Jordan Peterson is back?


I’d noticed something peculiar in the last week — a surge of traffic and comments to some old videos I made criticizing Jordan Peterson, and they tended to be the usual smug BS from fanatics who are appalled that anyone (that is, lib cucks) would dare to reject the wisdom of Daddy.

Just today I found out that Peterson is back at work making his videos, dang it. He’s threatening to finish a book about the Old Testament, so get ready for more religious dogma and revitalized fans. The sanctimonious stupidity is back!

Comments

  1. Reginald Selkirk says

    Right-wing idiots are faking Snopes reports

    In October 2020, a series of threads was posted to the anonymous internet forum 4Chan as part of operation “Snopes-Piercer,” a smear campaign with the stated goal of “red-pilling some normies” — internet slang for a propaganda technique in which distorted, fabricated, or skewed information is used to further a self-determined “truth.” In order to “red-pill” these people (one thread noted that “boomers” were the primary target), the plan was to create and circulate doctored screenshots of Snopes fact checks to make it appear as if Snopes fact-checkers addressed claims that we had not…

  2. says

    Why, on earth would I take advice from somebody who fucked up his own life so badly unless it was “don’t do whatever I did”.

  3. raven says

    He explains “cultural marxism” as a concept more clearly than anyone else I’ve seen, which is nice.

    Cultural Marxism doesn’t even exist.
    It’s simply a few scary words mixed together by morons like Jordan Peterson and spammers like you.

    Why should I listen to some guy who managed to get himself hopelessly addicted to benzodiazepines and has spent the last few years wandering around Eastern Europe seeing one quack after another?

  4. nomdeplume says

    The Peterson Cult is like a little brother of the Trump Cult. Cult leaders can do no wrong.

  5. raven says

    Jordan Peterson is dumb and crazy.
    He is though, good for a laugh on a slow day.
    Some of his greater hits below once again.

    Forget that Enforced Monogamy Red Herring.
    Sure it is disgusting and cuckoo.
    It’s also just one of many Peterson’s misogynistic comments.
    Jordan Peterson is a sick puppy!!! No matter how horrible a human being you think he is, the reality if far worse.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-i
    The poster below on quora has some Peterson quotes. I normally don’t like to copy other people’s comments but in this case it’s important enough that I will with attribution. The sources are at the original article reached by the link.
    My replies are in bold.

    Riley May
    Answered May 4, 2018 · Author has 70 answers and 83.4k answer views
    Because he says things like:
    ..women have a subconscious wish for brutal male domination
    This is bullcrap. He doesn’t know this.
    ..that it’s unfortunate that men can’t control women who say crazy things because they aren’t allowed to hit them
    How about crazy men like Peterson. We aren’t allowed to hit them either.
    Peterson admires violence and is frustrated that he can’t be violent towards women.
    Guy is a sick puppy.

    ..young women are outraged because they don’t have a baby to suckle
    Gibberish. He doesn’t know this. It’s just a misogynistic insult.
    more….

    ..if a woman doesn’t want to have kids, there’s something wrong with her
    Gibberish. It’s an opinion or an assertion without proof. It’s also wrong.
    It’s a sick puppy thing again.

    ..and says “The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.” –
    despite women lacking basic human rights and legally being owned by men throughout history
    The oppression was/is blatantly true and obvious.

    ..says stuff like “Men cannot oppose pathological women because chivalry demands they keep their most potent weapons sheathed” on twitter
    That violence thing again. I would be very surprised if Peterson doesn’t have a history of violence against women, children, and pets. Anything smaller and weaker than himself.

    Peterson is a sick puppy reflecting people’s hate back to them for money.
    He also glorifies violence against groups he doesn’t like, especially women.

  6. raven says

    Peterson and violence
    Unlike PZ Myers, Jordan Peterson makes a point of often using violent language and comes close to flat out calling for violence.
    He is just another in a long line of hack right wingnut hate merchants like Alex Jones, Ann Coulter, or Rush Limbaugh so this is no surprise whatsoever.

