Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Lobster Boy (was: This Jordan Peterson Guy)

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Originally posted by Bruno
    From what I've gleaned about Peterson's latest book, it's encouraging people not to let the fact that the problems aren't of their own making stop them from taking personal responsibility.
    That’s not a remotely original insight.

    Comment


      Originally posted by Bruno
      He apparently was already something of a cult figure among students at Harvard in the 90s.

      I read that Malcolm Gladwell called him a "wonderful psychologist" or similar.
      Gladwell is, I’m starting to suspect, also a fraud.

      Comment


        Originally posted by Fussbudget View Post
        French culture is insular, but I find it hard to believe that it's any more insular than US culture. For one thing, all French people learn a second language at school, and they're constantly exposed to US culture (as well as a fair bit of other foreign cultures) whether they seek it or not, whereas I very much doubt the reverse is true.
        His comments weren’t about French culture overall, but French academics. Especially French philosophers.

        US culture is generally insular, because, for most of us, everywhere else is so far away.

        American philosophy is dominated by analytic and philosophy of science, but there’s also a lot of critical race theory and deconstruction and all that, as well as loads of people, like Chomsky, who think all of that is bullshit.

        And, a lot of it is bullshit. In a system that cranks out PhDs and insists that they publish or perish, it’s inevitable that a lot of what gets generated just isn’t very good. This isn’t really new, however. The medieval universities cranked out commentaries on religious tracts etc by the building-full and nobody read those either. That wasn’t the point.

        The system needs reforming, but the generation of reems of bullshit is an inevitable byproduct of progress. As Thomas Edison said, he didn’t fail to invent the light bulb 100 times, he just found 100 ways not to do it.

        But all of that is pretty marginal. The big money is still in STEM and business schools, and those are, if anything, increasingly controlled by right-wing villains like the Koch’s.

        The idea, pushed by Peterson and Fox News etc that American universities have been taken over by deconstructionist-Marxist-lesbians bent on destroying western culture isn’t remotely true even though it might actually be preferable to what is happening.

        Comment


          Oh yeah. 24 carat fraud with his 10000 hours theory of genius and the likes. Cool hair though, bra.
          Last edited by Lang Spoon; 19-03-2018, 05:57.

          Comment


            Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
            Gladwell is, I’m starting to suspect, also a fraud.
            Gladwell is a story teller and quite good at that. He is not in any way an academic. He takes very small events and turns them into theories without any scientific method. He's good to listen to and read, but you have to be aware that 90% of what he comes up with is utter bollocks.

            Comment


              I’m no saying Chomsky is a hack, but his quoters sure are a bore. Bet Paul Mason was always turning on the Chomsky at hot and heavy student discussions.

              That’s not his fault, but let’s say he’s better value at linguistics than his Michael Moore with more words deconstruction of The System, Man.

              Comment


                Originally posted by Bruno
                Peterson and Fox aren't wrong that the universities have been taken over by the left. Anyone can see that, and the question is how troubled one should be by it, and how relatively troubling it is compared to the right, which controls the corporate world.
                Is that true? Serious question. It seems to me (perhaps coming from a European perspective) that universities are being taken over from the right, they are following a more and more corporate governance model and more and more are expected to be based on "the market". (And in the US you've got private universities being taken over by people like the Kochs and so on). The academic staff are still pretty much of the left I imagine, but then they always have been. I certainly don;t get this sense that universities are more left than they were before, actually the opposite. Look at the number of places which are trying to slap down movements like BDS for example.

                Comment


                  The people running universities are self-defined liberals ≠ academia has been taken over by the left

                  People have been able to utilise the self-regard from self-describing as liberal to enable them to do more completely wanky things that don't form the basis of any left program(me). Their behaviour isn't redeemed because they toss out some identity politics bones every now and again.

                  Comment


                    Have academic staff always been on the left? Certainly in 20s/30s Germany conservative/radical nationalism was big on campus with the faculty. That's what the lefties who wrote the books on the period taught me, anyway.

                    Comment


                      "Academia is overwhelmingly left-wing. "

                      with what data do you support this anecdotal assertion? Jordan Peterson's latest video?

                      Comment


                        "It's still fun to hear him bash French media-whore intellectuals though."
                        Bruno maintaining a high standard of intellectually rigorous debate.

                        You work at a University I understand. What's going on in your department that makes you come up with stuff like this?

                        Comment


                          "t I think it'd be wrong to minimize the influence of left-wing academia, especially when you have Fox News hammering the idea of how influential it is."

                          So what exactly do you consider is the correct response when a racist right wing broadcaster is lying about the influence of the left in academia?

                          Comment


                            Chomsky at least writes and speaks clearly and has contributed a lot to his academic field - which I don’t know much about - aside from his activism.
                            He contributed a lot, but on the other hand it now seems his entire life's project (namely finding a single universal grammar with all languages being merely tweaking of parameters) is a dead end. Chomsky's theories aren't particularly relevant to most contemporary linguistic study.

                            Comment


                              Originally posted by Nefertiti2 View Post
                              "Academia is overwhelmingly left-wing. "

                              with what data do you support this anecdotal assertion? Jordan Peterson's latest video?
                              This is a fairly well-established point in the US. Mother Jones piece on it here. There have been a couple of similar surveys in Canada (neither of which I can find at the moment), which suggest something similar for social sciences and humanities but not the rest of academia. May or may not be true elsewhere I don't know.

                              The question, I think, since political views are increasingly defined by education levels, is whether or not academia is disproportionately left/liberal/whatever after you hold levels of education constant.

