Professor Jordan Peterson

[David]

Is Peterson still on iTunes? I see they removed Alex Jones, the fucking fascists. 

[Chest Rockwell]

Alex Jones is a piece of shit who used his platform to harass the families of shooting victims. If I had a streaming platform I'd sack him off too.

[David]

I was being sarcastic.

[Keith Houchen]

This is absolutely fucking hilarious.

 

[David]

13 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

This is absolutely fucking hilarious.

 

Obviously a piss take, but it had me chuckling.

The dude has caught a break if she's as messy as he says, no guy needs that in his life.

[Chest Rockwell]

I saw that on reddit. If you go and look at the Jordan Peterson subreddit and read some of the other posts on there you'll see that it is almost certainly not a pisstake. I think you're forgetting how dumb kids are, generally.

Here it is on reddit, because Twitter is fucking shit, and reading words on screenshots in Twitter posts is garbage.

Bare in mind that the post and sub have now got a lot of attention so a lot of the responses and votes aren't coming from the usual population of that sub, so it's not representative of the norm.

[Brewster McCloud]

On 10/10/2018 at 5:01 PM, BomberPat said:

The problem with "oh, he's not as bad as Milo" or "he's not alt-right, it's just that his supporters are" is that the academic credibility he lends some of his statements (the glorified self-help book) is also reflected on to the rest - so when his readers think, "well, he was right about some of the advice he gave me", then it stands to reason that maybe he's right when he says that the rise of feminism and rejection of Christianity are killing western culture. It's not possible to separate "good psychologist" (debatable) from "right wing provocateur" in his public image when he's actively courting a specific audience, and using the reputation of the former to lend credibility to the latter.

And I don't buy the argument that he's not consciously associating himself with the right wing anyway. He's smart enough to know exactly what he's doing. And you give up any right to claim that you're not courting the "alt-right" the moment you start re-Tweeting Milo, and banging on about "professional victims" and "cultural Marxism".

As for academic dishonesty - he's Tweeted essays about erasure of POC in Medieval Europe, with a line taken completely out of context to support his argument (that European history is almost exclusively the history of white men), when the essay in question says the complete opposite. He knows that the vast majority of people will read the Tweet, but not bother with the essay. And he's not stupid enough to do so unknowingly - to me, that's academic dishonesty.

In terms of being outdated as a Psychologist - one of the things that brought him to public attention was his lectures on Bible studies, and on symbolism in the Bible. They're full of Jungian and pseudo-Freudian arguments that haven't been accepted as part of mainstream Psychology for decades. 

Aside from the lobster debacle, he once claimed that the common usage of intertwined serpents as a symbol in ancient cultures was evidence of a genetic memory of the DNA spiral - that's harkening back to the most mystical nonsense of Jung, and to 19th Century theosophy and occultism, with absolutely no basis in scientific thought or in folklore or anthropology (plenty has been written about the use of snakes as religious or cultural totems without reference to hypothetical race memory). It's archaic, pseudo-religious nonsense, and astounding to hear it from someone held up as a leading public intellectual.

 

He did an interview recently with The Idler magazine - I was disappointed, as it was incredibly pandering, when in previous issues they'd been somewhat critical of him. It was this interview that made me realise that his entire philosophy was just the Protestant Work Ethic dressed up in academic language, and trying to argue that it was a universal truth. During the interview, the Marxist notion that people freed from the trappings of work-as-toil would have more free time to take on more fulfilling endeavours - write poetry, create art, whatever it is they want to do. Peterson (rightly) pointed out that it was a somewhat bourgeois, classist notion to assume that's what everyone ultimately wanted to do, but then insisted that the majority of people only find value through work, and that creative people are a rare exception. This is utter bollocks, backed up by no evidence.

9

Sorry, I forgot to reply to this at the time. I agree with some of what you say, and you raise some good points. However, you make it seem like associating himself with the right wing would be wrong in itself, as if everyone has a duty to bow to the left. I've heard him say that he supports the death penalty in theory, and that he doesn't think Donald Trump is stupid, but other than that he's kept his political views fairly ambiguous. I'm pretty sure he is a Republican, or the Canadian equivalent, but so what? He shouldn't be taken to task on his politics as he's not a politician. 

As a psychologist, I'm under the impression that he uses Jung as an illustration/point of reference rather than an explicit endorsement. He also frequently references Dostoyevsky, in the sense that fiction can reveal truths about the human condition. I'd be really surprised if he was using Jungian techniques on his patients! 

As for the "Protestant Work Ethic" and his "glorified self-help book", I think there is merit in both. From personal experience, and having read his book, I wish he'd been around when I was an angry, single young man trying, pointlessly, to rebel against The Man and being bitter and depressed as a result. It sounds so obvious now, but having a job that you love doing really does help with mental health. His book would have worked wonders for me at the time, as I presume it is now doing for many. "Cultural Marxism" is the kind of label that tends to shut down conversation and acts as a "red flag" to the more hysterical members of the Left, but having dabbled in academia I know there's some truth in it. It's why I didn't go on to do a PHD in English literature; I was sick of being encouraged to apply Marxist/Queer/Feminist readings to authors who clearly had no intention of their work being discussed as such. If my work didn't express a critique of global capitalism, or "patriarchal hegemony" or whatever, then I wasn't going to get funded for it, so I buggered off out of it. Much to academia's eternal repent, I'm sure. 

[Keith Houchen]

18 minutes ago, Brewster McCloud said:

He shouldn't be taken to task on his politics as he's not a politician.

Everyone should be held accountable for their politics regardless if they're a politician or not.

[Brewster McCloud]

6 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

Everyone should be held accountable for their politics regardless if they're a politician or not.

Well, if they express them in public, especially, yes. I shouldn't have expressed it like that; rather, as Jordan Peterson hasn't declared his politics yet, we should stick to talking about his ostensibly non-political output. The lobsters and whatnot.

[Keith Houchen]

By using terms like "Cultural Marxism", you're expressing a political view.  Just because he hasn't said who he votes for doesn't mean he hasn't declared his politics.

[Brewster McCloud]

I disagree. You can be left leaning while still decrying cultural Marxism. 

[Brewster McCloud]

And, it shocks me how many people who claim to be left winged still have this notion that Karl Marx's philosophy isn't anything but a route to fascism and everything they claim to resent. 

[Keith Houchen]

But when you use that one example and pile it up with others, it's not exactly a stretch to conclude he isn't member of Momentum.

 

Besides, "Left leaning" can mean anything you want, can't it.  UKIP think the tories are left leaning for example. 

I bet Peterson endorses double posts, the monster.

[Brewster McCloud]

I do apologise for the double posting, it's because I'm an angry right wing nut who is sexually frustrated at the UKFF's patriarchal hegemony that is keeping the honest working poster down. 

"Left leaning" means what it always has; neither a good thing nor a bad thing to be. It all depends on how far you want to go with it. I am against the lunatic fringes of the left and right. 

[Keith Houchen]

6 minutes ago, Brewster McCloud said:

I do apologise for the double posting, it's because I'm an angry right wing nut who is sexually frustrated at the UKFF's patriarchal hegemony that is keeping the honest working poster down. 

You aren't quite at the stage of a former poster on here yet.  He got banned and set up 3 or 4 twitter accounts and constantly sent tweets to who he thought were the top posters on here DEMANDING to be reinstated.  The poor snowflake should've just set up a new account on here and saved time!  Wonder if his impotent rage still burns.