Sorry, buckos, it’s another comment on Jordan Peterson. But I think he’s losing it. He’s on a lengthy world tour and is posting delusional missives about his mental state.
So it’s 2:39 a.m. in Oslo, Norway. I woke up in a too-hot hotel room out of a fitful nightmare, which I can only partially remember. I haven’t had a dream that I could recall even that clearly in a very long period of time. The last one was about traveling and speaking and not getting enough to eat. That was about six months ago. It occurred just before I embarked on what has now been a nine-month, 85-city world tour. I am on a very restricted diet, eating only beef and water, as a consequence of what appears to be a rather intractable auto-immune disease. I was concerned at some deep unconscious level about what might go wrong if I set out to talk with 250,000 people: If I could not eat, then I could not think and then things would not go well. Hence the nightmare. It was a warning of what might go wrong (and has not).
Has too.
I don’t remember my dreams very often, either, but when I do, they tend to be surreal and sort of playful (I’m one of those lucid dreamers). I don’t think I’ve ever had a violent dream about beating people up — maybe it’s because I eat a healthy diet — but it seems to be one of his themes.
In this dream I was speaking to a young man. He was very garrulous and irritating; he was unkempt, poorly put together, and he simply would not shut up. Everything he said was designed to provoke and to test. He finally pushed me beyond my limit of tolerance. I grabbed him, physically, and threw him against the wall. It was like wrestling with dough.
In my dream, I wrestled my opponent to the ground. He was still talking, mindlessly, mechanically, rapidly, nonstop. I bent his wrists to force his knuckles into his mouth. His arms bent like rubber and, even though I managed the task, he did not stop babbling.
You’d think a psychologist would be able to provide some insight into all this. But no. It was because he had a bad experience with a French journalist the day before. He was resentful because the journalist wouldn’t swallow the bullshit he peddles, so he had a dream about forcing him to accept what he said. His response is to dehumanize someone who disagreed with him.
I hadn’t spent two hours talking to a person. The person wasn’t there, or was barely there (even though the journalist had the makings, I would say, of a fine young man). I couldn’t reach him. Instead, I had a very irritating discussion with an ideologically possessed puppet and that was both too familiar and too unpleasant. I had a shower, and we went for a steak, and we tried to put the episode behind us, as we must, under such conditions, when the next city and the next audience beckons, the very next day. But the part of me that lurks underneath, dreaming, still had something to say.
And that something was SHUT UP!
, and also to regurgitate that NPC meme that’s making the rounds of the right-wing trolls.
He’s not holding up well under the strain of his diet and finding out that a lot of people can see right through him. Poor man.
“ideologically possessed puppet” is just too good to be true as a case of projection!
So… he’s wishing he could shut up his younger self before he ended up his current self?
Hmmmm. Very interesting. Next, why don’t you tell us something about your mother, Dr. Peterson?
@nomdeplume:
Nope. I think it’s just good enough to be a perfect case of projection.
“People who disagree with me are philosophical zombies, so I win.”
Well, if it helps him sleep at night. Although it seems it didn’t in this case.
Also, I’ve heard about his diet before. I’d expect him to get a lot worse in the coming months. How he can genuinely think this won’t come back to bite him in the ass is beyond me. He’s smart, supposedly?
@Saganite:
You forget, his diet is in response to a “rather intractable auto-immune disease”. I think the theory is that he will eat only steak and water until his immune system ceases to attack cells it believes are foreign to his body. At that point, I’m sure, he will no longer eat steak.
Since dreams are generated out of each person’s subconscious, it is like a weird projection of yourself. (That is why it is so unfair for a wife to punch her husband after catching him kissing her sister in her dreams!.). He ought to try reflecting on the meaning of each thing and person in his dream and discover what it is he is projecting to himself about himself.
@Crip Dyke:
I fully expect him to attribute any ill effects of his diet to said auto-immune disease and double-down.
Best dream I’ve ever had was the one in which the flu shot prevented the zombie apocalypse. Sadly I was an evil witch who had tried to bring about said apocalypse. When people caught up they chased me and finally they came towards me on a bridge, from both sides, and they were triumphant and I cackled, told them they were stupid, jumped and flew off.
That was a fun dream.
Peterson’s, not so much.
I mean, we can all see that this is unhealthy, as is his diet, but he won’t even notice that it’s his own doings that are destroying him.