                              Comment


                                Are we saying "academia is left wing" when we really mean "the philosophy and politics (and maybe history) departments in academia tend to be left wing"? I've not noticed any particular lefty tendencies in the science and engineering departments I've ended up in. I can't imagine that the lawyers or medics are, either. I suspect there's something of a super-compressed worldview of academics in the humanities fields who don't even noticed the other fields, because those other fields don't try and describe politics.

                                Comment


                                  Ah! I just got the Bruno's post a couple up where he basically says exactly that - sorry for getting ahead of it. But I think it's crucially important to make that distinction. If Peterson, and Fox, and all those nutters, keep talking about how Universities have been taken over by left-wing thought, that gives them a line of attack on everything coming out of academia, not just waffly philosophy bullshit from the likes of Peterson and Chomsky and Derrida - who have literally no influence on the actual world.

                                  Comment


                                    Law in the US depends a lot on the school, with a general lean left (in US, not international, terms) at most of the "elite" universities, largely reflecting the fact that law students at those schools are largely drawn from the humanities departments of "elite" universities.

                                    Places like Chicago and (especially) George Mason attract a right/libertarian student body.

                                    It's also important to keep in mind that public universities in many states are dependent on highly reactionary state legislatures for funding.
                                    Last edited by ursus arctos; 19-03-2018, 14:34.

                                    Comment


                                      If the left has taken over universities (which of course we haven't), we're doing a terrible job of using these institutions to remake society. It almost seems like we're not even trying.

                                      According to Wikipedia, these are Petersen's "12 rules" to fight the chaos of postmodernism, and I'm having trouble believing such hokey pabulum could really be what all the fuss is about:

                                      Stand up straight with your shoulders back
                                      Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
                                      Make friends with people who want the best for you
                                      Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
                                      Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
                                      Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
                                      Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
                                      Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie
                                      Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
                                      Be precise in your speech
                                      Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
                                      Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

                                      Comment


                                        If the right is not well represented in universities, it's their fault. For the past forty years at least the Republican Party and its followers have committed themselves ever more fully to anti-intellectualism. It's not the left barring them from the gates, it's that most conservatives have no interest in science, the humanities, or rational inquiry or critical thinking in general. If anything, they're hostile to them.

                                        As for "PC culture," most of it just seems to come down to etiquette. I find a lot of it tedious, but it's hard for me to see it as a bigger threat to freedom of expression than say, the consolidation of media companies or the voiding of net neutrality.

                                        Comment


                                          How often do "regular folk" encounter it, though, outside of in hysterical media pieces about the out-of-control campus left? I'm not an academic and I work at a pretty regular job in Texas and it just never comes up.

                                          Comment


                                            Interview today with Cathy Newman. Shame the interviewer doesn't push her harder on that shameful mosque lie but at least it actually gets mentioned https://www.theguardian.com/media/20...with-an-agenda

                                            Comment


                                              Someone on another board posted this passage from Peterson and, well, yeah...

                                              I know how to stand up to a man who’s unfairly trespassing against me. And the reason I know that is because the parameters for my resistance are quite well defined, which is: we talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical. If we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is. That’s forbidden in discourse with women. And so I don’t think that men can control crazy women. I really don’t believe it. I think they have to throw their hands up in. . . In what? It’s not even disbelief. It’s that the cultural. . . There’s no step forward that you can take under those circumstances, because if the man is offensive enough and crazy enough, the reaction becomes physical right away. Or at least the threat is there. And when men are talking to each other in any serious manner, that underlying threat of physicality is always there, especially if it’s a real conversation. It keeps the thing civilized to some degree. 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. But I can’t see any way… For example there’s a woman in Toronto who’s been organizing this movement, let’s say, against me and some other people who are going to do a free speech event. And she managed to organize quite effectively, and she’s quite offensive, you might say. She compared us to Nazis, for example, publicly, using the Swastika, which wasn’t something I was all that fond of. But I’m defenseless against that kind of female insanity, because the techniques that I would use against a man who was employing those tactics are forbidden to me. So I don’t know. . . It seems to me that it isn’t men who have to stand up and say, ‘Enough of this.’ Even though that is what they should do, it seems to me that it’s sane women who have to stand up against their crazy sisters and say, ‘Look, enough of that. Enough man-hating. Enough pathology. Enough bringing disgrace on us as a gender.’

                                              Comment


                                                Originally posted by Bruno

                                                PC culture seems fine to courteous enlightened folk but it would be foolish to underestimate how alienating it is for other folk, especially given how it's often packaged. For example, calling people fascists who aren't fascists.
                                                Should we care how alienated rude arseholes are by people trying to suggest that politeness is a good thing?

                                                Comment


                                                  Originally posted by Renart View Post
                                                  If the left has taken over universities (which of course we haven't), we're doing a terrible job of using these institutions to remake society. It almost seems like we're not even trying.

                                                  According to Wikipedia, these are Petersen's "12 rules" to fight the chaos of postmodernism, and I'm having trouble believing such hokey pabulum could really be what all the fuss is about:

                                                  Stand up straight with your shoulders back
                                                  Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
                                                  Make friends with people who want the best for you
                                                  Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
                                                  Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
                                                  Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
                                                  Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
                                                  Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie
                                                  Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
                                                  Be precise in your speech
                                                  Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
                                                  Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
                                                  At least he and I can agree on #11 and #12

                                                  Comment


                                                    Not sure how much he is obeying his own #3, #7, & #10

                                                    Comment

                                                    Working...
                                                    X