From "Éric Zemmour: ‘Am I the French Trump? No, I’m more like Boris’
Éric Zemmour, 63, is a former journalist whose inflammatory statements about immigrants have made him a new voice of the far right, to rival Marine Le Pen. Last week, it was revealed that his 28-year-old aide is expecting his child. So, what are his chances in next year’s French presidential election?" (London Times).
The interviewer, Andrew Billen, says he asks Zenmour "about his bizarre theory... that France’s resolve has been emasculated by feminists and homosexuals over the past 50 years." Billen calls this theory "worthy of the Canadian lobster-man philosopher Jordan Peterson" — lobster-man! — and pushes Zemmour about his use of the word "virilité" and asks if he's "masculine" and whether he got in fights when he was young. Answer:
"Was I a brawler? Mean to women? Not at all. No, I don’t have the looks. I don’t have the physique. And I don’t have the mentality either. No, no, I’m very French. I like flirting, the culture of flirtatiousness. I like French courtesy. I just think... there has been a domination of what we call women’s values, that is to say that peace is preferred to war, consensus over choice. It is these values that push your daughter to say, ‘Ooh là là! We must absolutely respect the values of others.’ Your daughter must be careful to respect other values, which are more masculine, like taking responsibility. It is man’s nature to defend."
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44 comments:
He sounds a heap like El Trumpo to me. And that's not a bad thing.
"that if you are not of the left, you are never called an intellectual. So they call you a sloppy polemicist instead...."
"worthy of the Canadian lobster-man philosopher Jordan Peterson"
I saw what you did there.
Peterson uses lobsters as an example of behavior a lot. Lobster man is a perfect reference.
63/2+7=38.5
28 IS NOT 38.5
come On barbie! the math isn't THAT hard!!
his bizarre theory...
that France’s resolve has been emasculated by feminists and homosexuals over the past 50 years
i don't know much about france... but Sec Pete Butifuc DOT
employee training labels 'cisgender men' as oppressors of 'cisgender women', "Trans*" and "intersex" individuals via sexism
The DOT training also warns that simply choosing not to be racist or prejudiced is not enough, saying, "Attempting to suppress or deny biased thoughts can actually increase bias action rather than eradicate it."
Apparently, we're just supposed to embrace it?
The lobster bit in Peterson's book is actually very instructive to anybody who reads it. But it works as fodder for the disinformation apparatus, and so it will be used as such. I am sure that the vast majority of the people who repeat the slur have never read 12 Rules, but those who created the 'meme,' in the original sense of the term, did it with malice aforethought. Most people repeating it are simple dupes, but these useful idiots serve to multiply the power of the disinformation.
Our information system now is more hopeless than when people relied on traveling salesman to relate to them the gossip from the next town. We have hostile powers like China, who are very practiced in disinformation and destabilization, and we have tech like Twitter bots, and we have tech oligarchs who suppress one side of the argument, making it even more difficult to ascertain whatever the truth might be. And we have the New York Times and the Washington Post printing disinformation whispered in their ears by the CIA and FBI, not to mention the willing lies they make up in service of the DNC.
It's pathetic. I would rather live in France where they are putting up a fight for their beautiful culture.
I thought a woman would either have SOME capacity to detect a charlatan, or a flock of illegitimate children from charming wastrels. Well, that's why Roe is- or was- so important.
Anyways, Zenmour is pretty much the Ben Shapiro of France, and even more phony than Macron. The fact the French establishment is trying so hard to prop him up against Front Nationale is a definite sign that nationalism is rising throughout Europe.
Shades of Neville! Zemmour exhorts France to hold: Vous ne les laisserrez pas passer (You shall not let them pass). 1916 redux if not with Germans.
This post is quite disturbing, not for what he says, but BECAUSE the things he says -- things which only 40 years ago were commonly held beliefs, attitudes, and principles across a very wide swath of the political and moral centre -- are now considered to be "far-right" beliefs.
When you observe the results of that shift, by which what were, a generation ago, far left views are now presented as being "mainstream", it is nearly impossible for rational people with a sense of history, culture, and western civilization, to consider the functional outcome as being in any way positive or beneficial apart from certain minor improvement at the margins of society.
I say "presented" because I speak French with near-native fluency and have both travelled and worked there extensively over the years. Rural and small-town France have never accepted the "egg-head" beliefs recently pushed so hard in the cities, academia, and media. As in the US, UK, and Canada it has become a very snobiste divide between urban/academic people, who almost never work with their hands produce anything, and everyone else.
