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Lobster Boy (was: This Jordan Peterson Guy)

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    Lobster Boy (was: This Jordan Peterson Guy)

    An erstwhile psychology professor, seemingly overnight, has gone from academic obscurity to seeing his book top the Amazon bestseller list and being interviewed by the BBC. The thing is called 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos and it sounds like a self-help manual for members of the alt-right, according to this piece in The Baffler. I've never heard of Peterson before but he seems like a right fucking knob.

    “[W]hen men are talking to the each other in any serious manner, that underlying threat of physicality is always there, especially if it’s a real conversation, and it keeps the thing civilized to some degree.”

    “Your group identity is not your cardinal feature. That’s the great discovery of the west. That’s why the west is right. And I mean that unconditionally. The west is the only place in the world that ever figured out that the individual is sovereign.”
    Has anyone here heard of him before and is there any explanation for why he's suddenly become a leading public intellectual beyond his nauseating rhetoric suddenly finding itself resonating with the alt-right's colonisation of the mainstream?

    #2
    Ugh. Briefly, he's capitalizing on the notoriety he gained last year by refusing to respect some of his students' gender pronoun preferences. Ie 'them' 'hin' etc instead of he/she. He's at U of T in Toronto. As I say, ugh.

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      #3
      If you've ever heard him talk, he sounds like Kermit the Frog if he was from Alberta. This guy's been part of the alt-right sphere for at least 12 months, if not longer, so to see the fucking fawning profiles given to him by the Guardian among others just reminds me of how liberals love normalizing fascists.

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        #4
        I don't know whether we are talking about the same piece but the recent Guardian profile couldn't be described as fawning though it could have been more detailed in describing the errors it claims he makes.

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          #5
          Originally posted by Etienne View Post
          I don't know whether we are talking about the same piece but the recent Guardian profile couldn't be described as fawning though it could have been more detailed in describing the errors it claims he makes.
          The Tim Lott piece was fawning, featuring utter shite like this:

          There is much more to be said about Jordan B Peterson. He is a strange mixture of theologian, psychologist, conservative, liberal, wit and lay preacher. He’s a powerful advocate of the scientific method who is not a materialist. He can go from cuddly to razor sharp in a beat. His primary concern, however, which underpins nearly everything about him, is the defence of the individual against groupthink, whether on the right or the left.

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            #6
            I have a Facebook friend who posts his videos occasionally. He also posts stuff about Israel and brec

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              #7
              Our own AG did a thing on him.

              He’s a dumb person’s idea of a smart person.

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                #8
                Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                Our own AG did a thing on him.

                He’s a dumb person’s idea of a smart person.


                “Your group identity is not your cardinal feature. That’s the great discovery of the west. That’s why the west is right. And I mean that unconditionally. The west is the only place in the world that ever figured out that the individual is sovereign.”

                Christ almighty. Where to begin?

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                  #9
                  Flynnie, we are definitely talking about different pieces then.

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                    #10
                    My understanding is that he thinks humans are indistinguishable from lobsters, so he should be boiled alive.

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                      #11
                      Lobsters form social hierarchies QED social hierarchies are socially necessary. Yeah, I'Il go with that.

                      What he is good at though is rhetorical argument, so is able to cut through the banal bumper-sticker questioning which passes for interviewing these days. I suspect this is why many are impressed with him.

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                        #12
                        Gramsci's piece

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                          #13
                          Jordan Peterson or Islamic Cleric?

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                            #14
                            Garcia's Second Captains political podcast today is about Jordan Peterson.

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                              #15
                              Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                              Thanks, UA - that's a model of an entertaining and informative review.

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                                #16
                                You're mainly correct I think — except no one here has claimed he was a Trump supporter. I came across him because AdeC jr sent me the Newman interview (where she reflects most of the worst tendencies in contemporary TV journalism) which, I think, did him a lot of favours. To me he appears, primarily, to be against identity politics and those who practice them. Which, you're right, has been a big issue in Canadian Universities, who, collectively, have made a pig's ear of the issue over past couple of years. So far as calling individuals in his classes what they wish, you're not wrong he makes that clear in the Newman interview.

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                                  #17
                                  Originally posted by Bruno
                                  This guy keeps crossing my radar so I thought I’d check the OTF reaction, which looks not unpredictably kneejerk so far.
                                  Man flounces. Pops back in, sneers. "You're all still shit".

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                                    #18
                                    C4 News has been leaning more towards the counter-productively hostile, studs up interview in recent times, which is a shame and doesn't play to their strengths.

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                                      #19
                                      Newman is a terrible interviewer for people on the modern right (if we're avoiding the term alt right). She did a woeful one with Milo Yiannopoulos as well.

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                                        #20
                                        My kneejerk reaction was to the content of that opening salvo, rather than to you as a person/poster. I've always quite liked you fwiw, but that shitty intro deserved what it got

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                                          #21
                                          Get a room you two...

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                                            #22
                                            Peterson also said he would absolutely not comply with the implied diktat of Bill C-16, which could make the refusal to refer to people by the pronouns of their choice an actionable form of harassment. He believes the idea of a non-binary gender spectrum is specious and he dismisses as nonsensical the raft of gender-neutral pronouns that transgender people have adopted—ze, vis, hir, and the singular use of they, them and their. “I don’t recognize another person’s right to determine what pronouns I use to address them,” he said grimly. “I think they’re connected to an underground apparatus of radical left political motivations. I think uttering those words makes me a tool of those motivations. And I’m going to try and be a tool of my own motivations as clearly as I can articulate them and not the mouthpiece of some murderous ideology.”
                                            From this Toronto Life piece.

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                                              #23
                                              "murderous ideology"? Calling someone ze? WTAF?

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                                                #24
                                                Peterson does sometimes inspire a knee-jerk reaction, because he says some pretty daft things or creates some pretty daft comparisons, which - because they have the extra sheen of coming from someone who is actually articulate and academic - get adopted by the alt-right.

                                                Obviously, the lobster thing is an example of basically him being completely idiotic, or desperately cherry picking to make his silly reactionary point.

                                                Another is when he said that being asked to call someone by their preferred pronoun is almost exactly the same as Maoism and 100 million deaths.

                                                If that doesn't warrant a knee jerk response, then almost nothing ever would.

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                                                  #25
                                                  I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words "zhe" and "zher." These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.
                                                  From this National Post leader

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