Jordan B Peterson: Gish Galloping Simpleton, Simpering Surrogate Father Figure

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With all due respect, there is no context where Peterson’s remarks and attitudes are not condescending, unhelpful drivel. As a prairie lad myself, I understand his fear of change and the appeal of rigid structure, the siren songs of halcyon days past. The good doctor is mentally unwell, and has been for quite some time.

His inability to speak or write precisely and concisely is deliberate. There is nothing he says that cannot be defended by cries of “out of context”, even when they are horrific, regressive calls to seize and redistribute the means of child production. No further exhibit of his complete lack of grasp on reality required than his book Maps of Meaning. I posit that these are the ravings of a madman, of the same ilk as Icke. No same human would draw these - frankly, baffling - diagrams. I know this because I happen to have a neighbor who draws the same Escher mindmaps but with delusions of religious grandeur.

Peterson doesn’t know, and doesn’t care what truth is. He’s simply Pat Robertson in a cheap psychology suit. He’s a one trick pony whose only trick is smashing the straw spectre of Post Modern Cultural Marxism. Sorry, neo-Marxism now, because it’s cool to repeat Nazi propaganda if you change one word. Peterson fears a world without violence because violence is the only tongue he understands. He fears a world without God, for God is his only means of control over others. He fears a world of tolerance, because his intolerance would not pass muster.

The NYT article isn’t the first to examine his statements unedited, in context. I invite you to read the many, many critiques and dialogues written by and for laypeople on the EnoughPetersonSpam subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/EnoughPetersonSpam

I’ve studied this man for a long time. Nobody needs to subject themselves to his 968 hours of ramblings. And nobody ought to. Peterson is a simpleton, a Tony Robbins with more misogyny and less NLP. Nobody should feel bad about listening to him, but I would caution his listeners to be aware of the effects their actions have on others.

tl;dr
Jordan B Peterson sucks at psychology, understands only violence, and wants to impose an ISIS-like state to defend “Western civilization and values”

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Jordan “I’m being taken out of context” Peterson tried to walk back his remarks on redistributing potential partners. But he cant walk this back:

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Rule #10, from his rules of life: Be Precise.

He meant exactly what he said. And no amount of weasaling can undo that.

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A lengthy deconstruction:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson

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Thanks, that overview shows what a knack he has for donning the mantle of victimhood (ironically enough).

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Thank you for this thread. I have some vain hope that it won’t be assailed by trolls defending him as well because it started with substantive criticism.

But… This assumes all the trolls active all night long in the other thread weren’t Peterson himself. We’ll find out soon enough!

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In a YouTube video from July, Peterson said he’d been working with a programmer to produce a website that would enable people to upload course descriptions and then determine “the degree to which the description is postmodern.”

Right, avoid courses based on the “AI” of a simple Bayesian algorithm.

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Just more attacks on the humanities, of course.

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It sounds like it would have been a fancy pseudo-science version of Turning Point’s “Professor Watchlist”.

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Can’t have students learning to think critically. Then they’d find it all that much easier to see through the kind of pseudo-intellectual bullshit that’s made Peterson rich.

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In a recent conversation with Camille Paglia, Peterson says he regrets there isn’t a socially acceptable context in which he can hit a woman who is “unfairly trespassing against him,” and this despite his belief that people should be more confrontational. To support his assertion, he mentions a woman in Toronto who compared him and his ilk to Nazis.

“I’m defenseless against that kind of female insanity because the techniques I would use against a man who was deploying those tactics are forbidden to me,” he says. Because poor, defenseless Peterson won’t let himself punch women who criticize him, he laments that “men cannot control crazy women” and calls upon “sane women” to “go after their crazy harpy sisters” whose “terrible femininity” is “invading the culture” and “undermining the masculine power of the culture” in a way that he thinks is “fatal.”

I’d be tempted to compare him to a Nazi, just to provoke a physical assault from the easily triggered broflake.

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Don’t forget, Peterson thinks the only reason women wear makeup is to attract mates and that he has been thr subject of three harassment investigations while employed as a professor.

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c’mon guys you’re just taking him out of context

/s

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The two of them, together?

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Every brain dropping I’ve seen by Peterson reads like Markov chain drivel. He uses matryoshka semantics as a preemptive defense against criticism in order to claim that he’s misunderstood. He is Frankfurt’s prototypical bullshitter: someone not only ignorant of the truth but also apathetic towards it, caring only about whether their verbiage achieves its intended aim.

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From the clips I’ve seen, this philosopher-as-bullshit-artist’s formula for success often runs thusly whether he’s lecturing or fielding questions:

  1. Anodyne statement about the need to “get one’s life together” in a way that’s totally obvious to anyone who’s a well-adjusted adult with life experience. Often one of his “rules for life.”

  2. Just-so story about gender or racial differences explaining why it’s now so difficult for poor oppressed white males to follow this advice despite it being the natural order of things.

  3. Cherry-picked quoting of impressive study and/or respected dead white male thinker to bolster this view of traditional ways bogged down by feminism, affirmative action, etc.

  4. “So, if QED all right-thinking people should believe this should we not also give due consideration to…”

  5. Brief and oblique shout-out to alt-right talking point which is a more extreme version of 2.

  6. Criticism of a society that won’t give this idea a hearing even though he’s “proved” reasonable people and scientific research support it.

  7. Self-pitying story about how he’s been 'censored", too.

Someone else called him a “dumb person’s idea of a smart person,” but it goes well beyond that. He is smart even if, like many succesful charlatans, he believes his own BS. He understands that his fans aren’t only poor critical thinkers and ignorant but also that they’re immature and lacking in direction despite an outsized sense of entitlement , which also describes your typical right wing authoritarian follower. That Peterson has found his moment at this particular time is no co-incidence.

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This group is always out of context; rather than exchange ideas in traditional forums such as the academic literature, where they are subject to careful analysis, they have realized that making their case in popular venues has greater payoff, both in terms of finance and in terms of their ability to evade real criticism.

This isn’t anything new: Henri Bergson used to conduct his lectures in the Paris Opera House to throngs of swooning society ladies. In the modern era, Camille Paglia has been a master of it (as has Noam Chomsky on the left). However, the accelerated devolution of debate we see more recently with these people It is an almost inevitable consequence when “public intellectual” meets “social media”.

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Does he share the incel view that makeup should be outlawed? If not I’m sure he’ll insist that the idea deserves serious consideration.

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Is his aim really taking over the world for Satan, or is there a more short-term, personal goal?

What is he getting out of this?

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Peterson? I think what he’s getting is what most conservative public commentators and “intellectuals” get – loads of money.

From the RationalWiki piece @RickMycroft linked above,

As of January 2018, Peterson had over 723 thousand subscribers and 38 million views on YouTube,[2] 407 thousand followers on Twitter,[3] 160 thousand likes on Facebook,[4] and over 7,500 donors on Patreon[5] (generating an estimated $81,900 per month or $982,800 per year gross).

And that’s just a start. Add in such things as speaking fees, publication royalites and so on, and yeah, he might believe the vile shit he spouts, but it seems more likely to me that he spouts it so prolifically because it’s so financially profitable.

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