Jordan Peterson is a colossal ass — an ignoramus who has become a professor of psychology and uses his tiny sliver of specific knowledge to grant him the authority to pontificate on every other field, about which he knows nothing. He’s putting together a website that will tell you how wrong, as determined by him, your college classes are.
They can use the website to distinguish between people who are credible and people who aren’t and maybe we can drop the damn enrollment in those horrible courses by 75% over the next three years … it’s in their best interest both, I would say, spiritually and economically to avoid those courses and those disciplines like the plague and then maybe we can get the disciplines that have become entirely corrupt and the ones that started that way to put themselves back together before they run themselves out of existence completely, and I might as well name a few of the disciplines that i think are particularly reprehensible to begin with … So, as I said already, women’s studies, and all the ethnic studies and racial studies, studies groups, man, those things have to go and the faster they go the better. It would have been better if they had never been part of the university to begin with as far as I can tell. Sociology, that’s corrupt. Anthropology, that’s corrupt. English literature, that’s corrupt. Maybe the worse offenders are the faculties of education.
I’ve got some rather awkward news for him: there are biologists (I’m not one of them) who think psychology is worthless and corrupt. There are physicists who think biology is trivial and useless — “stamp collecting”, I think they called it. A good scholar recognizes that there are domains of knowledge in which we lack expertise, and that our ignorance is not an indictment of the field.
And look at what he wants to get rid of! Women’s, ethnic, and racial studies — does he think that those groups don’t have unique problems and perspectives? Does he believe that White Man is the standard by which all should be measured?
Sociology, anthropology, and English literature have to go? Is he insane? These are rigorous disciplines in important subjects. That they are too difficult for Jordan Peterson to understand does not mean they are invalid.
And my god, he despises education faculty? He’s got a job at the University of Toronto. He is supposed to be an educator. Part of his responsibility is teaching, and teaching well, or he’s got no right to be a member of a distinguished university. His only pedagogical technique seems to involve standing up and stammering out bigotry at an audience — an audience of like-minded assholes who applaud in contempt of genuine academic disciplines, by the way.
I’m just trying to imagine an institution of higher learning where he got his way. At my university, we expect students to acquire some breadth of knowledge. We require students to take courses in literature, history, sociology, the arts, even — I know, it’s hard to believe — psychology, a discipline that must be corrupt if it tolerates this jerkwad. If we demolished all those other disciplines that are so essential to developing our students as well-rounded, comprehensive citizens of the world, they’d be reduced to inane Jordan Peterson clones and the kind of people who write for the Morris North Star (I notice they don’t care much for sociology, either).
Let’s call Peterson what he is: an anti-intellectual. He’s stupid and proud of it, and he’d like everyone else to be as stupid as he is, which is why he wants to destroy so many worthy and important academic disciplines. He’s a neurasthenic Rush Limbaugh, and about as well informed. I wouldn’t even trust him in his own field of psychology.
But he’s part of a rising wave of anti-intellectual barbarism, and he’s profiting well from it. He’s making half a million dollars a year from his gullible alt-right fans!
This is an effective strategy, though: create a boogeyman populated with shadowy figures out of your audience’s paranoid imaginations, and convince them to throw money at you for batting them away. We saw the same thing with the bullshit specter of “cultural Marxism”, a non-existent movement that was conjured from whole cloth by right-wing know-nothings.
Can I be a Palaeo-Marxist Intersectional Marxo-Engelsist Cultural Communo-Marxist Anti-masculist please?
Or, failing that, some kind of powerful High Elf magic user?
In this fantasy, you can be anything you want!
Reminder: This Jordan Peterson who crusades against the alleged discourse-eroding effects of postmodern relativism is the same Jordan Peterson who shields his own Jungian just-so storytelling from rational criticism behind an ad hoc redefinition of truth as ancestral survivability. What’s that he’s always saying? Start by cleaning your own room?
Would it be morally incorrect to make $0.5Mpa from Alt-Right fans and without their knowledge direct it to anti-alt-right organisations?
Or would just taking their money and laughing behind their backs from a deckchair on a tropical beach (low carbon of course) be OK too.
Because it looks like the easiest way of earning money I’ve seen.
@madtom: ask the protagonist of Vonnnegut’s ‘Mother Night’
Uh-oh. My son was just telling me last night that he’s listening to a pod-cast by this guy. Apparently the podcast has something to do with the psychological roots of religious belief. Some hope there because my son is not a believer. But if he buys into his viewpoint, I face endless hours of debate over it.
I have to laugh, Richard Feynman was famous for his contempt towards psychology. I don’t think Jordie would appreciate his comments.
Day late, dollar short, he is already into the deliver nothing, fundraise cause I’m oppressed phase of the con: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-edition-1.4396981/toronto-university-professor-says-controversial-website-on-hiatus-1.4396986
I agree that, as a field, psychology is relevant and valid. However, with the number of researchers that have been caught fabricating their results (e.g. Stapel, Smeesters, Diekstra) or having difficulty with the statistics behind their work, there are warning signs that the field does need more rigour in its research environment.
you can say that literally about ANY field of science. really.
targeting any specific field just makes you look ignorant of the wider problem eroding away at science in general.
