Sexton links to Peterson posts at Instagram where we see that Peterson is working on a new book — which seems to be called "Beyond Order" — and he's playing with a remote controlled toy car (and wearing shorts):
April 22, 2020
"My initial reaction when I learned of Peterson’s drug dependency and near-death experience was that his career in public was over."
"After all, many in the media have been eager to see him fail for the past couple of years and it seemed like he had in fact failed in some sense," wrote John Sexton at Hot Air a couple weeks ago. I'm reading that today because I was wondering what ended up happening to Jordan Peterson and would he ever come back. (A Facebook friend had written something that struck me as Jordan Peterson-y.)
Sexton links to Peterson posts at Instagram where we see that Peterson is working on a new book — which seems to be called "Beyond Order" — and he's playing with a remote controlled toy car (and wearing shorts):
Sexton links to Peterson posts at Instagram where we see that Peterson is working on a new book — which seems to be called "Beyond Order" — and he's playing with a remote controlled toy car (and wearing shorts):
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Shorts in Canada! He-man.
He seems a little too feverish on his joystick, and the person taking the video noticed.
wearing shorts
Is that better or worse than the sad charade of covering unsightly legs with long pants? Would wearing perfectly panty pants remove the expression of hiding or shame?
Obviously not in Canada, since the plants aren't hardy.
I don't understand those who wish failure on Jordan Peterson. Can anyone explain it to me? Perhaps there's someone here who shares that sentiment - I'd be interested in hearing from him/her.
You can’t keep a good man down. The amazing effect his teaching and speaking skills had on the young men of this generation will go on.
If you listen to a lot of podcasts while you work, as I do, you may be disappointed to hear Peterson (in select forums) disparage citizen activist movements in America and berating Trump. He's startlingly ignorant of the ways American politics works. And to fail to recognize which groups are defending free speech is a pretty big intellectual failure, as is reverting the stereotypes of the left to smear the right.
He's not well-read in his hobby-work on fascism.
That said, he is a soldier for free speech on college campuses. In his own field, he's an empathetic counselor encouraging people to rise above their circumstances, heal their families, and take on adult burdens. Peterson's philosophy of self-help has never condemned people for falling down in their personal lives. He uses the greats of Western Civ to help people imagine "heroic" roles for themselves. Typical Jung, but a powerful antidote to today's identity politics totalitarianism.
He'll find a way to make this experience part of his lectures. Now he's Odysseus instead of Tiresias, or some such thing. I like this stuff, and it does help young people. Also, I laugh every time I try to picture how someone could be a Canadian and a Jungian.
Women are flourishing, and that's great, but young men are in crisis and all the women's movement has to say about it is that it's a tasty revenge. But what will straight women do when they go looking for good men to marry? The feminists don't care. Peterson's teachings are critical for young men.
Looks like he was addicted to an anxiety drug that also is used "recreationally". Its sad, but ita amazing how many of these people handing out advice and behaving like wise gurus turn out to be alcoholics, drug addicts, obese, financial problems or have some other private flaw that makes you wonder why they don't fix themselves before they fix others.
"many in the media have been eager to see him fail for the past couple of years [because he is conservative]."
You rob yourself of potential insight if you can't look past a person's personal problems and weakness to fairly address their arguments and offerings. The man is obviously intelligent and pretty clear thinking even if he does have some personal challenges. I think he makes a lot of sense, regardless. I'm not sure if such challenges create talent or that we just notice it more when the two come in the same person, but it is a pretty common thing.
He's in his own backyard. Counts in favor of wearing shorts.
He's not just in his own backyard, because he's on Instagram. Counts against wearing shorts.
His body shape isn't giving him the appearance of an oversized toddler. Counts in favor of wearing shorts.
He's playing with a toy. Counts in both directions. It's playtime, so playclothes are more appropriate, but playing with a toy creates the problem of looking like a child.
Also, I laugh every time I try to picture how someone could be a Canadian and a Jungian.
Robertson Davies was both.
"I don't understand those who wish failure on Jordan Peterson. Can anyone explain it to me?"
He refuses to do and accept the foolishness that bureaucrats and activists demand of him. That's all it takes to be hated. Their power comes from threats, and he takes some of that power away by refusing. He's very dangerous to them.
Vox Day called him out and warned those on Right against him. Seems he was correct.
The backyard Corinthian column is a bit much. Florida?
Vox Day is an asshole.
bagoh20 said...
You rob yourself of potential insight if you can't look past a person's personal problems and weakness to fairly address their arguments and offerings."
No, no! The important thing is that he's wearing shorts!
He's pretty flaky, but you have to respect his courage in publicly disputing feminist dogma.
Dave Begley said...
"many in the media have been eager to see him fail for the past couple of years [because he is conservative]."
Except he has said numerous times that he isn't a conservative. They want him to fail because he offers a path out of the culture of the victim.
