere in the chapter, he writes that “boys’ interests tilt towards things” and “girls’ interests tilt towards people,” and that these interests are “strongly influenced by biological factors.” He is particularly concerned about boys and men, and he flatters them with regular doses of tough love. “Boys are suffering in the modern world,” he writes, and he suggests that the problem is that they’re not boyish enough. Near the end of the chapter, he tries to coin a new catchphrase: “Toughen up, you weasel.”

When he does battle as a culture warrior, especially on television, Peterson sometimes assumes the role of a strident anti-feminist, intent on ending the oppression of males by destroying the myth of male oppression. (He once referred to his critics as “rabid harpies.”) But his tone is more pragmatic in this book, and some of his critics might be surprised to find much of the advice he offers unobjectionable, if old-fashioned: he wants young men to be better fathers, better husbands, better community members. In this way, he might be seen as an heir to older gurus of manhood like Elbert Hubbard, who in 1899 published a stern and wildly popular homily called “A Message to Garcia.” (What young men most needed, Hubbard wrote, was “a stiffening of the vertebrae.”) Peterson is an heir, too, to the professional pickup artists who proliferated in the aughts, making a different appeal to feckless men. Where the pickup artists promised to make guys better sexual salesmen (sexual consummation was called “full close,” as in closing a deal), Peterson, more ambitious, promises to help them get married and stay married. “You have to scour your psyche,” he tells them. “You have to clean the damned thing up.” When he claims to have identified “the culminating ethic of the canon of the West,” one might brace for provocation. But what follows, instead, is prescription so canonical that it seems self-evident: “Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good.” In urging men to overachieve, he is also urging them to fit in, and become productive members of Western society.

Every so often, Peterson pauses to remind his readers how lucky they are. “The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West,” he writes, “is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.” This may sound strange to readers in the United States, where a widespread perception of dysfunction unites politicians and commentators who agree on little else. But Peterson does not live in Donald Trump’s America; in Canada, the Prime Minister is Justin Trudeau, who seems to strike Peterson as the embodiment of wimpy and fraudulent liberalism. Recently, after Trudeau tried to cut off a rambling questioner by half-joking that she should say “peoplekind” instead of “mankind,” Peterson appeared on “Fox & Friends” to register his objection. “I’m afraid that our Prime Minister is only capable of running his ideas on a few very narrow ideological tracks,” he said.

Peterson seems to view Trump, by contrast, as a symptom of modern problems, rather than a cause of them. He suggests that Trump’s rise was unfortunate but inevitable—“part of the same process,” he writes, as the rise of “far-right” politicians in Europe. “If men are pushed too hard to feminize,” he warns, “they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.” Peterson sometimes asks audiences to view him as an alternative to political excesses on both sides. During an interview on BBC Radio 5, he said, “I’ve had thousands of letters from people who were tempted by the blandishments of the radical right, who’ve moved towards the reasonable center as a consequence of watching my videos.” But he typically sees liberals, or leftists, or “postmodernists,” as aggressors—which leads him, rather ironically, to frame some of those on the “radical right” as victims. Many of his political stances are built on this type of inversion. Postmodernists, he says, are obsessed with the idea of oppression, and, by waging war on oppressors real and imagined, they become oppressors themselves. Liberals, he says, are always talking about the importance of compassion—and yet “there’s nothing more horrible for children, and developing people, than an excess of compassion.” (This horror, he says, is embodied in the figure of the “Freudian devouring mother”; as an example, he cites Ursula, the sea witch from “The Little Mermaid.”) The danger, it seems, is that those who want to improve Western society may end up destroying it.

Peterson thinks that this danger has a lot to do with men and women, and the changing way we think about them. “The division of life into its twin sexes occurred before the evolution of multi-cellular animals,” he writes, by way of arguing that human beings are bound to care about this division. During his Channel 4 News debate, Cathy Newman pressed him on whether he supported gender equality, and he replied that it depended on what the term meant. “If it means equality of outcome, then almost certainly it’s undesirable,” he said. “Men and women won’t sort themselves into the same categories, if you leave them alone.” (He mentioned that in Scandinavia, an unusually egalitarian part of the world, men are vastly overrepresented among engineers, and women among nurses.) Convictions such as these inspire in him a general skepticism of efforts to redress gender inequality. He has argued that traditionally feminine traits, such as agreeableness, are not historically correlated with professional success. (He says that, as a psychologist, he has often counselled female clients to be more assertive at work.) When Newman suggested that this correlation might merely reflect the ways women have been shut out of corporate leadership, Peterson sounded doubtful. “It could be the case that if companies modified their behavior, and became more feminine, that they would be successful,” he said. “But there’s no evidence for that.”

