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Lobster Boy (was: This Jordan Peterson Guy)

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    Heck, you should worry. 1977 was when I bought my first house.

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      You sold out early, man.

      [insert smiley thing]

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        If you want to characterise yourself a smarter than everyone else then you just need to have an argument a tad stronger than “ everyone I know” maybe you know a pretty narrow range of people.
        You keep using what I would consider contaminated sources- like “ spiked video as if it’s some kind of clincher. It’s not. Apart from anything else it’s dumb shit. If you find antything about it worth citing then you have no claims to intellectual rigour. I don’t really value your opinion since someone who has spent the best part of 15 pages on what you keep presenting as a thought experiment- “what if there were something interesting in what Peterson is saying”. There isn’t. I d rather hear from the lobster.

        If you want to shift an intellectual Overton window about what it’s acceptable to say about “ the left” or women or gender then say so. If you don’t then stop making statements about what “ the left “ do or don’t think.
        Last edited by Nefertiti2; 20-03-2018, 12:56.

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          SPIKED IS NOT LEFT-WING!

          The only person I have called a NeoNazi is a guy who hangs out with people who give Nazi salutes.
          Last edited by Nefertiti2; 20-03-2018, 14:50.

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            I've never said Peterson is a fascist or an antisemite, but the fact that alt-right/fascists/antisemites love his work should give everyone (including him) pause.

            Also, his reaction on Twitter to the Pankaj Mishra article is absolutely ridiculous in its prissy menace ("I'd slap you happily"). More proof that the only thing interesting about Peterson is that he's a morbid symptom of our time. His "ideas" are negligible.

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              Originally posted by Bruno
              Sorry, to correct myself:

              SB's implication that the people angry about "PC" are confined to poor white working-class rust belt towns.
              what I should have said is that he was suggesting that such people couldn't possibly care about PC, that it's too abstract to them. For one thing I don't think that's quite true, and for another, there are plenty of Trump voters who don't fit that description who do care about it.
              This completely misses what I was trying to say. Perhaps I didn't explain myself clearly:

              I don't think anyone is actually angry about PC in a meaningful way, apart from a handful of daft culture-warriors.

              I was responding to you repeatedly suggesting that the "left" need to tone down their language because it aggravates "centrists". That there's a fundamental problem with telling people to (for example) not be transphobic because they get upset about it. And I think at least at one point you said that people voted for Trump because of this feeling that they're getting nagged.

              I think firstly it's a nonsense argument - very few people are particularly upset; and secondly that even if it wasn't a nonsense argument you should still be encouraging people to not be transphobic. Rather than taking the approach that people get too upset by PC so we should just let them carry on in their old ways without mentioning it.

              The mention of the rust belt towns might have been misplaced, but it's often presented that it's a handful of white working class dudes in these towns who have the most resentment of the "changing culture", and who, if only we didn't mention words like privilege, and don't ever say anything about using peoples' preferred pronouns, then they'd be voting for the most liberal of actual policies; but now we have mentioned those things they're terribly upset and are voting for an actual racist and a cartoon fascist.

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                I agree with Monbiot in that assessment of Spiked from the wikipedia page

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                  Spiked and Living Marxism's descendants cannot remotely be described as leftwing.

                  Tedious contrarian libertarian cunts, yes, leftwing no. They themselves are self-confessed left-haters these days.

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                    But you keep saying it’s a left wing panel. Brendan O’Neill is not, in any way, left wing. He’s a disingenuous right wing to his shitty boots Professional Contrarian. Him and fellow Trotskyist/Milton Friedmanite Clare Fox are equally terrible when on Sky News Review.

                    You don’t have to be left to be right, but please Bruno. Those fuckers are poison.

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                      Hell’s teeth man.

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                        Haha, he’s a fighty bastard, you have to give him that. Bets he’s got a long reach. Dance like a butterfly pinch like a lobster.

