January 20, 2022

"Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause... but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism."

"The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.... Incidentally... I think this should remind you of something that is happening. And we see what is happening in the Western countries. It is with puzzlement that we see the practices Russia used to have and that we left behind."

Said Vladimir Putin, making the news last October (in the Boston Herald), but I'm thinking about them this morning because yesterday — prompted by YouTube's algorithm — we watched this new Jordan Peterson video:

He gets so emotional that you might feel that he's raving, losing control, but he is reading something that was already published — here — so the emotion is some combination of performance and a real-time reaction to his own words. The words are locked in by the pre-existing text. Excerpt:

[T]his is on you. Professors. Cowering cravenly in pretence and silence. Teaching your students to dissimulate and lie. To get along. As the walls crumble. For shame. CEOs:...Why the hell don’t you banish the human resource DIE [Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity] upstarts back to the more-appropriately-named Personnel departments, stop them from interfering with the psyches of you and your employees, and be done with it? Musicians, artists, writers: stop bending your sacred and meritorious art to the demands of the propagandists before you fatally betray the spirit of your own intuition. Stop censoring your thought. Stop saying you will hire for your orchestral and theatrical productions for any reason other than talent and excellence. That’s all you have. That’s all any of us have.

58 comments:

Achilles said...

Peterson thinks the CEO's and professors are cowardly and craven.

This is wrong.

They are evil and Corrupt.

wendybar said...

Putin is less racially divisive than Joe Biden and the Progressive party is. Who would have thunk it??

RideSpaceMountain said...

"Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause" What is an "act of racism"?

Don't forget, there are huge numbers of people that include not recognizing or acknowledging someone's race as an "act of racism". Does anybody even know what racism even is anymore? Is it just a catch all now for anything that happens to piss someone off of any race or any color skin for any reason?

Sebastian said...

"Why the hell don’t you banish . . . before you fatally betray the spirit of your own intuition"

Even after all this time, Peterson is still a bit naive in underestimating the prog assault. They don't betray anything. They don't cower. They like it. They want it. Sure, some of them are greengrocers who live the lie. But most believe truly enough. And at this point, how can we tell the difference?

tim in vermont said...

Yesterday I called the customer service line for my pension from my old employer, and before they connected me, they played a 30 second lecture on how bad racism is and how nobody should stand for people who took differences into account, etc. I assumed that this was a setup for them to send me to a heavily Hindi accented call center, to forestall any coming complaints, but it wasn't, it was just a lecture on race to a retired employee who just wanted some information about the benefits he had earned.

RideSpaceMountain said...

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-york-sued-using-race-help-determine-who-receives-crucial-covid-19-treatment

Just when you thought racism couldn't get any more racismer. Racist or not racist?

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

to the dumb class left - everything is about superficial characteristics.

The left do not want 'content of character' - they WANT the skin color wars - and segregation.

rhhardin said...

John Gall "Systemantics" (1976) calls it administrative encirclement. The people hired to order pads and pencils wind up in charge of the entire institution.

In this case the personnel department.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

The collective soviet left also want to use "you're a racist" as a weapon to silence dissent on any issue.

tim in vermont said...

Update on an old Soviet joke.

"Under racism, one man discriminates against another, under woke-ism, it's the other way around."

Kevin said...

Agent Smith : Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.

Howard said...

Is stupid woke racism worst than Jim Crow segregation lynchings with the Tuskegee experiment cherry on top?

The Trumper sensitivity to the looney tunes left is mass hysterical dain bramage. TDS's opposite number so to speak. Wearing the frilly laced veil of victimhood over your white lumpy carcasses isn't a good look.

chickelit said...

Stop saying you will hire for your orchestral and theatrical productions for any reason other than talent and excellence. That’s all you have. That’s all any of us have.

Any organization--orchestra, university, which puts diversity ahead of excellence deserves to fail. Full Stop.

Ann Althouse said...

