“In this age and time, men have nearly no rights,” Peterson explained to me. “We cannot be served in restaurants. We cannot legally drive cars. We are routinely shot at by police helicopters if we are seen breaking our 8:00 PM curfew… This is why society is decaying and now, more than ever, needs men who can be men.”
It honestly took me a second to realize this was parody, given the kind of supreme bullshit hyperbole “oppressed” straight white men have been coming up with lately. (E.g. “‘straight white male’ is the same as the n-word”), and isn’t particularly distinguishable from Peterson’s actual nonsense. (E.g. lobsters as a model for human beings.) We’ve gone straight into the heart of a Poe’s Law singularity (and come out somewhere profoundly weird).
You mean the NYT article?
His own words are beyond self-parody - subtle satire isn’t possible because it would necessarily involve inventing a less-insane version of Peterson.
Well, actually, Peterson IS stupid. Well, more accurately, very very light-weight. Certainly fatuous anyway. “…a dumb person’s idea of a smart person.” If he’s regarded as a deity on the “Intellectual Dark Web” the evil SJWs have very little to worry about.
The Something Awful article is a little weird, it is almost as if they don’t realize that the original article by Nellie Bowles was actually satirical itself. Like they aren’t very intelligent or something… Maybe there’s a pattern here!
Oh I wish boingboing hadn’t succumbed to this bullshit too. It’s obviously a sensationalist joke-exaggeration of people’s fantasies about Peterson. People left, right and center have glommed onto Peterson and taken what they like from his remarks and writings, not paying attention to detail and nuance. Lot of that going around, huh?
I’m wondering about Cory’s motivation to post this. Is he testing our gullibility?
And unfortunately, we have more than enough idiots (yes, I think he’s an idiot, synthesis is a language utterly foreign to his ilk) masquerading as Dark Thinkers in possession of similar ego that’d jump at the chance.
How can you argue with “man up and clean your room because feminism is Tiamat the primordial chaos who had to get put in her place by some man gods to allow creation to progress”?
If it weren’t being delivered seriously; the “my symbolic associations are actually the Kantian categories that inescapably define human knowledge of reality” argument would be a snarky punchline.
It might also spur questions of the “if your categories are so fundamental that anyone who lacks them would be an alien; why are you controversial?” flavor.
I agree. The Something Awful piece is ham handed satire but at least honestly portrayed as satire. The NYT piece is something quite a bit darker, a cartel-level hit piece. A journalistic firm of torture porn, the piece carefully sets the stage (describing what sounds like a rather interesting office as a horror house), painting the subject in increasingly odd colors (feline??), agitating out of context remarks to misrepresent.
It all is rather obvious and amateurish, so rather discouraging that fellow boing boi gets seem to have taken it at face value.
Naturally I don’t agree with all of Peterson’s positions, and would prefer that he articulate his actual views in ways less able to misrepresent out of context. But it’s interesting that anti-Peterson noise is almost always in response to statements taken out of context and very rarely in response to an actual unedited clip or interview of Peterson himself.
There are a huge number of videos online in which he fields open questions at his lectures, fields open questions at seminars, engages in open debates, moderated discussions, and interviews ranging from friendly to agnostic to hostile. In these honest, unedited contexts, Peterson is not as he’s presented in the NYT piece, and it’s a very rare moment when an adversary scores a point against him.
For any curious boing boingers, I’d suggest to rely less on out of context caricatures and just go straight to the source; just pick some of the many Peterson clips on YT and see for yourself.
Enforced heterosexuality too, reading between the lines.
However, I’m sure that he’ll make an exception for the guys with 50 child-brides in pastel dresses.
And what happens when their arguments are carefully picked apart and demolished? Do they admit they were wrong, change their views, or do they hit the reset button and ignore it?