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/how-dangerous-is-jordan-b-peterson-the-rightwing-professor-who-hit-a-hornets-nest

    He describes debate as “combat” on the “battleground” of ideas and hints at physical violence, too. “If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect,” he told Paglia last year, adding that it is harder to deal with “crazy women” because he cannot hit them.
    and
    Interview in Reason Magazine
    “It’s very helpful for people to hear that they should make themselves competent and dangerous and take their proper place in the world.”

    Stossel scoffs, “Competent and dangerous? Why dangerous?”

    “There’s nothing to you otherwise,” Peterson replies. “If you’re not a formidable force, there’s no morality in your self-control. If you’re incapable of violence, not being violent isn’t a virtue. People who teach martial arts know this full well. If you learn martial arts, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously you learn to control it … Life is a very difficult process and you’re not prepared for it unless you have the capacity to be dangerous.”

    Peterson comes close to flat out calling for violence.
    He is also a merchant of hate, hate for women, atheists, Muslims, trans, nonwhites, the educated, Progressives.
    Add them up.
    This is most of our society.

    This is why Peterson and his fanboy trolls are getting a huge amount of push back.
    They are all haters and violence is a real possibility here.
    Wherever you have hate speech, you will have hate violence.
    We have the right and responsibility to defend ourselves and that is what we are doing.

  7. gjpetch says

    Soo many of my male friends and workmates have become fans of Peterson over recent years, maybe even the majority of them. I find it really worrying. Aside from the noxious views on women, and trans people, and so on, I’m also just concerned that Peterson is dangerously mentally unwell? Maybe I’m wrong, but when I look at his diagrams, it strikes me that this isn’t a psychologically healthy person.

  8. evolutionaryautistic says

    Seeing the hypocrisy of evangelicals like this is partly why I became an athiest.

  9. Paul Buckner says

    “Cultural Marxism doesn’t even exist.
    It’s simply a few scary words mixed together by morons like Jordan Peterson and spammers like you.”

    Hmm, looks like you jumped the gun there, hotshot. Maybe you should look into the podcast before you crap all over it (and the person who linked it) as the two part episode of Behind the Bastards is a comprehensive takedown of Peterson’s cult of personality, and not some fanboy gushing. It’s obvious that you have strong feelings about Jordan Peterson; try not to be blinded by the hate.

  10. raven says

    Maybe you should look into the podcast before you crap all over it (and the person who linked it) as the two part episode of Behind the Bastards is a comprehensive takedown of Peterson’s cult of personality, and not some fanboy gushing.

    I don’t follow links I don’t recognize posted by nyms I’ve never seen before.
    At best it is usually a waste of time.
    At worst, it is a proven way to pick up malware and wreck your computer!!!

    If the poster can’t be bothered to express an idea in his own words to explain it, I can’t be bothered to follow dubious links.
    Why don’t you try, you know, posting something that has some thought behind it and is on topic.
    You can start with cultural marxism.

  11. Akira MacKenzie says

    Raven:

    Behind the Bastards is on our side. They are anything but allies to Peterson or his stupid ideas.

  12. Rob Grigjanis says

    quotetheunquote @2:

    He’s like Nosferatu, that one, just won’t stay dead…

    Vlad the I’m Paler.

  13. says

    There was a brief mention of “Jewish Bolshevism” (an antisemetic narrative about the jews being responsible for the russin revolution) in relation to “social marxism”. I think I’ve seen that mentioned before and meant to investigate. I hope they say more in part two.

    JP does not look goog after part one.

  14. PaulBC says

    I don’t know much about Peterson, but the all steak and vodka diet is enough to set off my quack alarms. And the notion of “12 rules for life” sounds like self-help BS. When I look at the rules themselves, I find them unimpressive and cutesy.