An absurdly anti-scientific diet prescribed by his daughter (who has no medical or nutritional knowledge) for a vague condition that he has not had confirmed by a rheumatologist or immunologist. What a shining beacon for skeptics!
With his diet his rectum must look like a tree trunk.
“He was resentful because the journalist wouldn’t swallow the bullshit he peddles, so he had a dream about forcing him to accept what he said. His response is to dehumanize someone who disagreed with him.”
Also fits Trump/CNN
Sorry, Jordan, but when someone dreams about food, as in, craving certain items or not getting enough to eat, it’s because they’re not. Nothing so common in starving or malnourished people as to dream about food.
And, for somone with a mood disorder, such a restricted diet, supplemented only by vodka (according to him), is a really bad idea. If he’s taking any medicines for the disorder, restriction to beef, salt, and vodka is diastrous.
He’s just driving all the serotonin out of his lobster-like brain, you can see why he’d be having dreams of violence.
Well, if he insists on sticking to this idiotic idea, I suspect there won’t be much coming from him to criticize or ridicule in the future. You’d think he would at least understand that his oh so wonderful brain that
generatesvomits all this “wisdom” needs some friggin carbs for fuel since it uses 20+% of the body’s energy. It wasn’t exactly working right before, and now he seems to be deliberately fucking up his cognitive abilities.I wonder if he’ll smarten up after his upcoming hospital stay.
Maybe he forgot that thermostats in Europe are in Celsius? If you set your Norway hotel room thermostat to 70, you will feel a little hot.
(I’m kidding, of course. Room thermostats rarely go above 30°C. It’s the beef and/or the vodka.)
He’s going to be in a hospital by Christmas. He’s clearly stressed, and he’s eating badly — not just poorly, badly. This can’t end well.
As much as I hate to admit it, he’s Canadian, and should be used to Celcius on thermostats.
One thing that’s even worse than an all-beef diet is an all-bullshit diet. (He really does sound like he’s in a pitiful state.)
Giliell@8: “Sadly I was an evil witch who had tried to bring about said apocalypse. When people caught up they chased me and finally they came towards me on a bridge, from both sides, and they were triumphant and I cackled, told them they were stupid, jumped and flew off.”
Silly witch—you could just have jumped off the bridge into your swamp! Have you learned nothing from Dr. Peterson?
… eating only beef and water…
No wonder poor Peterson has all these problems – he forgot the ketchup!
@5: You think he’ll try the water-only diet? Maybe we can persuade him to become a breatharian!
Not restrictive enough. I’d suggest cutting out the water. Not much nutritional value. Might generate some cool dreams too.
I once dreamt I was losing all my teeth, but it turned out I just had a lump of driftwood in my mouth. Obviously!
I do find it interesting though – he once complained that you can’t really debate women, because you’re not allowed to assault them, and now he relates a dream in which a debate doesn’t go his way and he resorts to assault. Is he just a useless debater? (I don’t think it would be a dangerous bet to assume that he is, but I’ve never bothered seeking out any of his debates to find out (to my mind he’s too much like William Lane Craig – lots of rhetorical obfuscation without a great deal of substance, and a legendarily annoying manner of speech.))
This crackpot’s pot was cracked long ago.
In case it hasn’t been mentioned yet…
what makes you all think he isn’t outright lying about his diet?
he lies about everything else.
I’m no doctor, but in the video you posted earlier, Dr. Peterson looks really quite unwell compared to his 2016-ish videos. He seems to have lost a lot of weight and his whole torso seems very tensed up. He also sounds mildly hysterical and the handwaving is getting a bit out of control, this from a chronic waver-of-hands-while-talking myself.
He’ll be okay. A fellow tends to get kind of listless and pale just before shedding the old outer layer. Once he molts, he’ll be all full of ginger again, and probably get his appetite back.
@octopod
Wild hand waving is an occupational hazard for academics
https://youtu.be/bwAioN2mtsA
It seems like Peterson has very serious psychological problems that aren’t being properly addressed because of how he and his followers rationalize things.
Can’t do that. As we learned in the 80s, ketchup is a vegetable.
Dreams are things that didn’t happen to people and are therefore as about as interesting as how much custard you can safely store in a zeppelin
…and then he realized that the young man was himself!
Oh, I bet you would be able to easily find someone interested in proper large scale storage of custards.
probably someone from here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/food-science/custards
Unusually prescient and honest of him. He isn’t eating well. He can’t think, though he never could. And things aren’t going well. Perfect score.