Its sad, but ita amazing how many of these people handing out advice and behaving like wise gurus turn out to be alcoholics, drug addicts, obese, financial problems or have some other private flaw that makes you wonder why they don't fix themselves before they fix others.
Because there aren't any perfect people. Even perfect people have their own character defects. Just more acceptable ones. A Dr. friend of mine saw a psychiatrist for years, then the psychiatrist retired, and they still met once a week as friend/mentor. The shrink had a gambling/spending problem, and could not sustain a lasting relationship. Best to work with what God gave you, and strive to improve, perfection is its own defect.
I think it's well understood that many who go into psychology seek, as at least a partial motive, self-understanding. And I don't think Peterson set himself up to be a "guru"; he seemed as surprised at how strongly his best-seller (which was not his first book, nor, if I'm hearing him clearly, what he considers his best) resonated with readers. A "guru" typically offers easy, quick, one-size-fits-all answers, whereas Peterson's thing is the opposite of easy and quick. It is, I admit, one-size-fits-all, but that one size is "work hard to be an adult - here are some steps that will help," which seems less like self-help-guru than like good advice.
One of my close relatives takes anxiety medication to fend off crippling panic attacks, and is also in therapy. This relative can't "fix themselves," only seek treatment, but is doing their best to play the cards they were dealt. Someday they hope they'll be able to stop taking the meds, but that prospect also makes them anxious because the drug is habit-forming and the process of weaning off it can be horrible.
Vox Day's real name = Theodore Robert Beale
Jordan Peterson is an amazing intellectual and a needed voice. He looks good here, which is a relief. He is hated because he applies independent reason and logic to everything, and he can articulate his methods.
Nearly everyone is in a constant state of physical addiction (or at least a propensity for addiction) to prescription medicines -- they just don't realize it until such medicine is legitimately prescribed for a sustained period of time. (As an aside, my father was addicted to prescribed pain killers during his last days with cancer, which was well-known to his doctor and not an issue for anyone.) Jordan was prescribed meds by a doctor, he was aware of his increasing addiction as it was happening, and he knew he would need to wean himself off the meds at some point through "rehab." No shame in any of that, and no stigma should attach. He was not holding up liquor stores to sustain his habit.
Peterson likes to empower men to escape boyhood. The left hate that.
Don’t know a lot about Jordan Peterson but I do, fortunately, have an opinion on him. He always struck me as someone who couldn’t live up to his teachings. He seemed scared. He was the little guy shouting “I’m not afraid of bullies!” while his knees knocked together and his voice quaked. He was like a young, fervently Christian young man I knew who, when he passed through the mechanics office on his way to the shop each morning, studiously averted his eyes from the girlie calendars on the wall. You could feel his muscles straining not to look.
But the teachings of Peterson are excellent. I just wish he could be at the core the Bronze Age make that he champions.
I wish no ill on Mr. Peterson, but he's a strange dude.
Then again, mental health professionals are, in general, a fairly crazy lot. That's straight from Psychology Today:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/199707/why-shrinks-have-problems
And furthermore: he had to go through the awful situation of his beloved wife's receiving a terminal diagnosis in full public view.
“... Bronze Age male ...” dammit.
I've lost track of the last time I wore pants.
Not even Bermuda or cargo shorts. Thin Nylon basketball shorts
And unless I'm going out, commando
Maybe too much information?
John Henry
Shorts? Shorts? As in short pants?
Peterson is dead to me.
Seriously, wish him well. The worst thing he ever did was advocate for a different idea.
M Jordan:
Your first sentence said it all, and that’s on you.
So he's going for Phoenix not Icarus
"He was the little guy shouting “I’m not afraid of bullies!” while his knees knocked together and his voice quaked."
That's called courage.
"studiously averted his eyes from the girlie calendars on the wall"
That's called discipline.
Gilbert: But didn’t you note the irony?
Dave Begley said...
"many in the media have been eager to see him fail for the past couple of years [because he is conservative]."
But he is not, not in the same sense his fellow Canadian Mark Steyn is. Peterson appears to be just fine with things like government-run healthcare. His position on transgenders is far more nuanced than the activists can grasp. And he doesn't really get Trump (although, to his credit, he understands what a smarmy little snake Justin Trudeau is.)
But Peterson loathes hate speech laws, censorship and Communism. That leftists now consider those positions hateful and "conservative" shows you just how simplistic and poisonously illiberal the left has become.
From the very beginning of his rise to superstardom, Peterson has made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. He struck me as the psychologist version of Camille Paglia. He was a devotee of Carl Jung (first red flag) and seemed to be in the tradition of Edward Burnett Tylor, James George Frazer, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. He's like a less sentimental Joseph Campbell.
I have never been a big fan of comparative religion/mythology. It might be useful in the humanities but not really in understanding human behavior, the purported goal of psychology. It usually consists of pilfering mythological stories from world cultures, cramming them all together, excising the details, look for a pattern, and then extract some transcendent interpretation. If these stories are supposed to convey universal truths, then just read the stories. You don't need to read them through Peterson's eyes.