Such exponential arrogance rarely turns out well.
Zemmour looks like one of those historical figures that wanders onto the world stage and points out the elephant we have all been ignoring.
He also seems as though he knows this ends in triumph or utter defeat, history's ultimate binary choice. You see the reporter react to his (and Peterson's) thought like Vlad the Impaler greets a crucifix illuminated by the sunrise.
He will need much luck and his victory is improbable but necessary. There is a giant void for a necessary man shaped like Zemmour just as there was for Peterson when his time came to step up and speak the truth.
Bonne chance. Bon courage.
"Trump said to drink bleach" or "inject bleach" is another one of these lying memes, like "lobster man" and nobody is going to go back and check them, once they have achieved a life of their own. They actually enjoy how infuriating these memetic devices are a lot more than they care whether they are true or not. But of course this fury drives turnout for Republicans, so it's a double edged sword.
Of course Republicans, well, the right, has developed a memetic capability that is powerful and infuriating to the left, but whoever says that the left can't meme just doesn't understand the full range of what memes are and their power. Memes from the right, unlike memes from the left, find it hard to escape cyberspace, sticker attacks on Joe Biden's policies of energy poverty notwithstanding.
The New York Times actually wrote a piece this week about how harmful these right of center cute cat memes are, well, harmful to the electoral chances of The Party. LOL. It's like The Party orders up these articles in the New York Times from their war room the way you and I might order a pizza delivered. @Catturd loved it, for one, it means that he is over the target.
For a long time I have defended ideas and convictions and become what we call an intellectual. In truth, the problem in France is that if you are not of the left, you are never called an intellectual.
There's much truth in that. It's not quite as bad as that in America for "conservative intellectuals." The problem is more that the "sloppy polemicists" of the left dominate academia, have positions in the media, organize purges, and never are recognized as "sloppy polemicists."
From what I've been able to understand of Zemmour's writing, I'd call him a journalist or a commentator, a controversialist or a provocateur, or even a public intellectual, if by that you mean a "political intellectual" like so many in the commentariat.
Mary Beth said...
Peterson uses lobsters as an example of behavior a lot. Lobster man is a perfect reference.
No. He uses lobsters to explain a single claim. The claim is that hierarchies are not human social constructs. That behavior predates humans by millions of years, has a biological basis, and is widespread throughout the animal kingdom. Using lobsters as the example instead of other primates is intentional because it takes hierarchies back much further than primates, and their biology is so seemingly different from humans that it helps make the point. The reason small thinkers scoff at the comparison is precisely why lobsters make his point so well. Other than providing evidence supporting that single claim, he uses lobsters for no other purpose, and it's a tiny portion of what he discusses.
As exemplified by your comment, sheep also are good examples of human behavior.
Keywords:
>far right
>is he Trump? (whatever that's supposed to mean, although we know it means that every Trump utterance was racist and white supremacist).
>""worthy of the Canadian lobster-man philosopher Jordan Peterson" — lobster-man!" Jordan Peterson. Like Trump, the left only needs to say his name and then smile knowingly, either to themselves or those fellow travelers around them.
It's not an accident that those who control the words do not let the word "intellectual" be used for anyone on the right. I mean far right. Personally, I think what he is quoted as saying here is mostly on target. It's not hateful. It is calling a thing what it is. That it goes against The Narrative is the crime. Not the meaning of what it said, but that it is contrary to accepted narrative.
Mary Beth said...
Peterson uses lobsters as an example of behavior a lot. Lobster man is a perfect reference.
A lot?
This seems an example of someone who can hold at most a sentence of context about any subject.
Let us compare him to the most intelligent person in the Biden administration.
The wheels on the bus go round and round!
"his bizarre theory... that France’s resolve has been emasculated by feminists and homosexuals"
Didn't lefties celebrate the emasculation until the day before yesterday? Wasn't the replacement of toxically masculine Western culture with a more caring and inclusive feminine/gay culture a point of pride? And wasn't the notion of a nation having anything like "resolve" both ridiculous and dangerous?
A bizarre theory that France was emasculated 50 years ago? Well the theory may not be so bizarre. It's just that the date is wrong. France was emasculated starting 106 years ago when a significant percentage of French men of military age was eradicated, eliminated and exterminated at the hands of the German Army. The balance certainly hadn't returned by 1940 when the German Army returned to France. I know WW I started in August 1914, but the real slaughter and grinding occurred in the trenches 1915-1918.
