"Resentment is an extremely useful emotion, okay? It's very dangerous. And it's one of the three things that really hurt people."

"Resentment, arrogance, and deceit are, like, the evil triad. But resentment is extremely useful because it only means one of two things if you're experiencing it. One is that you are being taken advantage of, and you have something to say and something to sort out. So that's one possibility. The other possibility is that you're immature and you're not shouldering your responsibility property.... So now then the question is, if you notice that you're resentful, which you should notice, and which is quite likely, if you're an agreeable and self-sacrificing person, then you have to think, okay, am I being irresponsible and immature or is too much being asked of me?... Resentment is unbelievably useful if you use it properly because it, it's a marker for when things are out of harmony.... If you're resentful, it could easily be that you're doing too much... and that emotion is a marker of that...."

Said Jordan Peterson, on his podcast — audio and transcript —answering the question "What are some tangible ways to regulate your temper when dealing with young, especially young kids, and avoid feeling kind of resentful to them for the demands they make on your time and attention? "

The discussion at the link centers on childcare and resentment. I deliberately extracted the idea at a higher level of abstraction because it can be applied more broadly, notably to politics... especially if you add the arrogance and deceit to complete the dangerous "evil triad."

I'm sure Peterson has talked about this elsewhere. Ah, yes, I see — via Grok — that it's Rule 11 in his "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life": "Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant":

"And so on the one hand, we have the absolute radical pathological demoralization of young men. And then we have the insistence that although all that masculinity is toxic and patriarchal..."

"... that's precisely what young women should pursue. And so they pursue that in some ways, displacing young men, but more detrimentally for themselves, squandering their youth on service to the evil corporate world — bizarrely enough, given that it's a leftist trope — and the demolition of their, not only of their fertility, but the probability of their... participation in... the long-term partnership of marriage. So, I mean, you can hardly imagine a more toxic brew than that."

Said Jordan Peterson in his podcast talking to the NYT columnist David French. The episode is called "When Does Masculinity Become Toxic?" Here's the Podscribe link (for text + audio). 

The meaning of "And so they pursue that in some ways" might be a little difficult to catch, but it's clear in the context, that he means that women are out in the "evil corporate world" pursuing the kind of career success that they also associate with toxicity in the male.

The conversation continues into a Daily Wire episode, "The $20 Million Mistake Democrats Made with Young Men." You need a subscription for that. I've got one, but there's no transcript to quote, so... maybe a word about that later. Why $20 million?

How Michelle Obama reminded me of Jordan Peterson.

I'd just listened to Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's podcast. I blogged about some of it, here, yesterday. Peterson was criticizing woman who fail to develop beyond their natural, instinctive empathy. Let me give you a bit more of what he said:

"I've been lecturing to people for a long time about how to conduct themselves in life so they don't become a tyrant or a handmaiden to the tyrants, a silent handmaiden to the tyrants, let's say.... Because women are more agreeable, they're more prone to manipulation by psychopaths because their primary ethos is nurturing. For a naive woman, every victim is a baby...."

Now, you may find it odd, but I hear echoes of that as I am listening to Michelle Obama in "You Need to Learn to Say No (Even to an Inauguration)," the new episode of her podcast.

I know, your first inclination may be to mock the "poor me" aspect of this. She doesn't have a thing to wear... to the Inauguration. And not having a thing to wear, for her, means instructing her team of clothing wranglers to avoid readying the appropriate outfit, which they otherwise actively assemble for every possible occasion that might pop up (or "pop off"). She is not like other women. Very funny. But true! So work past that instinct to mock. I want you to think about how she is confessing to the agreeableness vulnerability that Jordan Peterson sees in women.

Michelle says:

"The left is full of empathic people. Right. And so those who parasitize empathy have a field day on the left...."

"The ethic is pretty straightforward. Anything that cries is a baby, it's like, no, some things that cry are monsters....Well, let, let's take the case of Nicola Sturgeon. The, the Scottish Prime Minister, the previous Scottish Prime Minister. Any man who wants to can be a woman. It's like, okay, any man, you mean any man? Do you? Yeah. Ha! Have you encountered the nightmare men? Oh, they don't exist. They're all victims. Yeah. You just bloody well wait till you encounter one. You'll change your story very rapidly. Yeah. And for the, for the naive and sheltered empaths of the radical left, they're either psychopaths, so they're wolves in sheep clothing, or they're people so that are so naive that the, the — what would you say? — Red Riding Hood's grandmother can definitely have his way with.... There are no shortage of naive people who've never really encountered a monster and have no imagination for it.... And they're, and they're very good at crying like infants... And then the mothers, the naive mothers come flooding out...."

Said Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's podcast. Scroll to 02:30:52 for the part I excerpted.

 

"The Nazi salute sh*t was insane. Honey, we're going to call a fig a fig, and we're going to call a Nazi salute what it was."