Peterson is not primarily interested in policy, but he was eager to join the debate over C-16, the Canadian bill forbidding discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression. In opposing the bill, Peterson claimed the mantle of free speech. “There’s a difference,” he explained, “between saying that there’s something you can’t say, and saying that there are things that you have to say.” But if laws against discrimination also prohibit harassment, they will necessarily prohibit some forms of verbal harassment—and they will therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, limit speech. Canada already limits speech in ways that the U.S. does not: a law against “hate speech” was repealed in 2013, but the government still bans “hate propaganda.” From an American perspective, such laws may seem ill-advised, or even oppressive. Still, like many free-speech arguments, this one was in large part a debate over the political status of a minority group.

The C-16 debate is over, for now—the bill passed and was enacted last summer. But Peterson remains a figurehead for the movement to block or curtail transgender rights. When he lampoons “made-up pronouns,” he sometimes seems to be lampooning the people who use them, encouraging his fans to view transgender or gender-nonbinary people as confused, or deluded. Once, after a lecture, he was approached on campus by a critic who wanted to know why he would not use nonbinary pronouns. “I don’t believe that using your pronouns will do you any good, in the long run,” he replied.

So what does Peterson actually believe about gender and pronouns? It can be hard to tell. Later in that campus conversation, when asked whether, in the absence of legal coercion, he would be willing to use pronouns such as “they” and “them” if a trans person asked him to, Peterson demurred. “It might depend on how they asked,” he said. One of his foundational beliefs is that cultures evolve, which suggests that nonstandard pronouns could become standard. In a debate about gender on Canadian television, in 2016, he tried to find some middle ground. “If our society comes to some sort of consensus over the next while about how we’ll solve the pronoun problem,” he said, “and that becomes part of popular parlance, and it seems to solve the problem properly, without sacrificing the distinction between singular and plural, and without requiring me to memorize an impossible list of an indefinite number of pronouns, then I would be willing to reconsider my position.”

Despite his fondness for moral absolutes, Peterson is something of a relativist; he is inclined to defer to a Western society that is changing in unpredictable ways. In discussing the many women who have criticized him, he has talked about how verbal disagreements commonly contain an implicit threat of violence, and about how such implicit threats are “forbidden” when men are addressing women. And yet, even when the topic is as elemental as male-female violence, our norms are changing: in the United States, laws against spousal violence were first enacted in the middle of the nineteenth century; laws against spousal rape are only a few decades old. Not long ago, these laws might have seemed intrusive and disruptive; now, many people shudder at the notion that it might ever have been legal for a man to physically assault his wife. Peterson excels at explaining why we should be careful about social change, but not at helping us assess which changes we should favor; just about any modern human arrangement could be portrayed as a radical deviation from what came before. In the case of gender identity, Peterson’s judgment is that “our society” has not yet agreed to adopt nontraditional pronouns, which isn’t quite an argument that we shouldn’t. And this judgment isn’t likely to be persuasive to people in places—like some North American college campuses, perhaps—where the singular “they” has already come to seem like part of the social fabric.

A different kind of culture warrior might express hostility to nontraditional pronouns in religious terms—in the United States, the fight against legal rights for L.G.B.T.Q. people has largely been led by believers. But Peterson—like his hero, Jung—has a complicated relationship to religious belief. He reveres the Bible for its stories, reasoning that any stories that we have been telling ourselves for so long must be, in some important sense, true. In a recent podcast interview, he mentioned that people sometimes ask him if he believes in God. “I don’t respond well to that question,” he said. “The answer to that question is forty hours long, and I can’t condense it into a sentence.” Forty hours, it turns out, is the approximate length of a lecture series that he created based on “Maps of Meaning.”

At times, Peterson emphasizes his interest in empirical knowledge and scientific research—although these tend to be the least convincing parts of “12 Rules for Life.” There is an extended analogy between human beings and lobsters, based on the observation that male lobsters that have proven themselves dominant produce more serotonin; he suggests that when people “slump around,” like weakling lobsters, they, too, will run short on serotonin, which will make them unhappy. The fact that serotonin has varied and sometimes contradictory effects scarcely matters here: Peterson’s story about the lobster is essentially a modern myth. He wants forlorn readers to imagine themselves as heroic lobsters; he wants an image of claws to appear in their mind whenever they feel themselves start to slump; he wants to help them.