I honestly believe Trump doesn't have a racist bone in his body.
As for Peterson, why the dig?
He's a very interesting guy, and not in the least threatening to anyone.
Europe in general needs some hard-liners on traditional culture or they will all be bowing towards Mecca...and sooner than they think.
Achilles: "Let us compare him to the most intelligent person in the Biden administration.
The wheels on the bus go round and round!"
Au contraire!
Biden's Earpiece explicitly declared Hunter Biden to be the smartest person he has EVER met.
Note: I am including Hunter as an administration member because he is actively running Biden's Earpiece Foreign Cash For Influence campaign.
Having viewed a merde tonne of Peterson videos and being the guy who introduced him to this very blog years ago while never having readed his books except for maps of meaning, Mary Beth is correct. Jordan frequency referral to lobster seratonin driven cooperative altruistic behavioral control manipulations plus their response to antidepressants like humans.
Actually, this point kills two major foundational underpinnings of modern conservative religion theory. One is that altruism is good and two that morals are emergent properties of Natural selection, not some gift from a jealous vengeful God.
Gilbar: 63 is the new 42
The "post-truth" world cares less about what's true and what's false than about what's verboten and what isn't.
There is a nice piece about him in the new Claremont Review.
I've become very annoyed at this time of discussion whereby the questioner states opinions as facts, and attachs "Insult labels" to every position he dislikes.
What does the word "bizzare" mean in this context? How does it move forward the conversation or interviewer? Its just a way to express the questioners opinion which no one cares about.
Anything not accepted by the Liberal-left establishment is "Right wing" or "Ultra Right" or "Extreme Right wing".
The Regime media has been doing that for years. Tommorrow if the Wapo/NYT/Democrats decided that Republican voters should be sent to Gulags, and Churchs burnt, then anyone who disagreed would be labeled "Right wing".
that's the way the Liberal/left has always operated.
Time was that a French politician without a mistress was the object of suspicion.
Skeptical Voter-- you're right in part, but the French set records in the fall of 1914 for pointless and expensive attacks as called for by Plan 17 and the super-hyper-macho Cult of the Offensive that replaced actual thought in the upper levels of the French Army.
As for 1940, French elite will collapsed far earlier and deeper than that of the populace.
I fixed the link. Thanks for the heads-ups... now deleted.
I love seeing thinkers who run counter to the consensus. There is always an element of truth in any thinker's views. It is also instructive to consider why you like or dislike such thoughts. Clarity in one's views is important and is a goal not often achieved.
"France was emasculated starting 106 years ago when a significant percentage of French men of military age was eradicated, eliminated and exterminated at the hands of the German Army."
So why wasn't Germany similarly "emasculated"? Worst case death totals, military and civilian, during the Great War as a percentage of the population for France and Germany were very close, 4.4% and 4.3% respectively. Is Skeptical Voter seriously suggesting that one-tenth of one percent difference made the difference between a virile and aggressive Germany and an emasculated and passive France in 1940? As one who has closely studied the military and political history of Franch in the 20th century, particularly the German operations against France, Fall Gelb and Fall Rot, I have learned the most widely accepted explanations for the fall of the Third Republic do not include a lack of manliness among les grognards.
Proposed causes of the French collapse are myriad, but the more plausible ones emphasize an important fact that runs counter to popular stereotypes of French and German military culture in 1933-1945 period. If rigid obedience to specific orders was characteristic of either, it was the French army and not the German. German officer and NCO training encouraged tactical flexibility and improvisation whereas French officers were often disciplined for movement without specific orders. This hesitancy to redeploy forces against standing orders from higher headquarters worked to the advantage of the Germans, particularly their Army Group A, which advanced through the French Second Army on a very narrow front with exposed flanks. Had the French reacted quickly, Army Group A, particularly the tank-heavy 12th Army, could have been isolated and forced into a defensive stance. However, the reluctance of French commanders to move without authorization and General Maurice Gamelin's absurd reliance on motorcycle dispatch riders conspired to paralyze the French forces that could have intervened and yet did not.
There are many other contributing factors -- Belgian reluctance to cooperate with the Anglo-French planners before 10 May, French concentration of armor and motorized infantry on the left flank, leaving the Second and Third armies short of transport, French tanks with one-man turrets and one radio-equipped tank per platoon versus German tanks with two and three-man turrets and abundant radios, Communist-inspired dissension in the ranks, Pervitin... too many to give much credit to lack of stones among the French.
The lobsters are being boiled slowly enough.