I have a BA in Physical Anthropology at one of the University of California campuses. In addition to all my major and related classes, I almost had enough courses for a major in Religious Studies too. Also 4 languages. And graduate work in Ecology. I use a lot of that today, decades later. So, it comes more in handy than most people think. This ass you wrote about is like a lot of folks I encounter–ignorant, as you said, and proud of it. Can you believe I just read (and responded to–turns out I know something of the topic) a post about how wonderful the Dark Ages in Europe were? He claimed that average people (who, I might add, had been farming for millennia) had to be *taught to farm* by do-nothing monks and the christian church. So, he blathered on, the Dark Ages weren’t so dark after all. Idiot. Unfortunately there are a lot of people out there like that. Don’t get your blood pressure up over it. (A piece of advice I should take myself.)
Should we be surprised that some big fan of the alt-right is literally pushing for the ultimate in political correctness?
Whether or not there’s a web site involved, the judging of the legitimacy of content is clearly the equivalent of judging whether or not that content can be “correct” based on the political interpretations of professor alt-right. What a snowflake, who doesn’t want university courses to happen if he doesn’t feel they are politically correct for his personal comfort situation. Sad.
Anti-intellectual, sure, but only as far as fields outside of his interest are concerned.
I prefer to call him a philistine.
Also: How naive does one have to be think to think the alt-right child-men who comprise the majority of Peterson’s fanbase will only use a resource like this to “name and avoid”? This site is going to be used to harass people, and probably not just the instructors. Peterson’s contributing to a hostile environment for both faculty and students.
should be a band:
pmnmcmectgy
pnctctctgy
PmnMcMactgy
.
or
.
.
SuckyBabyWankers
oooommm
Bruce @12:
The alt-right has always been special snowflakes who want to push political correctness. They can’t stand the idea of anyone else intruding new ideas into their safe space, which is anywhere they might see something.
To be fair, they didn’t conjure “cultural marxism” from thin air.
They stole it from the nazis.
https://news.vice.com/story/jordan-peterson-scraps-plans-for-website-targeting-indoctrination-cult-classes
Supposedly he put his evil plan on hiatus.
s/
Archangelo Spumoni, proud music major in an earlier life. I know a little about Western music and pritnear nothing about anything else, probably making me a prime candidate for clowns like Peterson.
This is from his site: “He has flown a hammer-head roll in a carbon-fiber stunt plane . . . .”
Bullshit. A hammerhead is a TURN. It is not a ROLL. One of your very first maneuvers in aerobatics training is a hammerhead. It is NOT a roll. So he is probably full of bullshit on everything else.
Do not go flying with some clown who claims he does a hammerhead ROLL. Go the other direction at once.
s/
Archangelo Spumoni, music major who made is living in the aviation industry for multiple decades.
I think that
“odincookies”
is a really groovy nym.
re: roll vs turn
I knew that.
Thank you to archangelospumoni for actually typing it for all to see.
Him and his supporters look like they’re one step away from a school book burning. Scary.
Nah, those are the ones he classified as merely “corrupt”. They just have to be refocused, presumably on white men.
Even if Jordie Jerkoff got his orwellian thought policing website up, what are the chances that it would make a serious dent in the attendance of these classes? He’s quite likely seriously overestimating how many students are going to take his ramblings about “post-modern neo-marxists” seriously, or even be aware of the site. We all know what this site would really be used for; giving Peterson’s shitwit cult of personality a list of targets to send death threats to.
That’s the same people demanding that we debate Nazis, give them room, take them serious, right?
The same people who will wail and rant and rage about content notes in a class description being censorship that kill critical thinking, right?
Meh. If their group is that gullible, this makes them a prime target for grifters. Madthom1999 @4 is on to something.
And once they are homeless and destitute, they will have no extra energy for harassing anyone.
OT, FYI
“Locals say Roy Moore was banned from the Gadsden Mall in the 70’s for ‘repeatedly’ hitting on teen Girls” https://www.rawstory.com/2017/11/locals-say-roy-moore-was-banned-from-the-gadsen-mall-in-the-70s-for-repeatedly-hitting-on-teen-girls/
Aaah, Psychology! He’s such a credit to a discredited field.
@cartomancer #1:
Splitter!
What he’s basically saying is that fields of study whose practitioners are mostly opposed to his ideology should be abolished, or at least purged of “corrupt” elements. This guy sounds like a wannabe totalitarian dictator who fortunately does not have the power to put his ideas into effect, but is trying to do the next worse thing by encouraging others to threaten and harass anyone who disagrees with him.
@Bruce #12:
No, no, no! Political correctness is an evil fiction used by the left to insidiously denigrate good, upstanding, real men and to impurify their precious bodily fluids. But when rational, clear-thinking men rightly silence certain elements of speech and thought it is to protect society from the dangerous subversives who desire nothing more than the overthrow of common sense and the corruption of everyone with their filth.
In addition to all of the many other horrific problems with Peterson’s statements: He is very bad at being a psychology professor. A good psychologist can’t dismiss any of sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, gender studies, or ethnic studies / racial studies.
archangelospumoni @19
Also, I have never heard an actual pilot us the phrase “stunt plane” to describe an aerobatic plane.
From the wackypedia
So a hammerhead is all yaw and no roll, therefore Jordan Peterson is all hat and no cattle. I wonder if he ever drove a Subeam Tiger with a 327.
Speaking of the cult of ignorance https://www.sott.net/article/313177-The-cult-of-ignorance-in-the-United-States-Anti-intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-of-America
Why won’t you debate him?