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                          I don't think he's necessarily dog-whistling, but it's worth asking why his shtick seems to be popular with actual fascists.

                          As for inconvenient questions, if scientists are being attacked for inquiry into biological differences between sexes, then of course that's deplorable. But generally it seems the Internet's call-out culture is awakened when people say things far beyond what science has actually been able to confirm. I mean, it's not really a "biological fact" that "there are two sexes". The existence of humans with XXY, XXYY, XXXY, XXXXY, XXX, XXXX, XXXXX, and XYY chromosome abnormalities suggests that the reality is rather more complicated. And that's before we get into the realm of human consciousness and whether there is any such thing as a male or female brain, or the social/cultural influence on gender identity, etc. And the idea that identifying social hierarchy among lobsters means you've found justification for our society being ruled by a bunch of businessmen is risible hogwash.

                          I probably come off as a defender of PC, postmodernism, Derrida, etc., but really I'm more of a universalist leftist and materialist, and am often skeptical of all of those. But to be properly skeptical, you actually have to engage with the phenomenon at hand and not dismiss it all as bullshit without really knowing what it is you're dismissing. This seems to be what Peterson is doing. He's blamed Jacques Derrida for a vast array of ills, and it seems doubtful he's ever really read him.

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                            Things have changed a lot in my lifetime: Homosexuality has become accepted to the point where to be homophobic is the minority and unaccepted viewpoint. Hitting kids - at school or at home - has become taboo (and in many countries against the law). There are many other examples.

                            These things came about because "left wing" or "liberal" or whatever you want to call them, people fought for these things. There are still people who oppose this, but they're in the minority. Should we go back in time?

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                              Originally posted by Bruno
                              I don't know what social conclusions are being drawn by scientists pointing out inconvenient facts. What I've heard has just been pushback against social conclusions based on unscientific claims advocated by others. If Peterson wants the kind of society you're alluding to, that's dumb, but the question is what exactly does he envision. The most recent scientist I heard talking about the chromosome anomaly thing was saying that it would be ridiculous to treat extremely rare exceptions as grounds for ignoring the basic fact that "there are two sexes" describes the overwhelming majority of our species. But I'm not qualified to have an opinion on the subject.
                              Here's a good Nature piece from a couple of years ago. Scientists can't even define what it means to be "male" or "female" in any meaningful way.

                              https://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943

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                                Originally posted by Bruno
                                Which is what I didn't see people here exhibiting a willingness to do before they labeled him or pigeonholed him as an alt-right fascist, at least by association, which is why I used the term knee-jerk. It looks like an easy question. One, there aren't that many fascists, they're eager to be received in polite company and they're trying to use "free speech" as a wedge to get a seat at the table. There's a reasonable debate to be had about whether censoring them or "bullying the bullies" only helps their cause. Two, it's obvious why they'd like Peterson who is attacking the far left on free speech and anti-PC grounds. There's another reasonable debate to be had about illiberal tendencies and practices on the far left.

                                The term fascist should be used a lot more sparingly. It's fine for the tiki torch people. Most of Peterson's fans aren't that. I would guess that most of his fans aren't as interested in whatever political agenda he has as in his psychology stuff. His psychology stuff is all wrapped up in the anti-postmodernist shtick, so he's being politicized for that reason as though the "12 Rules" book were in the Ann Coulter genre, and fair enough if that's what you want to do.
                                I'm not very invested in the wide application of the word "fascist" but I find it curious the demand that it only refers to violent street movements and not the organisations and ideologues that motivate them? Peterson is clearly a vile reactionary who courts far-right followers so i've no problem with him being shut down.

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                                  Originally posted by Bruno
                                  If you think the tiki torch people lacked ideological clarity or motivation before they'd read Peterson, that's obviously wrong. Your use of "shut down" sounds a bit fascist to me, and certainly would to them.
                                  lol, fascism is a reactionary ideology built on the glorification of the masculine and racial purity. Anti-fascism is a defensive tactic (or range of tactics) preventing fascism from getting a foothold. Anti-fascism may use similar tactics to tactics deployed by groups of fascists at times - interrupting political meetings, beating up fascists - but that doesn't make it "fascist" because it doesn't share the belief system.