Peterson vacillates from esoteric, mystical mumbo jumbo to over-confident sciencism. He can say things like “Rejection of the unknown is tantamount to 'identification with the devil,' the mythological counterpart and eternal adversary of the world-creating exploratory hero." to "multimethod multitrait matrix analysis...[is] the gold standard for establishing construct validity in the social sciences."
Peterson is clearly interested in existential questions about life, meaning, good, etc. And he apparently believes he can answer these questions can be answered using "evidence-based" methods. He rummages through psychology, neruobiology, anthropology, history, and literature and constructs a murky patchwork that apparently has a lot of meaning for him, but I can't manage to make heads of tales of.
Sharc: The first point of yours is excellent. I agree: courage is sometimes denying the cowardice welling up within.
J. Farmer: Your comment was why I come here. Thank you.
I don't understand those who wish failure on Jordan Peterson.
Everything is a matter of sides now. If you are on the wrong side, you are seen as an enemy and a threat and are subject to malicious attacks.
Its sad, but ita amazing how many of these people handing out advice and behaving like wise gurus turn out to be alcoholics, drug addicts, obese, financial problems or have some other private flaw that makes you wonder why they don't fix themselves before they fix others.
Once you get really successful promoting your ideas and go around the country talking about them, you start taking things to keep you going from city to city, lecture to lecture and to make you feel like you've put in a good performance. And when you aren't moving around and performing you may feel an emptiness inside yourself that you feel you need to fill somehow. #Itslonelyatthetop. Also, you can now pay for the drugs you couldn't afford earlier.
M Jordan: A fair reading. Similarly, discipline is sometimes (maybe always) denying the temptation welling up within.
Sharc: Yes but it reminds me of Apostle Paul’s struggle in Romans 7 where ends with, “O wretched man that I am.”
Peterson needs to get to Romans 8: “the law of the spirit of life has feared me from the law of sin and of death.”
J. Farmer, I agree he's a patchy and sometimes contradictory thinker, but at least he's thinking. I'd much rather listen to a man who is painfully trying to sort out the messy contradictions of life and culture and thinks aloud while he is doing it than to the boringly predictable and shallow pundits and experts who pass for deep thinkers today.
Ta-Nehisi Coates for instance, whose message basically boils down to "white man bad."
“... freed”, not “feared. Double dammit.
Snake plants. Definitely not Canada. If a guy with his bucks doesn’t have a winter home in Florida I’ll eat my hat.
Florida sucks though. Arizona’s where it’s at!
Perhaps in studying Jung he overlooked the power of the shadow side, as so many do, that and his over generalizations lessen my admiration for some of his sensible rules which are sound. But, he is a much more interesting conservative than Rush or the Fox crowd.
I was underwhelmed by his book "Twelve Rules for Life". His interviews with Rogan are quite interesting though, and he's produced quite a few thought-provoking podcasts. I especially enjoyed his (long) podcast series on the Book of Genesis.
I'm looking to expand my own knowledge of the world and mankind. I read and listen to people with interesting things to say, and who are most likely to introduce me to new facts, thoughts and interpretations that had not occurred to me before. This doesn't mean I agree with everything that person might say. I'm just on a quest for knowledge, from whatever source. Some are better than others.
Peterson certainly provokes one to think. Sometimes he's out there, sometimes I agree, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I change my mind. Same as reading Althouse, or Insty, or any other blog out there.
"But, he is a much more interesting conservative than Rush or the Fox crowd." Unlike "liberals" (i.e., tax-happy, coercion-addicted, power-tripping State fellators) who seem to obsess over it, I don't watch Fox much; and I've only had limited exposure to Limbaugh, although I am prejudiced in his favor. (The result of "liberals" saying stuff like, "He's not a REAL conservative*, he's a libertarian.") But Peterson, being more concerned with psychology, doesn't spend as much time on that pesky liberty-vs.-statism thing, so I can see why you'd find him less objectionable.
*i.e., a conservative who's no threat to the Hive
John henry said... I've lost track of the last time I wore pants.Not even Bermuda or cargo shorts. Thin Nylon basketball shorts
And unless I'm going out, commando. Maybe too much information?
Yes on the TMI.
It is now shorts weather in Tucson. From now until November, it will be shorts and sandals every day.
It's a good thing I have very manly legs. Althouse would approve I think.
TMI? Probably.
Blogger I Have Misplaced My Pants said...
"If a guy with his bucks doesn’t have a winter home in Florida I’ll eat my hat."
Eastern Canadians go to Florida. Western Canadians go to Arizona. Except that now they've all gone home. The roads here are like the middle of summer, but more so.
TCrosse: touché. It’s still inexplicably funny.
