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JackRiddler » Thu Mar 15, 2018 6:53 am wrote:The lobster thing should be the end of discussions taking this guy seriously as a grand thinker,
[Lorenz] at least deployed analogies to a species of vertebrates with brains and webbed toes, just like us. Since then the level of this discourse has apparently regressed to an arthropod state.
Newman: “Let me get this straight. You’re saying that we should organize our societies along the lines of the lobsters?”
Peterson: "I’m saying it is inevitable that there will be continuities in the way that animals and human beings organize their structures. It’s absolutely inevitable, and there is one-third of a billion years of evolutionary history behind that … It’s a long time. You have a mechanism in your brain that runs on serotonin that’s similar to the lobster mechanism that tracks your status—and the higher your status, the better your emotions are regulated. So as your serotonin levels increase you feel more positive emotion and less negative emotion."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... on/550859/
And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, And the leopard will lie down with the kid, And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; And a little boy will lead them.
Isaiah 11:6
I saw what you did there, Jack. You asserted dominance, took him down a peg or two, challenged his place in the pecking order, made him smaller (less grand and more petit). You bristled, your hackles were raised, you decided to lock horns with him.
... “God”, in Peterson’s formulation, stands in for “reality” or “the future” or “the logos” or “being” or “everything that isn’t you and that you don’t know”. And the principal discovery of early mankind is that “God” can be bargained with, through sacrifice – which is no more than saying if you sacrifice the pleasures of the present, reality is likely to reward you in the future. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s the best option you’ve got.
[...]
The last chapter of Peterson’s book, misleadingly titled “Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street”, goes into the personal struggles he went through when it was discovered that his daughter, Mikhaila, had a rare bone disease. For many years, Peterson, his wife and daughter fought the illness, which clearly caused Mikhaila terrible suffering. It is also on record that Peterson and his daughter have suffered clinical depression. It is impossible to be sure, but it seems clear that the agony of these experiences has had a major impact on him and how he comes to focus on the underlying darkness of life.
There is much more to be said about Jordan B Peterson. He is a strange mixture of theologian, psychologist, conservative, liberal, wit and lay preacher. He’s a powerful advocate of the scientific method who is not a materialist. He can go from cuddly to razor sharp in a beat. His primary concern, however, which underpins nearly everything about him, is the defence of the individual against groupthink, whether on the right or the left.
[...]
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018 ... -interview
“Your group identity is not your cardinal feature. That’s the great discovery of the west. That’s why the west is right. And I mean that unconditionally. The west is the only place in the world that has ever figured out that the individual is sovereign. And that’s an impossible thing to figure out. It’s amazing that we managed it. And it’s the key to everything that we’ve ever done right.”
God. Could this be true? The repressed/recovered memory industry is an ethical morass....Diana Davison
8:08 AM - 8 Jan 2018
@d2davison
Mark Pendergrast is the journalist really breaking this story on the wrongful conviction of Jerry Sandusky https://thecrimereport.org/2018/01/03/d ... -sandusky/ … https://twitter.com/docamitay/status/950234820931739649 …
14. Peterson's Maps of Meaning is on the one hand fascinating because of what it illuminates with respect to the patriarchal system it analyzes; it is on the other hand myopic because of what it fails to account for or even consider with respect to what is suppressed within the patriarchal system (cf. Sheets-Johnstone 1994b). In keeping with themes in mythology, religion, and Jungian psychiatry, the known and the unknown are personified by The Great Father and the Great and Terrible Mother, respectively, and the terrain between the two is mediated by the Hero. It is notable that in this historical/Jungian account, and equally, in Peterson's undistanced, uncritical rendition of it, daughters never enter the scene; there are only sons or the son. It is notable too that there are only heros. Heroines never enter the scene either--although a princess makes a brief appearance on p. 248 as she "waits for the kiss of the hero to wake." It is as if The Great and Terrible Mother never gives birth to females.