@Achilles

Something I'll bet you didn't do: Read the entire column or watch the entire video before making that statement. It really looks cheap to talk like that and to dismiss JP because you thought of some other words. Did you even search the page for "evil" before knocking out your comment?

Achilles said...

Howard said...

Is stupid woke racism worst than Jim Crow segregation lynchings with the Tuskegee experiment cherry on top?

Progressives/Democrats were racists then too.

Democrats have always had racist policies.

You really are stupid today.

Dave Begley said...

The University of Nebraska - Lincoln employs 17 people in its diversity division. What a racket.

farmgirl said...

I’m so glad Peterson gets a chance from you. When I jest of “the smart people” being in charge- I mostly mean those who emanate condescension toward all those they believe are “below” them… I recently said as much to a friend that a certain doctor was good enough to speak “to” me. She said I was being judgements- labeling people.

Sigh…

I think Peterson doesn’t “perform”, but of course that’s how I’d feel b/c I trust him. And really think highly of him(could you tell?) I would soon rather believe he’s not preventing himself from expressing his true reactions. I don’t think it’s necessarily a good look for him, to be so sensitive- but, it’s not a look, is it? It’s who he is. I like that. Idk if I can listen to his Russian interview- I started, but the interpreter is kind of yuck on my ears… I’ll try again later.

chickelit said...

I used to be a member of the American Chemical Society which is a professional organization of chemists. Beginning several years ago, they began a campaign to deemphasize excellence in science in discovery and to instead focus of rectifying diversity issues among their ranks. You can easily see this for yourself but pursuing any recent issue of Chemical & Engineering News. I will reiterate: any organization which puts diversity ahead of excellence deserves to fail--this includes American science. There are plenty of other willing nations waiting to take the lead and to pick up the slack.

Greg The Class Traitor said...

There's no such thing as "reverse racism"

There's just racism. "Diversity" of skin color is racism. You are duding people by the color of their skin, not the content of their character

"Black Lives Matter" is racism. For a non-racism, there are not "black lives" or "white lives", there's just human lives.

In America, the Democrats and the Left are the party of racism, almost everything they push is racist, and to the extent that you consider racism evil, you must also consider the Democrats, the Left, and their racist tools like CRT to be evil

Greg The Class Traitor said...

"Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause"

I agree. That's why every person of good will should oppose CRT, and oppose DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity)

No government or employer should ever be allowed to treat people differently based on the color of their skin, or their ethnic ancestry

Bob Boyd said...

Is stupid woke racism worst than Jim Crow segregation lynchings with the Tuskegee experiment cherry on top?

Progressivism, same as it ever was.

Richard said...

Blogger Howard said...
"Is stupid woke racism worst than Jim Crow segregation lynchings with the Tuskegee experiment cherry on top?"

America First Legal filed a lawsuit this week against acting New York health commissioner Mary Bassett, who in December issued a memo encouraging health care providers to treat race as a factor that increases a patient’s risk of severe COVID. New York’s guidance dictates that white patients cannot obtain COVID antivirals unless they have a medical condition that increases their risk for severe infection, such as obesity or diabetes. On the other hand, minority patients can obtain them simply by virtue of their race, regardless of other risk factors.

Gerda Sprinchorn said...

Peterson is an interesting phenomenon. He is very popular, yet I read one of his books and found it disorganized and kind of goofy.

So why is he so popular and his message so appealing?

My answer is that he is SERIOUS. He is one of the few people out there who comes across as taking life very seriously. He advocates taking responsibility for yourself and your actions and for willingly bearing burdens.

So why is this message so popular?

My answer is that there are so few people out there with that kind of message any more. That message used to be everywhere, to the point of cliche. But now it is rare. There is a lot of passion and self-righteous hysteria now, but not the same kind of serious, rather humble, responsibility Peterson embodies. (I don't know if I've quite caught the nature of Peterson's message, but this is pretty close. His verbal delivery, slow and thoughtful, may be a large part of his appeal.)