"I mean, I'll see things about him in the news and think, That's f**king cringe, I should probably post about this and denounce it, which I have done a few times.... But other than that, I don't give a f**k about him. I really don't. It's annoying that people associate me with him. I just don't have any room to care anymore. When I initially did the whole thing, when he came for me, the Jordan Peterson interview, that was the most cathartic moment of my entire life by far. I had all this pent-up energy, I had wanted to speak out for so long after being [essentially] defamed in a book, after being doxxed. Everything that had gone on — especially in my childhood — when that finally happened, it was the most cathartic experience I have ever had. And then I was like, Okay, whatever...."

Said Vivian Jenna Wilson, quoted in "Vivian Jenna Wilson on Being Elon Musk’s Estranged Daughter, Protecting Trans Youth and Taking on the Right Online/In Teen Vogue’s special issue cover story, the estranged 20-year-old daughter of Elon Musk talks about the 'cartoonishly evil' Trump administration and being a young trans woman today" (Teen Vogue).

The "[essentially]" is Teen Vogue's. I guess they're afraid the accusation of defamation is itself defamation and want to avoid seeming to be adopting that defamation. The "book" in question is, I believe, Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk. What specific statement of fact has she called defamatory?

We'll have to find a new way of living.

I'm reading "TikTok Loses Bid to Overturn Law Forcing a Ban or Sale/A federal court on Friday upheld a law that will ban the video app in the United States by Jan. 19 if its owner, ByteDance, does not sell it to a non-Chinese company" (NYT).

The decision [by a 3-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals] could be a death blow for the app in [the U.S.]. More than 170 million Americans use TikTok.... The decision also raises new questions for President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has repeatedly signaled his support for the app, but who doesn’t have a clear path for rescuing it under the new law.... 

The company argued that the law unfairly singled out TikTok and that a ban would infringe on the First Amendment rights of American users....

ADDED: Will truth, beauty, and love save the world?

"It is unclear whether he believes in God. He certainly does not believe in rational argument."

"[Jordan] Peterson’s thesis... is that... 'archetypes' recur throughout the most influential stories in Western culture. For instance, the archetype of the intellectually arrogant adversary represented by the biblical Cain is manifested in the figures of Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Faust, as well as, less exaltedly, 'Felonious Gru, of Despicable Me fame,' Jafar from the Disney film Aladdin and 'Syndrome in The Incredibles.' The obvious problem is that if you convince yourself that every animated children’s film is rich with ancient allegorical meanings, it induces a kind of symbological paranoia. Potential allegories lurk behind every tree and lamppost, waiting to be interpreted. Like the madman who glimpses messages from the CIA in the clouds, Peterson sees revelations about 'the intrinsic nature of being' in the most banal and improbable places.... And because he employs no interpretative system other than his whim the reader is soon overtaken with apathy. Your job is not to be persuaded or argued with, but just to sit still and be instructed in the specious art of Petersonian symbology: 'Shoes signify class, occupation, purpose, role and destiny,' 'smoke is essence, gist or spirit,' the rainbow 'represents the ideally subdued community, which is the integration of the diversity of those who compose it.'..."

Writes James Marriott, in "We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan Peterson review — rambling, hectoring and mad/The conservative polemicist’s new book is a bizarre study of the Bible featuring Jiminy Cricket, Harry Potter and Tinkerbell the porn fairy" (London Times).

Tell me about an "interpretative system" that is better than Jordan Peterson's "whim." He's one man, interpreting things. If my "job" is to "sit still" and take in his ideas, how is that different from reading any book? The author isn't here with me, the reader, to be "argued with." But I buy the Kindle version and excerpt any passage I want to pick apart, and I do my own writing here on this blog, which you are sitting still and reading. If you are "overtaken with apathy," you stop reading. If you want to argue, you go into the comments section. If it's just too much interpretation, coming at you endlessly, take a break. Nobody said you had to read this all at once. I heard that Elon Musk read the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica when he was 9 years old. That's unusual, and it's not what the encyclopedia writers had in mind.

Anyway, here, buy the book and send an Amazon commission my way: "We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine."

ADDED: The book review says that Peterson asserts that "the archetype of the intellectually arrogant adversary represented by the biblical Cain is manifested in the figures of Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Faust, as well as, less exaltedly, 'Felonious Gru, of Despicable Me fame,' Jafar from the Disney film Aladdin and 'Syndrome in The Incredibles.'" So — without mentioning Peterson or Cain — I asked Grok what those characters have in common. Answer:

"Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author, has an office on a quiet street in Hudson, N.Y., where he sits at a desk under a poster of Mao Zedong, the former communist leader of China."

"Why? Maybe to signal how ideas can be dangerous? Nope, no particular reason. There are two other Chinese communist posters on the wall, too. 'I found them online for like $10,' said Mr. Gladwell, 61. 'I just think it’s funny.'"