                                  Fascists also print newspapers, write books and hold public meetings but we wouldn't describe any of those activities as innately fascist.

                                  If you're suggesting shutting down reactionaries is fascism, you don't really understand fascism at all.
                                  Last edited by Bizarre Löw Triangle; 22-03-2018, 11:58.

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                                    Originally posted by Bruno
                                    No of course not. It's a question of putting recent gains at risk through overreach. I don't really have an opinion on Black Lives Matter in terms of their strategy as opposed to their goals, but one often hears that they've set back their own cause. If that's entirely the viewpoint of racists, then fine and fuck them, but I'm not sure.
                                    They might not self-define as racists-not many do these days ( though it has become a bit more common-and I think peterson’s Appeal to and defence of the men who like to settle things through violence- and his equivocation has been part of that.

                                    But racism doesn’t just work like that, does it? It exists between humans in social situations and they exist in ideology

                                    So for example

                                    https://twitter.com/usblm/status/976571445722656768

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                                      this talk about overreach, particularly Black Lives matter reminds me of This

                                      The thing here is that I'm fundamentally not convinced that this issues of Identity politics are a pre-occupation for an organized left that have made a decision to follow a certain path. The Left isn't organizing black Lives matter. Black people are, because they're sick of being shot with impunity by policemen, for the crime of being black. There isn't a socialist party of america that is pushing for LGBTQ rights, it's those people themselves doing the equivalent of ramming their high heels through the foreheads of policemen outside the stonewall inn, and their friends who can't understand why society is shitting on them. These people are trying to be treated as equal, and they shouldn't stop until they are. When people are saying that the Left is overreaching or focusing too much on identity politics, they're a) highlighting that the left doesn't actually really exist in any meaningful sense, and isn't doing anything other than piggybacking on the backs of the efforts of people who are struggling by themselves to be treated as equal or b) People who don't really understand that America is waging a race war on its non white population, a class war against the poor, and a generational war between the old and the young, and all of these battles have to be won, and they can't stop until they are, because the other cunts are never going to give up until they are dead and are passing on the hate to their children. c) people in danger of falling into a comfortable centrism in the hope that the unpleasantness will stop.

                                      And as for putting recent gains at risk through overreach, the Attorney General is Jeff Fucking Sessions, a man considered too fucking racist to be a federal judge in the 1980's. You had to be running a fucking plantation to be considered too racist in the 1980's. It's not that recent gains are at risk, it's long won basic rights are at risk, and the solution to this isn't to "Go Slow," but more of the same. People on Campuses aren't being driven by some arbitrary millenial madness for Social Justice causes. They want groups of people in their midst to be treated equally, and they shouldn't stop until they get what they want, and if some people don't like it, well fuck them. Some people can be convinced directly by argument, some people can be convinced by general social acceptance, and some people need to be fought with every ounce of your being because they are cunts who will not stop being cunts until they are dead.

                                      There is no reasonable other side to be negotiated with. America has a president elected on a platform of barely concealed fascism, white supremacy, baby boomer dominance, and culture war hatred. this is not the time to "Go Slow." It's time to move beyond isolated groups of people demanding that the state stop actively oppressing them, and denying their right to equality, to a much broader movement based around this idea. The time to go slow will be when everything is fixed, so 200 years from now perhaps.

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                                        What do you think about people who are against "combating racist outcomes caused by inherent racial biases in the system." White Lives Matter and so forth. ? Many don't self describe as racists. Many genuinely probably don't consider themselves as racist.

                                        And agree with everything Berba writes so eloquently above.

