Lobster Boy (was: This Jordan Peterson Guy)

[Lang Spoon]

Haha Laverte, if I knew he was an SWP fecker I wouldn’t have been so effusive. The one Labour club meeting I attended at QMU (Brian Wilson as guest speaker!) was spent with some lad who was usually selling his SWP papers outside Hillhead subway station interjecting every fucking minute. It wasn’t a members only meeting (why I was there) so I guess they could do fuck all. I only know him from his cases (and aye his self-promotion), as well as the ex Catalan Education minister he’s representing the family of a guy killed by polis for Being Black on the streets of my hometown.

[Lang Spoon]

Wow. Just wow. Prior to liberalization of divorce women were little more than chattels under law. But yeah, those 50’s women just needed to take some damn responsibility of themselves.

[Lang Spoon]

I don’t think he’s read any books. He thinks the Disney versions of “folk tales” are too legit to quit. I think he’s a lazy chancer outside his own field who got lucky and can’t back out. That bullshit on the double helix Hidden Knowledge among Ancient Cultures seems like the kind of shit he’s been rehearsing since not quite accepted by the frat boy days.

[Lang Spoon]

I’m trying to cut down on needless cunts and fucks being thrown around this board by my foul mouth. “Just wow”, hackneyed and lame as it is was a very mild alternative to my first typing after reading

but maybe they'd have been better off taking more initiative?

(I’m assuming you’re the holder of this thought, not JP). How about “words fail me”? I’m really not sure what your true meaning was.

[Lang Spoon]

I really don’t understand where I’ve twisted your intent by directly quoting you. Let’s get back to the Lobster Boy.

[Lang Spoon]

Amazingly, we are no nearer agreement as the page count creeps toward 50.

[Lang Spoon]

I’m still not sure what it is you want from the left as it deals with Proud Men like this.

[San Bernardhinault]

Well, the left are dealing with a mainstream media that is presenting Peterson as the Intellectual Voice Of A Generation and The Most Important Thinker Of Our Time.

The left needs to address Peterson's points (such as they are). And point out that he's clearly a pathetic lightweight, as well as a bit of a bigot, as soon as he strays beyond his narrow field of expertise.

If he wasn't being bigged up by the likes of the NYT and Guardian as someone we really need to be aware of, we'd probably just ignore him in his little corner of the internet where he can tell spotty young white boys (who feel like the world owes them everything and they're only getting some of it) that it's not their fault and it's the evil matriarchy and liberals that have stolen their birthright of being able to control the world. We'd almost certainly be totally unaware of him.

If he's going to come out with stuff like :

it’s so whiny, it’s just enough to drive a modern person mad to listen to these suburban housewives from the late ’50s ensconced in their comfortable secure lives complaining about the fact that they’re bored because they don’t have enough opportunity. It’s like, Jesus get a hobby...

when saying that women shouldn't feel oppressed by marriage - and it's not just on some blogspot page full of coloured text and excessive highlighting, but instead reported as the sayings of The Most Important Intellectual On The Planet, then people really do need to point out how fucking offensive, stupid, backward, bigoted and idiotic he's being.

And this is what "the left" has to deal with. (Not really "The left", rather "Anyone who actually thinks equality is meaningful and should be defended"). They basically have to destroy his nonsense to stop it becoming accepted as mainstream thought, provided by The Most Brilliant Philosopher Since Nietzsche.

[San Bernardhinault]

This is a barely recognizable caricature of what I've heard him say about his purpose. It's actually closer to the opposite. One of his main talking points is that it's better to exercise your own agency than blame the world for your problems. I don't know how you can listen to him for five minutes and not get that much.

Of course it's a caricature. He's obviously not going to say that he wants a return to the patriarchy and for women to be comfortable in their 1950s existences, looked after by men in the comfort of marriage, taking up hobbies like knitting rather than thinking and writing. He knows that if he says that explicitly he'll get ripped apart. But that seems to be pretty much the content of what he's saying.

I don't suppose you'd be willing to articulate exactly what you find so offensive about it. Housewives in the 1950s are a metonym for pre-women's rights activists i.e. women who "got a hobby" which wasn't handed to them by the patriarchy. Proceed with the usual assumption that I'm stupid and explain your workings to me. Or don't. He's talking about women who were privileged relative to other oppressed women in the world, he's talking about a "first world problem" (mutatis mutandis).

What's offensive about it is that he's suggesting that these women shouldn't get ideas above their station. That they shouldn't feel oppressed by their marriage where they are looked after by a husband. That, instead of agitating and writing "whiny" books, they should get a hobby. Presumably the last thing they should get, though, is a job. That they'd steal from a man.

The notion that he's mainstream is just journalistic hype. The real mainstream problems to worry about are being caused by politicians and corporations. He's a minor cult figure, while in your effort to "destroy" him you're fanning the flames. See the above unrecognizable caricature of what he thinks.

He's been made mainstream. That might not be his fault, but it's happened.

[pebblethefish]

Is he really that mainstream though? Because I have never seen him quoted or talked about in anything other than this thread. Or is it one of those "everyone is talking about..." things, where "everyone" turns out to be a few people you know on Twitter.