15. Females in fact rarely make an appearance within the analysis Peterson offers, or, if they do, it is with marginal attention, as when he writes that "rapid maturation and the naturally dramatic onset of menstruation" explain why "[initiatory] rituals tend to be more complex and far-reaching for males than for females" (p. 222); or when he writes that, following male initiatory rites, "The new environment is the society of men, where women are sexual partners and equals instead of sources of dependent comfort" (p. 224). How females come to be sexual partners in "the society of men" is not perplexing, but how they come to be "equal" in "the society of men" remains perplexing--and a challenge to this day. The question of an easy equality aside, how females make the transition from being "sexual partners and equals" to being "sources of dependent comfort" (i.e., mothers), or vice versa, or encompass the two modes--partner/equal and mother--not transitionally but simultaneously in "the society of men," is nowhere considered. Peterson's oversight is odd given the fact that having a child, for example--at the very least, a first child--is "unexplored territory," not only in the experiences of pregnancy and of giving birth, but in day to day discoveries of new meanings and potentially daily creative engagements with another being. Females are so shortly and breezily accounted for in Peterson's book that they appear to be no more than necessary but ready-made paste-ons in "the society of men"--which, perhaps, is what they are in such a society.
16. It is notable, furthermore, that while there is a Great and Terrible Mother, there is only a Great Father, even though this Great Father is tyrannical in the extreme as well as orderly, i.e., even though he, like Great Mother, has a powerful negative as well as powerful positive side. Why his negative side is not so designated in his label is peculiar--Terrible Father appears only once (p. 379). The lack of balance is particularly striking--and troubling--in light of the fact that men make war, men make concentration camps, men make prison camps, men dismember men, men rape women, and so on, and so on. Although Peterson chronicles the horrors of concentration and prison camps at length, recounting experiences described by Frankl at Auschwitz and by Solzhenitsyn at the Gulag Archipelago; although he specifically states that "Man can torture his brother and dance on his grave," that "Man exults in agony, delights in pain, worships destruction and pathology,... and constantly works to lay waste, to undermine, to destroy, to torment, to abuse and devour," that "Man chooses evil, for the sake of the evil," and that Man tortures and exults and chooses as he does out of "slavish adherence to the forces of socialization" (p. 347); although Peterson chronicles all these horrors and designates "Man" as their author, he does not seem to realize that it is specifically, universally, and virtually only males in "the society of men" who make war, who "torture," "massacre," butcher," "rape," "devour," and so on (p. 347). In short, that Peterson draws our attention to the horrors of "Man," all the while not questioning the patriarchal system itself in which Man's brutalities take place is an astonishing and puzzling omission, all the more so in light of his desire to discover the "human motivation for evil" (p. 460) and the way in which we humans might recognize "our infinite capacity for good" (p. 456); all the more so too in light of the absolute and central binary opposition he draws between male and female throughout.
17. One can legitimately wonder not only what kind of culture(s) would evolve--what kind of myths and religions would be spawned, what kind of stories would be told--but most significantly in terms of Peterson's central concern, to what degree evil would continue to "turn the world into hell" (p. 456), if females were the humans who spoke for society--for humanity--if they created myths of origin and structured cultures; or, if females and males in truth recognized each other as equals, treated each other as equals, and were thereby capable of creating culture together. In other words, if the "patriarchal kingdom of culture" were not patriarchal, and not a kingdom, and if connectedness rather than combative binary oppositions structured culture(s), then commonalities rather than differences might fundamentally motivate and define human action, and in ways that would move us in the direction Peterson tries to move us, i.e., toward "our infinite capacity for good." Taking just such a critical perspective on the "patriarchal system," Peterson might be willing to examine the structure of "the society of men" and determine how it eventuates in the morality it does. After all, if "morality, at its most fundamental level, is an emergent property of social interaction, embodied in individual behavior, implicit in the value attributed to objects and situations, grounded (unconsciously) in procedural knowledge" (p. 391-92), then whatever morality we have is a morality of the society in which we live, and an unfailingly scrupulous examination and critique of "the society of men" in which we live is mandatory. It may be that the kind of order a patriarchal system or patriarchal kingdom of culture produces is not the kind of order conducive to the morality Peterson envisions. The order the Great Father sets up, for example, is in opposition to Nature--in all Her forms, objective and well as culturally elaborated in myth, religion, and a host of other kinds of "narratives." It engenders a "dominant male" morality--and mentality--one which has evolutionary roots (Sheets-Johnstone 1994b), but one that is also unenlightened by insights into the positive moral capacities of humans that Peterson elucidates and personifies in the Hero. The question Peterson might ask himself is whether there is a connection between the opposition and the morality.