From "Malcolm Gladwell Holds His Ideas Loosely. He Thinks You Should, Too. As he releases 'Revenge of The Tipping Point,' the best-selling journalist talks about broken windows theory, Joe Rogan and changing his mind" (NYT).

What if he had a Hitler poster and said "I just think it’s funny" and they were really cheap? Before you answer, remember when Jordan Peterson "bought like 400 Soviet paintings on eBay."

"Yeah, well, Trump has that unvarnished element, and that's also something that's very appealing to working-class people...."

"He doesn't talk down to people.... He's very good at that.... Yeah, well and he's got that gift of spontaneity. You know, he doesn't craft his speeches, and of course that makes him a bit of a loose cannon, but people like that.... You might be deceiving us, but not in a practiced and calculating way. Right, you know, some of your personality flaws are leaking through, but but at least that's kind of like honest deception. I thought when when Trump won, I thought, well, they they preferred the spontaneous lies of Trump to the calculated lies of Hillary. You know, and that's very cynical but but there's still there's something about it that's accurate...."

Said Jordan Peterson, and it rings true to me. They're all going to lie, but which form of lying do you feel more inclined to trust?

"Wilson said that, for as long as she could remember, Musk hasn’t been a supportive father. She said he was rarely present in her life...."

"... leaving her and her siblings to be cared for by their mother or by nannies even though Musk had joint custody, and she said Musk berated her when he was present. 'He was cold,' she said. 'He’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.' Wilson said that, when she was a child, Musk would harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine, including by pushing her to deepen her voice as early as elementary school. 'I was in fourth grade. We went on this road trip that I didn’t know was actually just an advertisement for one of the cars — I don’t remember which one — and he was constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high,' she said. 'It was cruel.'... 'I would like to emphasize one thing: I am an adult. I am 20 years old. I am not a child,” she said. “My life should be defined by my own choices.'... 'He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there.... And in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.'"

From "Elon Musk's transgender daughter, in first interview, says he berated her for being queer as a child/In an exclusive interview, Vivian Jenna Wilson said her father’s recent statements, including that she is 'not a girl,' inspired her to speak out: 'I’m not just gonna let that slide'" (NBC News).

Here's what Elon Musk said in that conversation with Jordan Peterson:

"It happened to one of my older boys.... I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier. This is before I had really any understanding of what was going on.... I was told oh you know Xavier might commit suicide.... It wasn't explained to me that puberty blockers are actually just sterilization drugs... and so I lost my son essentially uh so you know they uh they call it dead naming for a reason.... the reason it's called dead naming is because uh your son is dead. So my son is dead, killed by the woke mind virus...."

It's hard to believe Elon Musk was "tricked into signing documents." Wilson doesn't believe Musk was tricked. You can see that Musk is very angry, and Wilson depicts Musk as a person who gets angry — "constantly yelling at me viciously." But this supports the position Jordan Peterson is taking, that there are deeper personal and family issues at play in these cases of transgenderism. 

Elon Musk says he was "essentially tricked into signing documents" and "vowed to destroy the 'woke' mind virus after that."

So actually @elonmusk bought X not to “own the libs” but because of the infinite depth of his love for his son who was trans’ed by the left. To destroy what destroyed his son, even as his som rejects him. That’s… wow. That’s some kind of love.❤️

pic.twitter.com/YKC7BmrTsV

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) July 23, 2024

AND: Here's the entire conversation between Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk:

My conversation with @elonmusk. Live today at 3pm ET. https://t.co/RyaZFmvC8i

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) July 22, 2024

"She acknowledges being the beneficiary of a previous generation’s progressivism... It’s the crazy activism she’s against — you know, the 'fringe' stuff."

"By fringe, she means trans. She’s peeved that some trans women are trying to redefine feminism in ways that seem to her to be anti-woman, resents that lesbians risk being erased by trendy all-purpose queerness and fears that as a married lesbian mother she will have her own rights swept away by anti-trans backlash.... I was, of course, eager to read good gossip about The Times. The best nugget: After Bowles started dating... Bari Weiss... she says an editor [exclaimed]... 'She’s a Nazi.'... Her most serious charge is that the editor thought her story ideas weren’t as good after that. The obvious question is whether her heterodox turn has conferred much benefit when it comes to ideas. The ones on display here seem pretty shopworn. I recall admiring a sharp-elbowed profile of the psychologist and anti-identity politics commentator Jordan Peterson that Bowles wrote early in her Times tenure. Nothing in this book hits that level.... [T]he book’s central fallacy is that idiocy on the left requires moving to the right. It doesn’t...."

Writes Laura Kipnis, in The New York Times. She's reviewing the new book by Nellie Bowles, "Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History" (commission earned).