Peterson wants to help everyone, in fact. In his least measured moments, he permits himself to dream of a world transformed. “Who knows,” he writes, “what existence might be like if we all decided to strive for the best?” His many years of study fostered in him a conviction that good and evil exist, and that we can discern them without recourse to any particular religious authority. This is a reassuring belief, especially in confusing times: “Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not.” No doubt there are therapists and life coaches all over the world dispensing some version of this formula, nudging their clients to pursue lives that better conform to their own moral intuitions. The problem is that, when it comes to the question of how to order our societies—when it comes, in other words, to politics—our intuitions have proved neither reliable nor coherent. The “highly functional infrastructure” he praises is the product of an unceasing argument over what is good, for all of us; over when to conform, and when to dissent. We can, most of us, sort ourselves out, or learn how to do it. That doesn’t mean we will ever agree on how to sort out everyone else. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the March 5, 2018, issue, with the headline “Sort Yourself Out, Bucko.”

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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby minime » Mon Mar 12, 2018 6:44 pm

McGilchrist is a genius. Standing on the shoulders, etc... The Master and His Emissary is required reading for all third men.

Watched the video--thank you for that. Thought the jump cut from the physiology and psychology of brain hemisphere differentiation to the metaphysics (or whatever that was) needed more of a transition. Fortunately the book is readily available.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Laodicean » Mon Mar 12, 2018 7:58 pm

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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Elvis » Mon Mar 12, 2018 8:24 pm

I wasn't familiar with Peterson, so thanks. I haven't watched the OP video (yet) but I read the New Yorker article...

During an interview on BBC Radio 5, he said, “I’ve had thousands of letters from people who were tempted by the blandishments of the radical right, who’ve moved towards the reasonable center as a consequence of watching my videos.”


With that, I'd say offhand that we need more like him. He seems to address complex issues with appropriately complex analyses, not simple-minded "your side sucks" heel digging.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby PufPuf93 » Mon Mar 12, 2018 8:53 pm

Have not watched the videos yet.

Here is some more background on Jordan Peterson:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson

https://www.patreon.com/jordanbpeterson
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Jerky » Tue Mar 13, 2018 12:35 pm

Peterson fandom, on RI. Wow. Who'd have thunk it.

This guy is one of the most monumental frauds in the history of public intellectualism, guilty of everything he accuses the dreaded "neoMarxist postmodernists" of, and more. Also, even if he isn't strictly speaking Far Right, he's definitely become a favorite of the Far Right. I think his definition of "moderate" or "centrist" is probably somewhat suspect.

The dude is a loon, to boot. He weeps at some Disney movies and finds dark, social engineering conspiracies in others. He thinks stories shouldn't have morals (or "political ones" at least, laughably), except for morals he approves of. He's terrified of lipstick and high heels. He's a fucking buffoon.

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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Jerky » Tue Mar 13, 2018 12:37 pm

Not at all surprised by which RI participants are among his boosters, either. I could have easily guessed.

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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Belligerent Savant » Tue Mar 13, 2018 12:45 pm

.
Appreciate your dispassionate, objective viewpoint, Jerky, as well as the broad, sweeping brush you implement to now place us in whatever categories you have conjured in your mind.

These videos/links have been provided as topics for discussion -- I for one, have not been previously exposed to Peterson, and as such have no firm opinion formed at this time, but I found the videos to be, minimally, thought-provoking.

I see absolutely no issue with posting this content here in RI.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Jerky » Tue Mar 13, 2018 12:45 pm

JORDAN PETERSON: THE STUPID PERSON'S IDEA OF A SMART PERSON

University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson was in the news this week—and one imagines this makes the university sad. Peterson first made the news and became a belle of the alt-right when, in September 2016, he announced that he would not use a student’s preferred pronoun if he were asked to, except that he might if he felt the request was “genuine,” and no one had asked him that anyway.

What that poor man has been through.

Needless to say, in an economy as desperately short of leadership and ideas as the alt-right’s is, Peterson’s stock went through the roof. He currently has legions of fans hanging on his every YouTubed word; he’s now hauling in around USD $50,000 a month through crowdfunding.

As a child, I was always a bit uncomfortable when my parents’ friends asked me to call them “Auntie.” I was pretty sure there was no peer-reviewed literature supporting this familial relationship, but it never occurred to me to attempt to politicize, let alone monetize, my unease. I certainly never accused “Auntie June” of trying to undermine Western civilization in the service of a post-modern neo-Marxist agenda every time she brought over a casserole. I wouldn’t have gotten any pudding.

“Postmodern neo-Marxism” is Peterson’s nemesis, and the best way to explain what postmodern neo-Marxism is, is to explain what it is not—that is, it is entirely distinct from the concept of “cultural Marxism.”

“Cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics, realizing that traditional Marxism is unlikely to triumph any time soon, is out to destroy Western civilization by undermining its cultural values. “Postmodern neo-Marxism,” on the other hand, is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics, realizing that traditional Marxism is unlikely to triumph any time soon, is out to destroy Western civilization by undermining its cultural values with “cultural” taken out of the name so it doesn’t sound quite so similar to the literal Nazi conspiracy theory of “cultural Bolshevism.”

To be clear, Jordan Peterson is not a neo-Nazi, but there’s a reason he’s as popular as he is on the alt-right. You’ll never hear him use the phrase “We must secure a future for our white children”; what you will hear him say is that, while there does appear to be a causal relationship between empowering women and economic growth, we have to consider whether this is good for society, “‘’cause the birth rate is plummeting.” He doesn’t call for a “white ethnostate,” but he does retweet Daily Caller articles with opening lines like: “Yet again an American city is being torn apart by black rioters.” He has dedicated two-and-a-half-hour-long YouTube videos to “identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege.”

Now, as I’ve said, I failed to get in on the ground floor of the “not using a person’s chosen address” industry which, in a simpler time, was known as “calling people names” and was considered bad manners. But since calling a certain University of Toronto professor “Jordan Pea-Headerson” is apparently the only thing standing between us and non-stop collectivist potato farming, I’ll do my part for the resistance.

Western civilization is, after all, a delicate thing. Today you agree to call Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston “Audrey Hepburn,” tomorrow we’re all fighting over water and gasoline in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Even worse, some social justice warlord will ask you to call him “Immortan Joe,” and that’s not your real name, Joseph.

As far as I can tell, Jordie—and not the cool “Geordi” from Star Trek either— rewards the devotion of his Patreon patsies with regular rants against “political correctness,” and relationship advice I can only call “Angry Oprah Says.” For USD $29.99, Petersonites can get access to the Self Authoring Suite (a USD $119.92 value!). Those looking for further opportunities to give him money can pay USD $9.99 for “100 question phrases” which “can be found, along with similar question sets, elsewhere on the web” so that they might learn how your personality compares to 10,000 others.

Pro tip: just take a personality test from the back of an issue of Glamour; you’ll only be out about five bucks, and you might find a free perfume sample.

He also gives book recommendations apparently drawn from a high-school English-class reading list. If somehow you missed them, Mistress Peterson is the portal to such obscure works as Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men, and that cornerstone of the Western canon, Flowers for Algernon.

There is no polite way to put this, but since Peterson claims that “If you worry about hurting people’s feelings and disturbing the social structure, you’re not going to put your ideas forward,” I’m just going to say it: Spend half an hour on his website, sit through a few of his interminable videos, and you realize that what he has going for him, the niche he has found—he never seems to say “know” where he could instead say “cognizant of”—is that Jordan Peterson is the stupid man’s smart person.

Peterson’s videos go on and on. It’s like opening up a tab for one of those bird’s nest webcams at the height of its popularity: Lots of people are watching, you feel like you should too, but nothing is happening. You keep checking back, the viewer numbers have risen, but the scene is just so grey and drab. You can make out a white object on your screen that may or may not be cracking up, but as time goes on you start to think, “This thing was not incubated properly.”

Watching his videos, it’s easy to conclude that Dr. Jordan Eggman exhibits the first documented case of the male-cry voice. Maybe he wouldn’t need to repeat himself quite so much, maybe he’d be more convincing when explaining things like men are helpless before “crazy women” and “harpies” because it’s not socially acceptable for men to hit women and that this is “undermining the masculine power of the culture” in a way that will prove “fatal” if he didn’t sound quite so much like Gwyneth Paltrow accepting her Oscar for Shakespeare in Love.

It was a video that brought J-man back into the news this week. In July, he posted a video on his YouTube page laying out a plan to launch a website on which students and parents could have courses rated for them by artificial intelligence that could detect a “postmodern cult course.” His aim, he explained, was to cut off “the supply to the people that are running the indoctrination cults.” Ultimately, the champion of free speech said, he hoped the project would shut down whole departments that upset him.

One has to wonder why Dr. Pettyson felt the need to resort to artificial intelligence. He’s already concluded that the entire fields of “women’s studies, and all the ethnic studies and racial studies groups” “have to go,”and that sociology, anthropology, English literature, and education are all “corrupt.”

Surely a concerned student, or parent (I note Jordan Petersonny-don’t go-away-I-am-here-all-alone’s oft-expressed concern about overprotective parents is suspended when the terrifying prospect of ANT208, “Medical Anthropology: an Evolutionary Perspective on Human Health,” hovers into view) need only enter the name of the professor teaching a course. If that name isn’t “Jordan B. Peterson,” the class is probably a post-modern neo-Marxist brainwashing scheme.