    Rule 5 “Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them” seems especially problematic. What if my kids have the right idea and I’m the monster? Or even if they’re just a little annoying, as we all can be, what if I’m the one who’s being a total prick?

    From skimming, I believe the point is to raise your kids keeping in mind the objective that they should not seem a nuisance to a reasonable bystander. I endorse that goal wholeheartedly. But Peterson’s edict is something else. It presupposes both that you have total control of your kids’ behavior and that your judgment should be the last word. I can only assume (if he is “telling the truth or at least not lying”) that he considers this the case for himself and that where I say enough is enough (even if I didn’t know about the steak and vodka diet).

    What amazes me is that anyone takes this kind of crap seriously.

  15. PaulBC says

    It would be cool if Jordan Peterson had spent the last dead for tax purposes like Hotblack Desiato in Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy. Since I’m not a lawyer and know nothing at all about Canadian tax law, this seems at least remotely plausible to me. Please don’t ruin it!

    Or course, if he could continue this tax dodge it would be even better for all concerned.

  16. says

    evolutionaryautistic@11 Peterson isn’t an evangelical. He’s apparently a “sophisticated theology”/cultural Christian of some sort. When asked if God exists he said “I think the proper response to that is No, but I’m afraid He might exist.” The fact he’s a psychologist would probably make him suspect in a lot of Evangelical circles.

  17. PaulBC says

    “I think the proper response to that is No, but I’m afraid He might exist.”

    That’s where the valium comes in handy!

  18. raven says

    Peterson isn’t an evangelical.

    Peterson hates atheists.

    Rationalwiki
    Peterson: No, he [Stalin] was killing people because, as a rational man, his conclusion [was] that life was so unbearable that it should be wiped out. Uh, you know, you guys who –(deleted gibberish) And if you don’t have any faith, like any faith, in an ultimate authority that says, essentially, that life is sacred, what’s to stop you from stopping that (that being mass murder)?
    and
    Proof itself, of any sort, is impossible, without an axiom (as Godel proved[note 9]). Thus faith in God is a prerequisite for all proof.[194]
    and
    [Answer:] Nazism was an atheist doctrine. So was Marxism.[213]

    No surprise that Peterson hates atheists. He hates the vast majority of the world’s people.

    The Peterson quotes are wrong on all the facts as well.
    It’s basically gibberish.
    He got Godel wrong on proof, faith in god is not necessary for anything, Stalin didn’t kill because of atheism, Nazism was a pure xian production start to finish, and Marxism isn’t an atheist doctrine, it is a theory about economics and politics.

  19. PaulBC says

    Proof itself, of any sort, is impossible, without an axiom (as Godel proved[note 9]). Thus faith in God is a prerequisite for all proof.

    I can only guess at his misunderstanding of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which is:

    The first incompleteness theorem states that in any consistent formal system F within which a certain amount of arithmetic can be carried out, there are statements of the language of F which can neither be proved nor disproved in F

    Informally, what it says is that there are some statements in first order logic that do not have a finite-length formal proof, or in other words, you can add either the statement or its logical inverse to the axioms and get another consistent formal system.

    It was counterintuitive in Hilbert’s time, but less so now. The expectation that any statement should be resolved one way or the other with a finite length proof is no more reasonable than the expectation (refuted earlier by Ruffini and Abel) that a quintic solution should have a closed form algebraic solution. There are limits to what you can do in any mathematical formalism.

    If someone gives you anything reasonably complex in mathematics and insists there is some finite-length series of symbols that tells you the “answer” your intuition should be that there is not unless there is a good reason to believe otherwise. Even something as simple looking as the Collatz conjecture has natural generalizations that are undecidable. As Barbie memorably put it, “Math is hard.”

    It is a fundamental result in mathematical logic, but it has no bearing at all on our comprehension of truth on a day to day basis. The latter is so far removed from mathematical certainty as to be laughable. Pulling Gödel into a discussion about believe in God is a huge red flag. What we understand about reality is based on scientific induction, which is at best a heuristic. It is still the main thing we have.