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                                          Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post
                                          this talk about overreach, particularly Black Lives matter reminds me of This

                                          The thing here is that I'm fundamentally not convinced that this issues of Identity politics are a pre-occupation for an organized left that have made a decision to follow a certain path. The Left isn't organizing black Lives matter. Black people are, because they're sick of being shot with impunity by policemen, for the crime of being black. There isn't a socialist party of america that is pushing for LGBTQ rights, it's those people themselves doing the equivalent of ramming their high heels through the foreheads of policemen outside the stonewall inn, and their friends who can't understand why society is shitting on them. These people are trying to be treated as equal, and they shouldn't stop until they are. When people are saying that the Left is overreaching or focusing too much on identity politics, they're a) highlighting that the left doesn't actually really exist in any meaningful sense, and isn't doing anything other than piggybacking on the backs of the efforts of people who are struggling by themselves to be treated as equal or b) People who don't really understand that America is waging a race war on its non white population, a class war against the poor, and a generational war between the old and the young, and all of these battles have to be won, and they can't stop until they are, because the other cunts are never going to give up until they are dead and are passing on the hate to their children. c) people in danger of falling into a comfortable centrism in the hope that the unpleasantness will stop.

                                          And as for putting recent gains at risk through overreach, the Attorney General is Jeff Fucking Sessions, a man considered too fucking racist to be a federal judge in the 1980's. You had to be running a fucking plantation to be considered too racist in the 1980's. It's not that recent gains are at risk, it's long won basic rights are at risk, and the solution to this isn't to "Go Slow," but more of the same. People on Campuses aren't being driven by some arbitrary millenial madness for Social Justice causes. They want groups of people in their midst to be treated equally, and they shouldn't stop until they get what they want, and if some people don't like it, well fuck them. Some people can be convinced directly by argument, some people can be convinced by general social acceptance, and some people need to be fought with every ounce of your being because they are cunts who will not stop being cunts until they are dead.

                                          There is no reasonable other side to be negotiated with. America has a president elected on a platform of barely concealed fascism, white supremacy, baby boomer dominance, and culture war hatred. this is not the time to "Go Slow." It's time to move beyond isolated groups of people demanding that the state stop actively oppressing them, and denying their right to equality, to a much broader movement based around this idea. The time to go slow will be when everything is fixed, so 200 years from now perhaps.
                                          I'm standing up in my living room and cheering, Berba.

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                                            I wonder if there's a difference in the use of the term fascism here. Too much commentary seeks to compare whether the circumstances present now map onto our experience of actual fascism in Germany, and since they don't, conclude that we're not yet dealing with fascism, and therefore not yet ready to drop the polite centrist conventions attendent in a self-regarding liberal democracy.

                                            This formalistic approach is pointless though, because it seeks to dignify fascism as an ideology, rather than the end of the line or destination for any particular historical moment in the politics of reaction. The formalist approach takes it as axiomatic that anyone who is not a self-described fascist is not a fascist and not worthy of being treated as such. Conversely, if you use fascism to mean the process by which the politics of reaction get foothold and turn into their murderous conclusion. Whether Peterson is a fascist is irrelevant; his work is part of the mood music for the public address system on the train as it pulls out of Reaction City on its journey to Fascism Central.

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                                              America has a president elected on Hillary hatred as much as anything else, and Hillary hatred is explained to some extent by left-wing hysteria along with right-wing. It's one of the ironies of our times.

                                              A big part of Hilary hatred, was 25 years of demonization by the right, which had nothing, literally nothing to do with her many obvious gaping flaws. She was a terrible choice for candidate for precisely this reason. And while structural racism is a massive problem, that's buttressed by a huge number of real life racists, and a political party that runs on a platform of structural and old fashioned personal racism, whether it's called "Law and order", or "the war on Drugs" or "Inner city carnage" or "Welfare Queens" or "Voter Identification laws".