I dunno. It gets harder and harder each time. Square-cube law, basically. Bigger and bigger carapaces take more and more energy to struggle out of when they molt off, so mortality goes up. This Peterson specimen is a pretty good size. He could be in for a bad time.
‘Crawl back under your rock,’ Swedish foreign minister tells Canadian professor Jordan B Peterson https://www.thelocal.se/20181108/crawl-back-under-your-rock-swedish-foreign-minister-tells-canadian-professor-jordan-peterson
…Actually, if he is molting, crawling to a protected place under a rock is good advice.
Re. what species he is, I would suggest the arthropod Prador, the hostile civilization of Neal Asher’s science fiction.
Since his talk with Camille Paglia he has been beset with thoughts that some women have intellectually valuable things to say to men. His anima is attacking him as only a Jungian chaos dragon could and his manly cells are working overtime. The only thing to do is eat manly meals of steaks to stave off the creeping femininity and he hasn’t pooped for a month.
The worst kind of bully…the type that pummels you with your own fists. Time for a feeding tube stocked with Metamucil before this guy explodes like Mr Creosote in a spray of rage and fermented impacted feces.
@NitricAcid: I’ve met older Canadians still resentful of Trudeau Sr’s imposition of the “French” system on the country. I could see Peterson being an anti-metric crank.
Huh. Typical that this was his reaction to one of the few people of any gender who could conceivably out-bullshit him!
34 jack lecou
Oh, I told him. “Bubeleh, get an inside skeleton! You’re just not made for this!” Of course, that made him hotter than ever to do it his damn way, which in fact I suspected it would.
I can sort of sympathize with you, Jordy B Petemoss, but the thing is those are your fans. You built it and they came, only now they’re annoying you just as much as the rest of us. This is your subconscious telling you that you’ve messed up, but you’re too assure of yourself- hence why you rarely ever make any sense to anyone not wallowing in their diminishing undue and unearned entitlements, much like yourself- to ever realize this much less admit it and do something about it.
What I’m saying, Jordy, is that terrible man is your life’s work. You may not have created it, but you helped mold it into shape and gave it words. And, you are welcome to it.
Obviously he should have had steak and lobster.
Is his writing always this self-conscious and stilted?
Also, Ideologically Possessed Puppet is my k-pop Ted Nugent/Lee Greenwood cover band.
I don’t think he’s cracking so much as he’s always been cracked:
Source: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/2018/05/25/i-was-jordan-petersons-strongest-supporter-now-i-think-hes-dangerous.html
He clearly believes he’s on a holy mission to fix the world as its one true savior, and his every experience is interpreted through that lens. A weird dream becomes a portent of things to come instead of just being a weird dream. I will say that the fact this supposed free speech warrior’s first instinct in his dream was to use violence to silence someone saying something he disliked is illuminating (but not surprising).
Question: Why is he eating only steak and water? I heard from someone on here that its to treat an immunological disease, but that doesn’t make any sense to me. I really would like to know because as much as I find this man an idiot, I don’t want to see him die from low blood sugar.
@45, as I said, in one interview he said that vodka was the only carbohydrate that doesn’t worsen his “immune disorder”.
So, if he’s keeping his blood sugar up only with that, he is in a real bad way.
What’s important to remember about dreams is that the dreamer is the producer, director, writer, the narrator and all the characters.
Just to note, protein can be converted to carbs in the body, but it’s a messy process.
Shouldn’t scurvy be almost inevitable if he’s really sticking to this diet? Where is he getting vitamin C?
this link is the first thing that pops up. https://www.healthline.com/health/aip-diet
“…as a consequence of what appears to be a rather intractable auto-immune disease.”
Not that I care enough to actually, you know, research this, but did he get an actual medical diagnosis? Because this sounds like something he pulled up from the University Hospital of Bad Google.
@32 ichtyic
Top link, I withdraw my hypothesis
I was really taken aback with the comment where he was forcing the figure’s hands into its own mouth. That just screams childish bully, and I had a very visceral reaction that I never want to hear from him again.
@49 That was my thought too! If he has really been VERY strict with this beef & water only diet (no lamb allowed? Buffalo? Venison? Elk? Moose? So many questions!) where the heck is he getting vitamin C?? Because i would think after a few months scurvy would’ve set in. Perhaps he is in the early stages of it now. Dangerous – can be fatal. Perhaps he is taking vitamin supplements?