    While I do not definitively rule out the existence of God, I will note that he has not responded to any of my voice mails.

  20. leerudolph says

    PaulBC@30: “are there any self-identified “cultural Marxists”? If not, it’s a very weak concept.”
    I am very confident that there are no self-identified “Christian-baby-sacrificing, blood-harvesting Jews”, yet that concept has “existed” in the same sense as “cultural Marxism” (if I understand what you mean by “in that sense”), and it is a concept has been very strong at various times in various places, in the sense (which isn’t yours, presumably) that it has led to self-identified Christian baby-protectors other-identifying Jews as “Christian baby sacrificers and blood harvesters” and then killing them.

    TL;DR: I don’t understand what you mean by “weak concept” (surely not some mathematical-logic derived meaning?).

  21. PaulBC says

    leerudolph@31

    I don’t understand what you mean by “weak concept” (surely not some mathematical-logic derived meaning?).

    I mean that terms are not very interesting when they are made up by accusers for something that doesn’t really exist. “People who accuse others of being ‘cultural marxists'” is a much more interesting category, since it’s grounded in reality, and it’s the subject of the SPLC article.

    I just think it’s usually a bad idea to take terminology invented by conspiracy theorists and start throwing it around without qualification. At the very least, it gives them credibility.

  22. PaulBC says

    @31 In fact, I can’t really do any better than SPLC

    In a nutshell, the theory posits that a tiny group of Jewish philosophers who fled Germany in the 1930s and set up shop at Columbia University in New York City devised an unorthodox form of “Marxism” that took aim at American society’s culture, rather than its economic system.

    The theory holds that these self-interested Jews — the so-called “Frankfurt School” of philosophers — planned to try to convince mainstream Americans that white ethnic pride is bad, that sexual liberation is good, and that supposedly traditional American values — Christianity, “family values,” and so on — are reactionary and bigoted. With their core values thus subverted, the theory goes, Americans would be quick to sign on to the ideas of the far left.

    The very term, “cultural Marxism,” is clearly intended to conjure up xenophobic anxieties. But can a theory like this, built on the words of long-dead intellectuals who have little discernible relevance to normal Americans’ lives, really fly? As bizarre as it might sound, there is some evidence that it may. Certainly, those who are pushing the theory seem to believe that it is an important one.

    If you don’t like “weak concept” how about “wild conspiracy theory, utterly divorced from reality, and promoted by bigots.”

  23. PaulBC says

    By the way, I was mostly thinking about raven’s statement

    Cultural Marxism doesn’t even exist.

    How about if we recast it as “Actual ‘cultural Marxists’ do not exist.” Is this reasonable?

    E.g. how much do I need to know about “pizzeria-based child sex trafficking”? I mean, there is no lack of people with a lot to say on the matter. Is that sufficient grounds for insisting it “exists” or would it be germane to point out that there are no known instances of child sex trafficking rings being run out of pizzerias?

  24. hemidactylus says

    As a pejorative “Cultural Marxism” is a catchall for capturing Frankfurt School, poststructuralism, and recent developments in social critique that focuses more on social justice. Pluckrose and Lindsay, to their credit, distance themselves from the canard.

    In that Horkheimer and Adorno seemed to be addressing superstructure from a somewhat post-Marxist framing I dunno. A lot of critical theory and pomo adopts a weird Marxist-Freudian pastiche.

    Fromm, Habermas, and Rorty each approached cultural issues in their own manner and it is an insult to lump them all into some movement called Theory, Cultural Marxism, or whatever. The new framing by Pluckrose and Lindsay does no justice to these independent thinkers.

  25. raven says

    There is an obscure school of thought sometimes called cultural marxism.
    The right wingnuts like Peterson who throw the term around don’t know that though and could care less.

    To them it is just a scary phrase to use as an insult because it has the word marxism in it.