J. Farmer puts the wiggly pretensions of Jungianism in its place, unsurprisingly. Still, considering what came after it — Foucaultian Will to Marxist Power garbage, I’ll take the former. Peterson has made his contribution to reviving old ways. Hard to do.
He’s staying in Florida with his son and son’s wife. No great mystery if you follow Peterson on Instagram. The entire family is there.
I watched a few of his videos. He seemed poised, reasonable and had a therapeutic presence. He's probably a good therapist. I don't understand why he's so controversial.....Apparently he has a fair number of personal problems. I wish him luck in his struggles....I guess an exaggerated interest in Jungian psychology is some kind of red flag. Is Jung more discredited than Freud? Don't trendy celebs still delve into The Red Book in their struggle to find the meaning of life....I don't pay much attention to such things. It would be just my luck at my age to find a sure fire way to achieve peace and happiness.
@exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil & roesch/voltaire:
I'll admit that Peterson can be an engaging speaker, and I liked some of his earlier interviews when he was pushing back on transmania and the biology of sex. When he started becoming a guru, I got much less interested. And quite frankly, I think he's a total charlatan.
When he tweeted, "So, I shouldn't talk to conservatives? By their own written account, hundreds if not thousands of young people tempted by the blandishments of the alt-right have remained or returned to the liberal/conservative center because of my work. What have you done for peace, bucko?"
Not only is that hilariously self-congratulatory, I'm pretty sure it's a lie. And I loathe that kind of fetishizing of the "center." He's diagnosed young men with too much chaos, and he's offering them order in return. For a price. Not just donating to his Patreon but also buying his book or his merch or signing up for his new tiered platform. Before he got internet famous, he was pushing another gimmicky product called the Future Authoring Program.
Peterson's also got a lot of weirdness around him. His daughter is pushing some bizarre carnivore diet, and she's apparently been trying to follow in her father's monetizing footsteps. They've both apparently had histories of odd, not clearly diagnosed medical problems. And Peterson's Klonopin addiction that required an induced coma and medical treatment in a facility in Russia was very odd.
Jordan Peterson is an unlikely combination. He has been very careful in how he says things, apparently all his life, and on the surface has been in some sense political correct the whole time. And yet he criticizes the left at a deep level.
The left hates Peterson for a whole list of reasons, and I'm not going to do justice to all of them.
They hate his memory of the past and in particular the history of the Soviet Union. Something that the left has been trying to airbrush out of existence for a long time now.
They hate him for his criticisms of identity politics.
They hate him for his criticisms of Marxism and for his linking it to deconstructionism.
They hate him for his criticisms of academia.
Most of all they hate him for being effective at expressing himself.
In reality the left hates anyone that is not left wing. But they hate those that express themselves clearly and have a large audience and are not left wing most of all.
Peterson's anti-fascist message should be just as relevant for women as for men. And if it's not, then that is not a good thing to say about women in general.
In my opinion Peterson's arguments are at their weakest when he attempts to map and measure the human psyche by assuming our myths and stories reveal something fundamental about us. I say that even though I believe his premise is correct. In fact it has to be correct.
JF — that’s precisely the problem. He has this belief that right and left are equally powerful and malevolent. It’s sheer nonsense, possibly even more irritating than libertarian rants about how they’re the only people using reason because they see through all the things other people can’t see because they’re libertarians and so don’t subscribe to group thinking because ...
It goes on.
Peterson is good at what he trained in. Very good. Politically he’s a naif and a bit of a coward.
I was never interested in Petersen because he seemed incapable of saying things in a straight-forward, clear, manner. If you're constantly qualifying, back-tracking, "Throwing stuff out of discussion", refusing to take responsibility for what you've said, use weasel words, and above all USE AMBIGUOUS LANGUAGE, I don't have any use for you.
Plenty of peeps are like that. John Scalzi for one. Rod Dreher for another.
Shorts calculus is hard!
I'm so glad you posted this! Was just wondering yesterday if he was out of the hospital/rehab. Looks like he may still be in some facility or at least somewhere that it's usually warm like California or Florida; for sure he is not at his home in Toronto. He looks good, much better than he had been while on that punishing speaking tour.
"Vox Day's real name = Theodore Robert Beale"
Okey-dokey.
I wouldn't burden Peterson with Rod Dreher. Peterson has done something useful with his life.
" A "guru" typically offers easy, quick, one-size-fits-all answers, whereas Peterson's thing is the opposite of easy and quick. It is, I admit, one-size-fits-all, but that one size is "work hard to be an adult - here are some steps that will help," which seems less like self-help-guru than like good advice."
Agreed. His overall philosophy and advice remind me very much of M. Scott Peck, whose books The Road Less Traveled, Farther Along the Road Less Traveled, and People of the Lie were incredibly helpful to me as a young adult. I read a lot of self-help books back then and they were about 90% bullcrap, but I didn't know that until I read Peck's books and recognized what solid truth looks like.