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

There’s no vaccine for the pandemic of cowardice.

Greg The Class Traitor said...

Howard said...
Is stupid woke racism worst than Jim Crow segregation lynchings with the Tuskegee experiment cherry on top?

NY, MN, and other States are allocating Covid treatments based on the color of your skin.

So a fat 18 year old black kid gets expensive monoclonal antibody treatments before a 70 year old white diabetic, even though the Covid risk for the year old white diabetic is at least 100 times more.

So, there's your Tuskegee experiment, except it's being carried out on about a million times as many people

farmgirl said...

It seems excellence and American are no longer a thing, if u look at the cities once thought to be cutting edge excellent…

Dude1394 said...

Greg the class traitor that is extremely well said.

Aggie said...

@chickelit 9:59am said: "There are plenty of other willing nations waiting to take the lead and to pick up the slack..."

Ya think? Back when I was in grad school, our department (Petroleum Engineering) was maybe 25% American. Quite a few Arab states represented, a few Europeans. And Chinese. Lots and lots of Red Chinese. That was back when there was plenty of international jostling about resources and energy security-of-supply. Oil has always determined international policy - and politics. Oil security looks out decades, not years. And now, here our universities find themselves. How far out do your think their policies are looking now, and what topics do they concern themselves with? How many National Security issues can you fit on the head of a Woke pin? The Chinese view things in a way that's a little more grounded. One could say: They're awake about being 'woke'.

Greg The Class Traitor said...

Howard said...
Is stupid woke racism worst than Jim Crow segregation lynchings with the Tuskegee experiment cherry on top?

What were the total number of "segregation lynchings" in America from 1866 to 1966? Show your work.

I'll then compare those murders to the increase in murders in the 30 largest US cities post George Floyd

How many years of "woke murder" do you think it will take to top the number of "segregation lynchings?

Achilles said...

Ann Althouse said...

@Achilles

Something I'll bet you didn't do: Read the entire column or watch the entire video before making that statement. It really looks cheap to talk like that and to dismiss JP because you thought of some other words. Did you even search the page for "evil" before knocking out your comment?


"[T]his is on you. Professors. Cowering cravenly in pretence and silence. Teaching your students to dissimulate and lie. To get along. As the walls crumble. For shame. CEOs:...Why the hell don’t you banish the human resource DIE [Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity] upstarts back to the more-appropriately-named Personnel departments, stop them from interfering with the psyches of you and your employees, and be done with it?"


I have seen a lot more or Peterson most likely than you have. I have a pretty good idea what he thinks about all of this.

He is talking about you by the way. I think that is why this is a touchy one for you. He wants to give people like you who pushed all of this crap for decades the benefit of the doubt. He is talking about something far more inclusive than just the few outspoken professors pushing D.I.E. He is talking about the entire University system. The entire Corporate system.

Peterson is very good when talking about the duality of good and evil inside all of us and the proclivity of the young to fall into easy solutions.

He falls short on the motives in my opinion. You all pushed DIE to get revenge.

Title 9 wasn't used to make women equal. It was used to make women superior.

Affirmative Action wasn't used to even out the playing field. It is being used to actively discriminate and inflame racial division by turning white males into Jews.

People who used racism to fight racism and used sexism to fight sexism were just pulling the pendulum the other way.

Martin Luther King had a better idea. You know judging by the content of a person's character stuff...

Deevs said...

"Is stupid woke racism worst than Jim Crow segregation lynchings with the Tuskegee experiment cherry on top?"

Not sure why we'd turn this into an either/or scenario. I suspect we can get along pretty well without either of those.

farmgirl said...

Gerda- that’s a good explanation. It’s also that he’s a freaking shrink and professor- so he knows his shit. It’s free professional advice given to help people feel more worthy of putting our shoulders into the effort of moving our lives to the good.

He cares- or seems to care- about the Truth. Not a relativistic truth, although it’s a choice.

chickelit said...

Achilles @t 10:01 AM. Well put.