Should I read this book? It's 7 hours by audiobook. I'll try. Kipnis warns me that Bowles is trying to be the new Tom Wolfe, but she's not as good as Wolfe (and neither is Kipnis): "where Wolfe was a precision-guided stiletto, Bowles is more of a dull blade, ridiculing her former colleagues by saddling them with laughably vacuous thoughts and dreams — their 'beautiful vision of the role of journalism for such a beautiful time,' for instance."

What about in that "sharp-elbowed profile" of Peterson? Was she closer to Wolfe back then? I blogged it at the time — here, in 2018. Bowles wrote:

Jordan Peterson overwhelms the NYT columnist Pamela Paul and Cruz crushes Bill Maher.

Bill does stand down amusingly.

Watch "Overtime: Sen. Ted Cruz, Jordan Peterson, Pamela Paul | Real Time with Bill Maher":

Jordan Peterson — out of context.

Jordan Peterson cooking pic.twitter.com/p8mXfgR0Z4

— Watcher66 🇨🇦 (@Watcher66547q) October 27, 2023

I ran into that on "Twitter" today and found it funny enough to watch twice. Then I read some of the replies and can see that not everyone gets it: "What a dishonest video. Do better"/"Crappy cuts. But feel good in your demonizing."

"Laughter itself has fragmented. Just listen to it: You’ve got your gurgling, impotent The Late Show With Stephen Colbert laughter over here..."

"... you’ve got your harsh and barkingly energized Trumpist laughter over there; you’ve got your free-floating Joe Rogan–podcast yuks; and then you’ve got the private snuffling and seizurelike sounds that you yourself make when you’re watching Jay Jurden Instagram clips alone, on your phone, with your earbuds in. And for most of us, behind all of this, the feeling that we’re whistling past the graveyard: that the sludge is rising, politically; that the bullyboys are cracking their knuckles; that we’re 'just kind of half-waiting,' as Marc Maron put it in a recent HBO special, 'for the stupids to choose a uniform.' How did we get here? How did we arrive at a place where Jordan Peterson, who wouldn’t know a good joke if it ran him over, is instructing us on the importance of comedy as a defense against totalitarianism, while Dave Chappelle—one of the funniest men alive—burns up his comic capital defending his right to be mean about trans people?"

Writes James Parker, in "Comedians Only Care About Comedy/A new book cured me of any attachment to the idea of the stand-up as truth-telling philosophe" (The Atlantic).

"A cadre of mindless, obedient... students...."

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson (@jordan.b.peterson)

"I have now officially been accused of hate speech by YouTube."

"Let's be clear about this: that is a direct accusation conduct deemed criminal in many jurisdictions. This is absolutely not OK, @YouTube. Not OK."

Tweets Jordan Peterson. 

His podcast #287 — "Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality" — was deemed "Content glorifying or inciting violence against another person or group of people" or "content that encourages  hatred of another person or group of people based on their membership in a protected group."

The podcast title is the title of a book — described here at Wikipedia — and Peterson interviews the author.

"I heard somewhere that people in the middle class pay for things they used to do personally and personally do the things they used to pay for."

"The example, I think, was that people used to pay travel agents to book trips and mowed the lawn themselves. Now, they pay someone to mow their lawn and book travel themselves. Hiring people to do things in your house that you don’t want to do is its own luxury.... Still, the more our society monetizes every aspect of life, to include the empty seats in our cars and the empty beds in our houses, the more necessary it is to undertake work for the pleasure and dignity of the work itself. Our only relationship to work cannot be as a cog in a financial machine."

Writes Theodore R. Johnson, in "Why mowing the lawn is like making your bed in public" (WaPo).

Let's read this morning's Instapundit post about feminism and happiness.

Glenn Reynolds writes:

PYRRHIC VICTORY:  Joel Kotkin: Women have won the ‘war between the sexes,’ but at what cost?

Even Vox is wondering why women have gotten everything they said they wanted, but are still unhappy. Their explanation, of course, is that men still aren’t doing enough to make women happy. But it’s interesting that they’ve noticed the problem.

My hypothesis: What we’ve been told that “women” want is in fact what a relatively small percentage of women — 20% at most — who tend to be neurotic and anxious, and largely incapable of sustained happiness anyway, say they want. But even to the extent that’s true, their needs aren’t really those of most women whose interests fall closer to the norms.

Related:  “Actually, it’s very much an open question as to whether feminist interpretations of life make women happier. . . . Certainly, polls such as the General Social Survey suggest that women have become steadily less happy every year since 1972.”

Also:  The Female Happiness Paradox. 

Lots of parts there, so let's take this one piece at a time. 

I had to mouse over "isqiisi" to get my first (and last) clue what new evil is currently aggravating Jordan Peterson.

You evil pathetic virtue signaling greedy corrupt panderers @isqiisi

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) May 19, 2023