Yep, Short, shorts on a man with long legs doesn't look like a little boy. Put long shorts on a short man and its a little boy.
Peterson has an astonishing number of different ideas. I don't think any of these comments above, including my own, are doing any justice to the man.
You can listen to him podcast after podcast, and although there are certainly some definite themes that keep reappearing, still time after time he expresses new ideas.
Now this does not mean I agree with everything he says. But I agree with a lot of it, obviously. Or I wouldn't have spent the time I have listening to the man.
But to see what I mean pick a podcast and go through and write down all of the ideas he's articulating. It will usually be quite a list.
Or to give a specific instance, I recently listened to "Cain and Abel: the hostile brothers."
Try to engage with it. Write what he says, and write your response. I think you will see what I mean.
He’s a nice Canadian guy with a very good self help approach essentially taking 1950s common sense and tarting it up with psychology jumbo jumbo.
@Tina Trent:
Peterson is good at what he trained in. Very good. Politically he’s a naif and a bit of a coward.
I think that is certainly true. Whenever I hear people use phrases like "post-modern Cultural Marxism," my eyes go back in my head. That's a totally meaningless phrase that doesn't even really make use given the inherent contradictions between the two. What they're really doing is taking pieces of philosophy that are regarded as being part of "the left" and stitching them together in some kind of conspiracy theory of infiltration and subversion that promotes identity politics and social justice activism.
It's all very sloppy. To explain modern American identity politics, you don't need the Frankfurt School or Paris 1968. You can start with Civil Rights Movement. But that's not as exciting as trashing obscure French intellectuals whose work almost nobody in America has ever read.
@J. Farmer,
It's all very sloppy. To explain modern American identity politics, you don't need the Frankfurt School or Paris 1968. You can start with Civil Rights Movement. But that's not as exciting as trashing obscure French intellectuals whose work almost nobody in America has ever read.
As has been pointed out to you multiple times recently, you have a very selective relationship with facts.
Just because you never read any Post Modernists or Frankfurt school stuff, doesn't mean the no one else did. Go find an on-line posting of graduate readings in any sort of "X studies" or anything having to do with identity politics and tell us who's on it.
When the people who were involved in e.g. the 60's New Left say how important e.g. Marcuse was to them, why don't you believe them? Why do you try and impose some alternate history that you've pulled out of your ass on them?
The pop intellectual Peterson most reminds me of is Sam Harris. Even though they have different approaches, they are occupying similar space. They both like to claim we are fighting big ideological battles, because that would make big thinkers like them necessary. Whenever you start seeing a proliferation of headlines about how someone "DESTROYED" or "OWNED" someone else in a YouTube, start getting suspicious. And when someone tells you they support "reason" or "rationality," get really suspicious. Who the hell doesn't?!
@jeremyabrams said
But what will straight women do when they go looking for good men to marry?
Already a problem in poor and minority communities. Women are having a hard time maintaining a stable family life because the available men are unable to sustain a financially stable life.
J. Farmer, I have read them. Or parts of them. I wasn't too keen really on J. Derrida, and I'm trying to remember the names of some others.
I thought Walker Percy was profound, but then he's probably not part of "post-structuralism" or what is taught today.
I didn't read them as part of some course or because I knew who or what they were about. But simply because I was curious, and I also knew that if I found them in a college library or a college bookstore, then no matter how few copies were being sold, they were in some sense influential.
I guess I overlap with Jordan Peterson because I have pretty much read every person he mentions. Usually not as much but still there is hardly a person he mentions that I don't know something about.
I suspect that is because we are basically the same age, have some somewhat similar interests, although to be honest I was not at all keen on psychology, and we both obviously spent a lot of time in libraries.
I'm a bit amazed that you think the Civil Rights Movement is the lens through which we should see the world.
@YoungHegelian:
Just because you never read any Post Modernists or Frankfurt school stuff, doesn't mean the no one else did. Go find an on-line posting of graduate readings in any sort of "X studies" or anything having to do with identity politics and tell us who's on it.
I didn't say "no one," I said "almost no one." Consider this. How many Americans have graduate degrees? How many of those degrees are in the kinds of programs you're talking about?
When the people who were involved in e.g. the 60's New Left say how important e.g. Marcuse was to them, why don't you believe them? Why do you try and impose some alternate history that you've pulled out of your ass on them?
I'm sure some of them will. So what? There is absolutely nothing about the course of American history since 1960 that requires references to Herbert Marcuse. You don't need to understand Abbie Hoffman or Angela Davis to explain this time period. In fact, probably the most well known and influential radical leftists in the country is Noam Chomsky, who has described Marcuse's work as useless. He has a similarly negative view of post-modernism.
When you look at how society is organized and where power is actually distributed, the notion that "cultural Marxism" (whatever that is) explains it, is absurd.
@mandrewa:
I'm a bit amazed that you think the Civil Rights Movement is the lens through which we should see the world.