He's right.
let me put it this way >>>>
does it take an intellectual to say : We hold these truths to be self-evident etc.
or is it a mere common-sense statement?
or Q:
when did the Founders gain intellect? at time of Declaration or at time of Constitution?
No lobster ever called me serf.
Actually, this point kills two major foundational underpinnings of modern conservative religion theory. One is that altruism is good and two that morals are emergent properties of Natural selection, not some gift from a jealous vengeful God.
Howard, your atheism is confusing you. There is a considerable literature on the concept that altruism is good that has nothing to do with religion. And morals are also attributed to group behavior associated with natural selection.
"a jealous vengeful god" is some of your childhood nightmare content.
As usual, lefties have no concept of what conservatives think.
Peterson sells lobster merchandise on his website. https://shop.jordanbpeterson.com/lobster
However he mostly talks about the human condition and how to deal with it in a way that many people find helpful. My father who was a therapist mostly for young men would have loved him.
Why are French women neither fat nor feminist?
Discuss.
Howard: "Having viewed a merde tonne of Peterson videos and being the guy who introduced him to this very blog years ago..."
Hilariously false.
But only hilariously!
Wait, it gets better: "Mary Beth is correct."
Wrong. As in incorrect.
Wait, it gets better: "Actually,...(meaningless filler cisplaying as argument).....ealous vengeful God."
Laughable.
On a positive note: its at least consistent with other Howard "offerings".
But hey, more good news for Howard: in addition to Biden's Earpiece getting rid of sanctions on russian oil and gas pals of Putin as well as Biden's Beijing Masters, Biden's Earpiece just got rid of sanctions on the mad mullahs of Iran who are using their Biden Bucks to accelerate nuke development!
Yeah!
Here's another example of Howard's veneer thin intellect getting something wildly wrong from the Amy Coney Barrett thread....though one shouldn't discount purposeful lying as well.
Howard: "Abortion was legal under common law and not controversial when the Constitution was adopted. Anti abortion laws were enacted as a counter punch to the woman's sufferage movement.
Greg The Class Traitor: "Another Howard post, another lie. With, of course, no link to back it up.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10297561/
During the colonial period, the legality of abortion varied from colony to colony and reflected the attitude of the European country which controlled the specific colony. In the British colonies abortions were legal if they were performed prior to quickening (which was the first time the mother felt her baby move inside of her). In the French colonies abortions were frequently performed despite the fact that they were considered to be illegal. In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies abortion was illegal."
No lobster ever called me serf.
No filet mignon ever called me surf.
No. He uses lobsters to explain a single claim
It's true he's making the same point each time, but I have heard him talk about it in his book, in a lecture, and in conversations/interviews. Maybe I should have said I have heard it a lot, not he talks about it a lot because it is only one thing out of many that he has said.
I would have felt the same if the reference had been to people needing to clean their own room. The lobster reference or being responsible for cleaning your own room is connected in my mind with Peterson and immediately recognizable.
As exemplified by your comment, sheep also are good examples of human behavior.
And there are those who remind us of jackasses. (Although, it's an undeserved insult to the jackass.)
France's problem in 1940 was leadership. Their politicians weren't that great, and the generals weren't either. One could argue that the real leaders were killed in the war, but even had they lived they probably wouldn't have risen to power yet. France had its problems, but the main one was that the Germans were fanatically committed to winning and the French were more laissez-faire about everything.
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Zemmour is good at what he does. He writes penetrating and provocative analyses of where France is and how it got there. You want somebody like that in government. But you don't necessary want them as the top elected leader. You want someone who can get things done, and Zemmour will get bogged down defending his writings, rather than implementing policy.
There's a division of labor between analysts who see what's going on and politicians who concentrate on not offending anyone, and that has a lot to do with our problems. If you can identify a problem, and you write or talk about it publicly, you have already made yourself unelectable.
Zemmour identifies with Boris Johnson, because he thinks of himself as an intellectual, and he likes Boris's intellectual trappings, but really, I think he is closer to Trump. Zemmour and Trump were both non-politicians who took risks supporting controversial policies. Boris likewise risked failure when he opted for Brexit, but it seems more to have been a matter of political calculation rather than real commitment.
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Does every society have an orthodoxy? Were dissidents and non-conformists shunned or cancelled as much in the past as they are today? Maybe, but one could get away with saying things in parts of Manhattan or Paris that would have get one run out of Mississippi or la France profonde. Today, the urban centers that were once havens for the unorthodox are not the most committed to the new orthodoxy.
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