The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future by Riane Eisler is an international bestseller first published in 1987 and now in 26 foreign editions, including most European languages as well as Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish. The book introduces a new conceptual framework for studying social systems that pays particular attention to how a society constructs the roles and relations between the female and male halves of humanity. It proposes that underlying the long span of human cultural evolution is the tension between what Eisler calls the dominator or domination model and the partnership model. The book traces this tension in Western culture from prehistory to the present, and closes with two contrasting scenarios for the future. It challenges conventional views about cultural evolution.
This happened in the 60s, as far as I can tell, that we got this misbegotten idea that the way to conduct yourself as a responsible human being was to hold placards up to protest to change the viewpoints of other people and thereby usher in the utopia. I think that’s all appalling, I think it’s appalling. And I think it’s absolutely absurd that students are taught that that’s the way to conduct themselves in the world. First of all, if you’re nineteen or twenty or twenty one, you don’t bloody well know anything. You haven’t done anything. You don’t know anything about history, you haven’t read anything, you haven’t supported yourself for any length of time. You’ve been entirely dependent on your state and on your family for the brief few years of your existence. And the idea that you have any wisdom to determine how society should be reconstructed when you’re sitting in the absolute lap of luxury protected by processes you don’t understand… let’s call that a bad idea… The idea that what you should do to change the world is to find people you disagree with and shake paper on sticks at them, it’s just...
Thompson told the American troops that, if they opened fire on the Vietnamese civilians in the bunker, he and his crew would open fire on them.
Sounder » Thu Mar 15, 2018 3:20 pm wrote:I finally watched the Ian McGilchrist vid, very good observation that the right hemisphere watches for predators while the left looks for prey.
It would be nice if folk could forget their distaste enough to challenge or support ideas on their merits alone.
Last paragraph of the guardian article. This is why the top down people throw shit at Jordan“Your group identity is not your cardinal feature. That’s the great discovery of the west. That’s why the west is right. And I mean that unconditionally. The west is the only place in the world that has ever figured out that the individual is sovereign. And that’s an impossible thing to figure out. It’s amazing that we managed it. And it’s the key to everything that we’ve ever done right.”
JackRiddler » Fri Mar 16, 2018 8:21 pm wrote:Since today is 50 years to the day after the My Lai massacre, here's JP on the movement against the American War in Indochina, the Civil Rights Movement, students and youth in general, imaginary universities, and presumably feminists:This happened in the 60s, as far as I can tell, that we got this misbegotten idea that the way to conduct yourself as a responsible human being was to hold placards up to protest to change the viewpoints of other people and thereby usher in the utopia. I think that’s all appalling, I think it’s appalling. And I think it’s absolutely absurd that students are taught that that’s the way to conduct themselves in the world. First of all, if you’re nineteen or twenty or twenty one, you don’t bloody well know anything. You haven’t done anything. You don’t know anything about history, you haven’t read anything, you haven’t supported yourself for any length of time. You’ve been entirely dependent on your state and on your family for the brief few years of your existence. And the idea that you have any wisdom to determine how society should be reconstructed when you’re sitting in the absolute lap of luxury protected by processes you don’t understand… let’s call that a bad idea… The idea that what you should do to change the world is to find people you disagree with and shake paper on sticks at them, it’s just...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqi0jHn_7-I
What did this guy know?Thompson told the American troops that, if they opened fire on the Vietnamese civilians in the bunker, he and his crew would open fire on them.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la ... story.html
"...forget their distaste" say the white men who go on and on about how identity politics aren't important. When half the Earth's people are female and most are not white it's not a matter of distaste they have for your dismissal of their experiences. Especially their experiences of predator and prey which are extremely different than yours.
It would be nice if there was someplace on the internet where men did not always insist that their POV speaks for all of humanity.
PW says it much better than I can in her post above.
It would be nice if there was someplace on the internet where men did not always insist that their POV speaks for all of humanity.
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