I didn't say it was the lens through which we should see the world. I said you can understand identity politics by starting with it. The language of oppression, the reliance on demonstrations and lawsuits, and the efforts to pass laws are all embedded in the civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, before the counter-culture movement really got started, and the categories it covers: race, color, religion, sex, national origin. You do not need references to obscure continental philosophy to explain why the 88th Congress passed that law.
" Whenever you start seeing a proliferation of headlines about how someone "DESTROYED" or "OWNED" someone else in a YouTube, start getting suspicious. "
I would only be suspicious if I knew Peterson (or Harris, or Shapiro, or whoever the "destroyer" is) wrote those headlines themselves. They don't, nor do they have control over it.
I've seen a few "Douglas Murray DESTROYS..." headlines on You Tube. When you watch the video, Murray is being his usual thoughtful and civilized self. I should discount what he actually says because of a headline one of his less thoughtful fans has slapped onto a clip?
You do like to make the perfect the enemy of the good.
Funny how we're supposed to be compassionate for every liberal and Hollywood star that gets addicted from recreational use but we're supposed to turn our backs on people who don't spout the Progressive line when they have an issue from actual pain or mental issues. We went through this when Rush Limbaugh had a problem.
So Ann Althouse decides to branch out into alternate media and she picks Hotair.
Hotair lost most of it's readership after they sold out to Salem and went full NeverTrump.
Now they are boot licking to get readership and are full of clickbait.
Jordan Peterson "failed in some sense" in much the same way Reagan failed, by succeeding beyond the worst fears of the Left in getting his message out, by damaging the public's perception of the Left immeasurably with all who heard him, and by leaving in his wake long-lasting proofs of his success.
The Left says, "Yeah, that Jordan Peterson guy - we all ridiculed him. Therefore we won."
Meanwhile his books still are read, his internet presence remains, and those who heard him and listened still live. May the Left win 1000 more such victories, although I suspect that about a dozen or so will destroy them.
.
Camille Paglia (someone I sometimes agree with and sometimes do not) once said that she didn't read Freud or any other thinker because everything they say is Gospel Truth because that's not how she approaches authors. You might agree with some of what they say, disagree with other things and be skeptical of other things but find them interesting. And of course, it's always get if one or two of the points they make broaden your understanding or perspective so you can see something you wouldn't have arrived at on your own.
Paglia's approach is, I think, the correct one, but nowadays so many people insist on dismissing everyone who doesn't fit into their little ideological cubbyhole. "I liked him and then he said this and now I think he's worthless' seems to be a common response, and one not limited to leftists.
I guess, like 5th Century Athens, we must live in an era where there are so many intellectual giants out there that we can afford to dismiss these lesser types who aren't 100 percent perfect all the time.
Achilles said...
So Ann Althouse decides to branch out into alternate media and she picks Hotair."
Yeah. It's like picking Jen Rubin and Max Boot as representative conservatives.
Ugh.
"it's always get" should be "it's always great"
Those who cannot stand Peterson and find him a quack almost without exception have a world view based on a hodgepodge of doctrines taken from the philosophies of empiricism and materialism. These folks have never gotten over David Hume's devastating critique of causation. And they cannot stomach Peterson's view that there is a reality that lay far beyond the limits of any explanation offered by their favored philosophies. In fact, the concept of transcendence cannot even be grasped by these folks. So they take the quickest exit and pronounce the very idea to be gibberish.
Jordan Peterson gives the Stephen Hicks version of postmodernism, which I found to be an accessible and clear lineage of the thinkers behind it. I think I've even heard Peterson recommend that slim volume. One can quibble with Hicks, but it's still a useful primer on it, and yes, European thought has had a huge impact on postmodern trends in US academia.
I knew the shorts would garner comment.
While I certainly don't wish to pile on someone who is clearly struggling, it's a bit ironic to be someone who instructs others to "clean your room" and "take your pills" and who, it seems, tends to have rather unnatural familial desires. I tried to read "Maps of Meaning" and it was such a word salad that I came close to tossing it in the bin (luckily it was a library book so I promptly tossed it in the returns bin instead.)
Like him or dislike him, Vox Day has spent a good amount of time analyzing Peterson and dismantling much of his writing. He was right.
https://arkhavencomics.com/product/jordanetics-audiobook/
@exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil:
I should discount what he actually says because of a headline one of his less thoughtful fans has slapped onto a clip?
Being suspicious doesn't mean you "discount what he actually says." And the suspicion should really be directed at yourself. One of the worst aspects that coterie is its tendency to encourage cocooning. It's sort of like the people who go to "free thinkers" or "atheists" conventions. And winning a debate does not make you right. Ben Shapiro humiliating a cocksure college freshman or Peterson making a fool of a Chanel 4 newscaster isn't that instructive. We should always be vigilant to not become fanboys.
When you watch the video, Murray is being his usual thoughtful and civilized self.