Greg The Class Traitor said...

Howard said...
Is stupid woke racism worst than Jim Crow segregation lynchings with the Tuskegee experiment cherry on top?

I was born after Jim Crow ended. Neither I nor any of my ancestors ever lived in a State that had Jim Crow.

Other than you are a dyed in the wool racist, what justification do you have harming me because some other people I no connection to other than skin color did bad things to some else, who's now dead?

Lexington Green said...

Petersen is a tragic figure. First, he is absolutely correct on all the important points.. Second, he has a historian who has seen the movie, knows where this is going and knows where it is going to end up. Three, he has a significant platform, which allows them to reach a lot of people, but not one which which is strong enough to actually change the outcome. He is doomed to act forcefully but be dismissed, and disregarded and vilified, do you have a public position on these things which gets him hurt but from what she is doomed to fail, and watch all of the destruction of the 20th century warned us about occur again, right in front of his face. That’s where this is going, and it’s not going to change.

TJ said...

In the 1990s when this started at the University, I was required to attend a session on bias, etc. (not sure what the term was then) to be a teaching assistant. During the presentation, the presenter made sweeping generalizations about my gender, race, religion, and political ideas. At the end of the session, I asked her about it saying "didn't you just do what you trained us not to do"? She actually agreed with me. Not sure what "their" response would be today...

Ron Winkleheimer said...

@chickelit

I belong to the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) and for the last couple of years the org's magazine has been filled with "woke" articles. I especially liked the one from some trans guy who was given a slot to speak at the annual convention about, you guessed it, including trans people, and then the ACM published a screed from him (or her, not sure) about how their (I guess) ass was not sufficiently kissed.

mezzrow said...

How many of the people JBP is addressing get stopped on the street most places they go so someone can thank them for making their life better?

What kind of person does it take to make that happen? What level of character is required to face the anti-Peterson hatestorm and turn the tide? How many have stood beside him at U of T? No, I mean publicly stood beside him.

Not many. I know I wouldn't have. I don't have that level of character. If I was an academic, I wouldn't be writing here. Just retire, get on with your life and get the most out of every day you're given. Look at the cost. People want to be liked. I'd tell him how proud I was of him. Back channel, of course.

Our generation has had it pretty good. I repeat this like I used to say "I love my job".

Ann Althouse said...

@Achilles

Try responding to the precise thing that I said. I was defending JP!

Really, I'm going to stop talking directly to you in the comments, because it's not a good use of my time. You don't respond on the substance. I don't like that.

mikee said...

Putin and Peterson in one post. A propagandizing "president" and a proletarian professor. Pretty palatable and of paramount parallelism.

Critter said...

A wise Son once said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Has anyone come up with a better idea?

farmgirl said...

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/Screenshot%20(1281).png

It has to do w/honesty and Truth. Otherwise- it’s Anarchy.

Achilles said...

Ann Althouse said...

@Achilles

Try responding to the precise thing that I said. I was defending JP!


Of course you were defending him.

And I was challenging him.

I know he jokes about the evil greedy capitalist stereotype used by leftists all the time. I addressed that specifically in my comment. You want me to type the quote out of the article? I knew it would be there without reading the article.

"CEOs: signalling a virtue you don’t possess and shouldn’t want to please a minority who literally live their lives by displeasure. You’re evil capitalists, after all, and should be proud of it."

Yup. Cowardly capitalist CEOs and craven professors running from stupid students with easy solutions right?

But he was wrong. Is wrong.

You weren't cowards. You were guiding these kids. You told them they could hate white males with impunity. CEO's are not installing HR departments to reign down judgement and discrimination on their employees out of fear. The CEO's of the largest companies are engineering this to keep their work forces divided against each other. Professors wanted their students warring against each other and persecuting white males.

This made it a lot easier for you to control white males.

And they are doing exactly what you taught them to do. Exactly what you do on these posts every day. You have looked down on us for decades. You have supported racism and sexism and discrimination for decades.