                                              And Sure black lives matters seems to emphasize differences in race, but that's not because they think black people are different, it's because black people are treated differently by the state. Supporting Black lives matter follows directly from believing that Black people are equal citizens, and deserve not to be shot arbitrarily by the police. If you believe in equality of people, the most important thing to recognize that the primary aim of the republican party over the last 50 years is to get people on board with systematic transfer of wealth from the many to the few, by distracting them with the grand project of rolling back the civil rights act, and putting the saddle back on black people.

                                              Jeff Sessions is a stupid cunt and he might be at his post because Trump likes his racist side, but neither man represents in that capacity more than 20-30% of the American population. Trump got elected, just barely, because people are ignorant fuckwits, not because they all signed onto a platform of fascism and white supremacy.

                                              Jeff sessions isn't a stupid cunt, It's important to treat him as he is. he's not stupid, he's an evil racist traitor, and it doesn't matter that he only represents 20-30% of the american population. That's enough to win most presidential elections if they all turn out to vote, in their disproportionately important states, and I've got to say that when you're voting for a candidate who's going to crack down on the inner city carnage, restore law and order, and build a fucking 2000 mile wall to keep out the mexicans, then you are signing onto a platform of fascism. It didn't matter if some germans in the 30's voted for the Nazis. primarily because they liked their stylish uniforms, you're still signing up to a platform of genocidal racism and murderous totalitarianism.

                                              The only way out of this is for the majority of Americans, who are being shat on by this absurd current system to realize that they are fighting multiple cultural wars designed to distract from an sociopathic economic system.

                                              neither is the right when we're using that term to refer to people who vote Republican. The war is overwhelmingly one of rich corrupt capitalists against the proles. Their ideology is money-making. I think making it all about identity politics, like as not, plays into the hands of the money-makers.

                                              Show me a country riven by a culture or identity wars, and I'll show you a country run by wealthy powerful psychopaths who are using divide and conquer to distract from their insatiable greed.

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                                                Originally posted by Bruno
                                                A word ending in "ism" connotes an ideology by definition: "ism" = "a distinctive practice, system, or philosophy, typically a political ideology or an artistic movement" (dictionary). I guess that's "formalist" but if we want to avoid misunderstandings we probably need to find another approach to labeling.

                                                "Reactionary" is a loaded word that has become synonymous among progressives with bad outcomes. It doesn't mean that to reactionaries; it means the return to better outcomes. Not all reactionaries are down with fascism. Religious conservatives, for example. The tension between progressive and conservative tendencies or motivations is perpetual and the one pole can only be understood in relation to the other. Calling something reactionary doesn't, or shouldn't, define it as "ending in fascism" or murder, any more than should extremer forms of leftism like Marxism, which also reached a murderous conclusion.
                                                Religious conservatives have traditionally been extremely down with fascism.

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                                                  What Berba said.

                                                  I mean, yes, I've run into liberals so obnoxiously up their own arses with theory and cultural relativism that asking a question like, "Well, what about non-Western cultures that persecute homosexuals, then? Should we say that's OK since it's part of their culture?" is enough to cause a spluttering system malfunction in their brain. But most anti-PC rhetoric is really aimed at shutting down all struggles for equality, insinuating that drawing attention to the racist discrepancy in police violence is as frivolous-seeming as a male-at-birth teen on Tumblr angrily insisting that they identify as a lesbian otherkin or something this week.

                                                  I just really can't buy the notion that PC "caused" a right-wing backlash. The right wing will always lash back against something in order to defend their exploitative and unequal vision of society. If US academics in the '80s and '90s had fixated on something other than postmodernism I reckon the right would have lashed back against that, whether it was relativist like postmodernism or strongly universalist like (most) Marxism.

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                                                    I'm with Renart on this. PC didn't cause a backlash, or inspire a backlash. PC is just the current excuse that the reactionary right are using. They all sound angry about PC because that seems like the current trendy way to resist behaving like decent human beings.

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