I like Douglas Murray. I liked his last two books, The Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity. Ironically, Jordan Peters and Sam Harris blurbed it. Murray also makes an effort to connect our current problems to a French intellectual, Michael Foucault.
Douglas Murray seems to self-consciously emulate Christopher Hitchens, and he first made a name for himself in the early 2000 parroting Hitchens' ridiculous arguments in favor of the Iraq War. His first book was Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, and he was a member of the Henry Jackson Society, a rather ridiculous little think tank quickly set up to provide ideological support for the Iraq War, which had already become massively unpopular in the UK.
Thin Nylon basketball shorts
Aren't they a little...damp in PR? My skin would be rotting off.
@ mtrobertslaw:
Those who cannot stand Peterson and find him a quack almost without exception have a world view based on a hodgepodge of doctrines taken from the philosophies of empiricism and materialism. These folks have never gotten over David Hume's devastating critique of causation.
This is actually a good example of why I am not a big fan of Peterson's. I don't see much point in talking at the level of abstraction.
@exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil:
Paglia's approach is, I think, the correct one, but nowadays so many people insist on dismissing everyone who doesn't fit into their little ideological cubbyhole. "I liked him and then he said this and now I think he's worthless' seems to be a common response, and one not limited to leftists.
I agree with that approach to. That's why I think it is best to avoid labels. Calling somet position "Marxist" doesn't really get you anywhere. It doesn't tell you why, or even if, the argument is incorrect. People tend to affix a label to something specifically so they can dismiss it.
Camille Paglia (someone I sometimes agree with and sometimes do not) once said that she didn't read Freud or any other thinker because everything they say is Gospel Truth because that's not how she approaches authors.
I can't imagine Paglia saying she didn't read Freud. If anything, the opposite seems true. She seems quite enamored with Freud and has praised him throughout her work. One of her critiques of modern feminism is that it has insufficient absorbed Freud's insights. On that score, I am decidedly on the side of the modern feminist.
"Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Monica Fields"
One Youtube headline you won't see.
"Cultural Marxism" is what has been driving the Left ever since the 1930s. The Communists were not supporting black voting rights and desegregation because they loved black people. Or attacking censorship and promoting ACLU type civil liberties because the Commies believed in free speech.
As Susan Sontag Said: "They don't need free speech in the USSR. They have socialism."
To explain modern American identity politics, you don't need the Frankfurt School or Paris 1968. You can start with Civil Rights Movement.
Certainly, people ought at least to have read those writers and have tried to understand them before they talk about "cultural Marxism," and many who complain about "cultural Marxism" haven't done that. Democracy means that groups that consider themselves to be marginalized or excluded or exploited or disadvantaged are eventually going to organize themselves politically and seek power. The recent movements people complain about were underway, certainly much weaker and smaller than they are now, a century ago, when the Frankfurt School were undergraduates and the Parisian post-structuralists not yet born. That doesn't mean that such movements are always right but one can't simply label them "cultural Marxism" and expect them to go away.
J. Farmer said,
"I said you can understand identity politics by starting with it. The language of oppression, the reliance on demonstrations and lawsuits, and the efforts to pass laws are all embedded in the civil rights movement."
There is so much going on here that I don't understand. It's obvious you have a mental framework that explains all of this, a theory of the world where the connection of this to Jordan Peterson makes sense.
But I don't get it. To make it clear, the reasons I dislike the left have nothing to do with "demonstrations and lawsuits" andthe nominal purpose of the "civil rights movement".
"Language of oppression" on the other hand might be getting at what I dislike. It all depends on what you mean. It could be other good or bad. The reality is that the worst regimes of the last century, the most murderous in human history, all talked in words we might describe as "language of oppression," aka they claimed to be acting for the oppressed.
J. Farmer said,
"You do not need references to obscure continental philosophy to explain why the 88th Congress passed that law."
Perhaps there is a comment on this thread in the context of which that makes sense. It certainly does not make sense, it seems to me, as a reply to mine. What in the world do you think I'm saying?
For the record I don't think the left is about the civil rights movement and I don't think the civil rights movement explains the left or why the left thinks what it thinks or says what it says. [And I'm not opposed to the Civil Rights Act (nor of course is Jordan Peterson).]
I tend to think most people who are informed about many of the other things the left has done this century and last would be skeptical of that.
The very emphasis on the civil rights movement as a major story in the arc of human history seems odd. In turns of rights and wrongs, good or bad, it's vastly overshadowed by many other events. Heck, it's vastly overshadowed by things happening right now, things that are greater moral significance that as it happens hardly anyone is paying attention to.
But I do get the left wants to perceive itself as virtuous.
I think Paglia meant she didn't read Freud et al 'because they are Gospel Truth' but for any insight they might offer--a reader who wants or EXPECTS "Gospel Truth" should just read scripture.