Understandably, this plan to unleash grumpy-old-man Skynet on the academic world caused concern amongst his peers. The University of Toronto Faculty Association released a statement on Friday condemning Peterson’s website plan, without naming him directly; the group said it was “alarmed to learn that a web site may be under construction that is designed to place under surveillance certain kinds of academic content.”

No one can objectively look at the level of hyperbole used by Jordan Buttercup Peterson and his fanbase and not acknowledge that the Faculty Association’s concern is justified. I wouldn’t want to be a department at the end of those more than 500,000 Youtube subscribers and more than 250,000 Twitter followers.

But you can breathe easy, neo-Marxist conspirators for whom there is “nothing but power” and who, says Petersonshine, are motivated only to ”accrue all the power to them”—the plan has been put on hiatus until he can find a way to avoid adding “excessively to current polarization.” Two days after the faculty association’s statement, J. Pete the Beet announced that he had consulted a Twitter poll and decided to shelve the plan.

“I was going to put an end to your pomo-Marxist plotting once and for all but a third of respondents to a Twitter poll advised against it, so you’re safe… for now!” cried the last great defender of masculine Western civilization.

But woe betide those fields that have abandoned serious inquiry and empirical evidence and have become cult-like: Guru Jordan will vanquish you—just as soon as he’s done prepping his course, Psychology 434: Maps of Meaning.

In this rigorously academic course, students learn how “every experience that you have had contains information. If you have fully processed the information in that experience, (1) its recollection will no longer produce negative emotion and (2) you have learned everything you need to know from it.”

I’m hard-pressed to find a course on Chaucer that comes this close to promising to clear my thetans.

It’s easy to assume Peterson is deserving of respect. A lot of what he says sounds, on the surface, like serious thought. It’s easy to laugh at him: after all, most of what he says is, after fifteen seconds’ consideration, completely inane. But in between his long rambling pseudo-academic takes on common self-help advice and his weird fixation on Disney movies, is a dreadfully serious message.

What he’s telling you is that certain people—most of them women and minorities—are trying to destroy not only our freedom to spite nonbinary university students for kicks, but all of Western civilization and the idea of objective truth itself. He’s telling you that when someone tells you racism is still a problem and that something should be done about it, they are, at best, a dupe and, at worst, part of a Marxist conspiracy to destroy your way of life.

Peterson says he only thinks of it as a “non-violent war.” But when you insist the stakes are that high, the opposition that pernicious, who’s to say where the chips will fall?

http://www.macleans.ca/opinion/is-jorda ... rt-person/
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Jerky » Tue Mar 13, 2018 12:47 pm

Well, you're lucky then, because this is the least nauseating interview that Peterson has ever taken part in, thanks in large part to Russell Brand's magnanimous generosity and open spirit (now HE'S someone worth listening to on a somewhat regular basis... say what you will about him, but he does the difficult personal work, and he's honest, open, and loving... the opposite of Peterson).

J.

Belligerent Savant » 13 Mar 2018 16:45 wrote:.
Appreciate your dispassionate, objective viewpoint, Jerky, as well as the broad, sweeping brush you implement to now place us in whatever categories you have conjured in your mind.

These videos/links have been provided as topics for discussion -- I for one, have not been previously exposed to Peterson, and as such have no firm opinion formed at this time, but I found the videos to be, minimally, thought-provoking.

I see absolutely no issue with posting this content here in RI.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Jerky » Tue Mar 13, 2018 1:05 pm

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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby 0_0 » Tue Mar 13, 2018 1:07 pm

lol i agree with jerky on this, i can't stand jordan peterson but it's mostly because i'm allergic to all self-help gurus who claim that with just some little tweaks here and there life can be a wonderful bold adventure. that's why i only read schopenhaur, it's all doom and gloom and misery and that's how i like it, and if that's your attitude you'll even end up pleasantly surprised now and again. when you take the self-help gurus snake oil on the other hand you're just setting yourself up for more disappointment, and that's why they themselves are all on prozac. Oh god and the interviewer is russell brand, kudos to anyone who can sit through that! What puzzled me most about this thread tho was pufpuf93's comment:



was that some serious deadpan comment or what? :lol:
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby streeb » Tue Mar 13, 2018 1:09 pm

I don't have an opinion on either Peterson or McGilchrist, although I adore Russell Brand, and I'll check out those interviews...

... but MacLeans would be the stupid person's idea of a smart magazine. I can proudly say that I've been personally called out twice in the house rag of Canadian neoconservatism.
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