Peterson only used the word evil once in his article and he used it to make a point about the simplicity of the leftists.

He should be much more liberal in it's application.

Really, I'm going to stop talking directly to you in the comments, because it's not a good use of my time. You don't respond on the substance. I don't like that.

Just think what you would tell one of your students if they wrote that to you.

You are only as strong as the level of criticism you can endure and grow from.

Leora said...

Lexington Green, I hadn't previously thought of Peterson as the mythic Cassandra who knew the future but would not be believed. She was rather hysterical too. I admire and worry about the man. He may be giving up too much.

tim in vermont said...

"s stupid woke racism worst than Jim Crow segregation lynchings with the Tuskegee experiment cherry on top?"

Talk about hysterical. Asking for ID from voters is that?

Michael K said...

Is stupid woke racism worst than Jim Crow segregation lynchings with the Tuskegee experiment cherry on top?

Howard forgets that the racists who did all those things, including "woke racism," are and were Democrats. Howard is becoming the Ritmo character.

Narr said...

I started watching JP on the 'tube because people here talked about him a lot, so all I have is a few hours exposure to his deep thoughts.

He is intelligent and erudite, much more so than most psych-types I know about.

Most of what he says seems obvious to the point of triteness to me, but maybe that's because I've been a Petersonian of some sort all along and not known it. He does have an oddly compelling delivery, but that tendency to welling up almost to tears is off-putting in an adult.







robother said...

Mister, we could use a Vlad like that. Just a minor incursion to impale 100,000 D.I.E. people in our East Coast University/Deep State/Corporate sector.

I never considered that the Cossack and Tatar raids may have actually invigorated the European Medieval social order by reducing the parasitic load.

tim in vermont said...

"Howard is becoming the Ritmo character."

He got yelled at by his boss at the troll farm for showing symptoms of Stockholm syndrome.

It's a joke, Howard, maybe...

tim in vermont said...

Ward Connerly replies to the Howard types:

Ward Connerly@tobeequal Jan 14
Something about which I am very knowledgeable is the Jim Crow era. I was born in Louisiana in 1939 and suffered through 25 years of my life with the indignities of Jim Crow. It is offensive and grossly perverse to equate opposition to a partisan bill that would reshape our election process with Jim Crow. I oppose “ballot harvesting” and I support rigorous voter identification measures such as photos. These are not racist beliefs and it is shameful that an American president would characterize the debate in such a manner.

Howard said...

Nice pivot Tim. Doesn't justify all the whining crying and indignation about white Christmas regression recession repression, man

tim in vermont said...

What are you smoking, Howard? You have to be careful of what that stuff is laced with.

Greg The Class Traitor said...

Nice pivot Howard

Much better than trying to respond to all of us who pointed out how wrong you are.

Are you "white" Howard? If so, better hope you don't ever need monoclonal antibody treatment?

Or are you fat and diabetic, too?

Kirk Parker said...

"Read the entire column..."

A doable task, at least.

"or watch the entire video"

Oh, no. My goodness, no. No no no no! Life is waaaaaay too short for that, except for some very carefully targeted, very very brief excerpts.

Josephbleau said...

A wise Son once said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

A wise SOB says Figure out thy neighbor's motives.

Kirk Parker said...

Josephbleau,

That wise Son put it this way: "As wise as serpents..."

Lurker21 said...

I hadn't previously thought of Peterson as the mythic Cassandra

That would make him Cassandra Peterson, TV's Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

Russia's problems may have turned it away from democracy (though I don't know that we can really point the finger there), but suffering and troubles and real problems can turn a country away from destructive contemplation of its own faults and flaws. I wish they did contemplate those flaws and failings more, but I doubt anyone who wished Russia well would want them to be as polarized and guilt-ridden and self-lacerating as we are now.

Bunkypotatohead said...

"Any organization--orchestra, university, which puts diversity ahead of excellence deserves to fail."

Unfortunately, the largest organization of that type is the USA.