The whole field of psychology is a jumble of irrelevancies to me, and I can't recall an instance of reading pop- or prof-psy without wondering why people bother. Then I recall that many of the most upgefuckt people I ever knew were practitioners and/or victims of these theories.
I'll give Peterson this-- he's no quitter!
Narr
Quitters never win ;>
@rcocean:
"Cultural Marxism" is what has been driving the Left ever since the 1930s.
American communists in the 1930s had nothing to do with "Cultural Marxism" or would even recognize that as a term. The Frankfurt School was a part of a movement known as Western Marxism. They rejected Leninism and the USSR and they were more concerned with Marx's earlier work, the influence of Hegel, and the application of Marx's ideas to sociology and philosophy. It was almost completely academic in its orientation, and it didn't even represented a single coherent movement. Some were interested in Hegel or Kant, others took a psychoanalytic perspective.
@Lurker21:
Certainly, people ought at least to have read those writers and have tried to understand them before they talk about "cultural Marxism," and many who complain about "cultural Marxism" haven't done that.
I agree completely with everything you wrote. On this point, reading those writers wouldn't even help because what is called "cultural Marxism" today has practically nothing to do with what any of them wrote. What is called "cultural Marxism" today is basically bad intellectual history and bad political history that attempts to draw a line from Marx to Frankfurt to the 60s social movements as a deliberate effort to overthrow western Christian civilization. That would sound like gibberish to any of the people associated with the Frankfurt School in the 1930s. The notion that people like Theodor Adorno or Max Horkheimer w anted to overthrow Christian civilization would have seemed like insanity to them. Their main interest was in analytics, not activism.
The purpose of post-modernism is in part to a criticize logic and reasoning and the belief that there is an objective reality.
Deconstructivism is in large part an argument that texts aren't important and they don't have an objective meaning. Which sounds absurd, but there it is.
So after -- supposedly -- demolishing the foundations of Western thought, and rendering it "reactionary" to study the great thinkers of the past, what theory do post-modernists and deconstructionists imply we should organize all of our thinking around?
Why Marxism of course.
And thus "cultural Marxists" seems like an entirely apt and appropriate naming to me.
Actually the same can be said for a great many modern majors, some shallow little unimpressive field of knowledge, which in reality is organized by the assumption that guess what is true.
Gramsci, not the Frankfurt School nerds, is the one to turn to for understanding so-called cultural marxism.
@mandrewa:
There is so much going on here that I don't understand. It's obvious you have a mental framework that explains all of this, a theory of the world where the connection of this to Jordan Peterson makes sense.
In an exchange with another commenter, I was making a point of Peterson's incoherent use of phrases like "post-modern Cultural Marxism" and the notion that this has something to do with modern politics. I was explaining how you can trace modern identity politics back to the civil rights movement and gave the example of how the Civil Rights act afforded certain legal privileges on the basis of identity traits.
I tend to think most people who are informed about many of the other things the left has done this century and last would be skeptical of that.
The problem with this formulation is that "the left" is not coherent entity that you ascribe motives, intentions, and actions to. In the 19th century, republicanism, socialism, and anarchism were all considered left-wing. In the 20th century, Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party, the British Labour Party, and the Soviet Communist Party could all be described as part of "the left." That's indicative of how broad and expansive the term is.
Narr mentioned: "the most upgefuckt people"
I am totally upgesnatching this wonderful term.
"I can't imagine Paglia saying she didn't read Freud. "
I phrased that poorly, Farmer. I meant to say that Paglia reads Freud (and certainly agrees with many of his theories - a most unfashionable stance these days), but does not accept everything he writes as Gospel Truth, but because she thinks he got many things right and gives one a different and original perspective on human beings.
I don't agree with everything Peterson writes, but I don't reject him wholesale because of that any more than I completely reject Paglia because she's a '60's flake when it comes to astrology.
Enjoy, RigelDog! I stole it from the brother of a wargaming friend, who was one of the last of the Fulda Gap Guards (Sixth Armored Cavalry?) in the 80s. An older one was "mox nix" (machts nichts).
Narr
Sprechen sie Deustchlisch?
Deutschlisch!
Narr
Stupid checker of spelling thing.
e@xiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil:
I don't agree with everything Peterson writes, but I don't reject him wholesale because of that any more than I completely reject Paglia because she's a '60's flake when it comes to astrology.
I take your point about Paglia, and I agree. For what it's worth, I think Peterson and I probably agree more than we disagree, though probably for different reasons. And I certainly think a lot of the negativity he attracts is very over-the-top, but that's actually part of the business model. If people get something from his talks or writing, more power to them. Since I consider myself part of the alt-right, I'm not too thrilled about his expressed desire to "save" people from it and move them back to the middle. Although, anyone who would do that after listening to Jordan Peterson probably wasn't someone worth having in the movement in the first place.
Standalone Chapter 2 of 12 Rules for Life is one of the greatest essays I have ever read. This is not damning with faint praise. I have read most of the greats.
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