[Lang Spoon]

Bruno, my obsession with the page count is bemusement that the same circular argument has continued without end for dozens of pages. Am I blowing off steam? Maybe so, but I’m not sure what you’re doing. To almost every piece of criticism, either JP is being unfairly caricatured or yourself. I still don’t understand your point on how JP is being misrepresented on sexism.

The difference comes down up you are only scared of fascists with brown shirts and their overt propagandists. I think “respectable” reactionaries are worse if anything, and can create god knows what hell down the line. The nineteenth century reactionaries he so resembles paved the way for the horrors of later, as the logic of their arguments were pushed to the limits.

[Lang Spoon]

Why does he get so angry at a Feminist book from so long ago? Like Tories shouting at the ghost of Raymond Williams. It’s very hard not to think the worst of him, the total denial of structural sexism/racism or classism by Kermy is enough for me to think him a wrong un. It’s a lot easier to stop moaning when you have all the toys.

[Lang Spoon]

Leftist as in Social democratic? Has he addressed economic redistribution or is he just gimlet eyed focused on Post Modern Marxist Identity Politics?

[Lang Spoon]

It’s a fairly facile, monomaniacal view of leftism that doesn’t even engage with the economic aspects.

[ad hoc]

Peterson is a weirder and more complicated case than Trump, and I'm kind of fascinated by why he's so popular and the level of vitriol. There are more obvious sexist targets than him and he's not a sexist in the sense of believing that men are superior to women full stop. I've never heard him advocate a return to the way things were in the 1950s or 19th century. Basically he holds some nuanced views steeped in his background as a clinical psychologist that reasonable people will conclude are not in the best interests of women, whereas people here and in the media are super-eager to make no distinction between him and basement-dwelling 4chan/incel types. He has female clients, has had many over the years who won't (I assume) have reached the conclusion that he's a sexist.

But he's seeking order in a chaotic world and he defines order as male and chaos as female. This isn't dog whistling it's "here boy here boy, there's a good boy, have a biscuit" . He seeks to empathise with the Toronto killer (not justify, but empathise, try and explain him, and what drove him to commit mass murder). He thinks (based on lobster hierarachy) that men have power because that's natural. He is more than just a bit dodgy on this, he's misogynistic to the core.

]I don't want to get into the nuances of his views on the sexes here, it would be a waste of time, but I'm no less convinced than I was initially that the cartoonish way he's being portrayed in the media will further alienate the people who like him. I don't think his style of communicating is helping him, either. He delivers sound bytes that demand being couched in the qualifiers that he's more than happy to bore you with if you hear him out, and it's seriously backfiring on him.

It is NOT seriously backfiring on him. He's reached an audience that wanted someone to justify their rage and anger and sense of uncertainty, and he's doing very very nicely out of that audience. And despite some occasional videos at which he explains (after about minute 10) that his views are not exactly what they think it is, he does NOTHING to try and tell that audience why they're wrong. He does not make it clear that in fact we should pay attention to what women are saying, that there is a lot wrong with post war society that needs to be fixed. Because why would he? If he did that he'd risk being a nonentity at a Canadian University again living on an academic's salary.

From what I've seen recently, Peterson does seem to have become snottier as his fame has grown, and I think that is likely explained in part by the huge volume of hate he receives, a lot of it stemming from mischaracterizations of his views.

Or, just possibly because of who his fans are and how he can best speak to them and fuel their biases and hates? Your "likely explanation" is one. Mine is another.

[NHH]

You do realise that the above is at best new age mystical cockrot, and at worst, misogynistic bullshit, right?

[San Bernardhinault]

You don't think that explicitly defining chaos as female and order as male has all kinds of very obvious deeply misogynistic connotations? And that anyone with half a brain would run a mile from setting those definitions unless they were actively sexist or deliberately courting a reactionary sexist mob?

[Lang Spoon]

I’d be very fucking suspicious of people who read such binary messages into myth, and especially into folk tales (or in lazy JPs case, the Disney versions). He is seeing absolutes that suit his contemporary obsessions in texts whose moral purpose may be manifold, or none. He thinks Pinocchio is a folk tale (it’s no more a folk tale than fucking Dickens, it’s a serialised story).

[Nefertiti2]

Like Jordan “ not a Fascist” Peterson himself.

[Lang Spoon]

How’s the ticket sales looking at the o2, Benjm?

[Benjm]

You can wait for the Groupon without too much risk of missing out, I reckon.

[Lang Spoon]

Hope Douglas Murray and pals have their own money tied up in this. Would be sweet as the dome opens with the upper tiers closed off, only a scattering of beardo past row J.

[Lang Spoon]

I don’t think archetypes are useful at all. Campbell, Jung etc, discredited wank in the main. This is the kind of pattern forming shit that appeals to stoners and the credulous.

[Lang Spoon]

Think SB called his schtick new age woo, and yeah it’s a perverted RW mirror of new age shit.

[Gerontophile]

This is the kind of pattern forming shit that appeals to stoners and the credulous.

Can you narrow it down a bit?