AcidCat posted:

I usually just leave my drunkposts...

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

but you should acknowledge that he's out there and he's trying to hurt people

AcidCat posted:

I don't know that this is true. I would say he is not out there TRYING to HURT people, but has a viewpoint that certain people perceive as being hurtful. And that therein lies a tangleweb of poo poo that I'm absolutely not ready or willing to address because Imma Go NighNight, but thanks for your thoughtful response.

AcidCat posted:

I think my only point was how people tend to gang up on and focus on people they disagree with and that just makes that person even more elevated in the collective consciousness, like honestly when Trump was president I just, avoided it, I didn't watch any videos of him, I didn't read any of the millions of articles about him. I just kinda shut him out of my consciousness,

Ihki posted:

I sort of agree that Peterson is largely made famous by his haters, though it's more complicated than that. The first problem with Peterson is that he is tuned in to a real problem, which is how lost conservative young white men are with their place in contemporary society. Like most anyone else, but this is not the most fashionable demographic, for some good reasons and bad. But there will always be people who are conservative and fearful and incurious by nature, something's going to be there for them to draw influences from. American brand conservatism (which is starting to assert increasing influence over my Nordic home) and right-populism at large is about the most cynically hateful pursuit for power and money. No wonder if all you feel is empty inside. I think Peterson can offer something genuine into this emptiness, and ignoring this is a mistake. If you disregard the parts where he tries to fake having read any post-WW1 philosophy or Marx whatever, and put aside everything he says about politics, there's a powerful message of how this being lost is itself some grand, ageless metaphysical struggle for the soul of mankind. Spend twelve hours a week staring at a poster of Stalin, sobbing uncontrollably while thinking about gulags and you'll be a better man for it. When you subscribe to that message, it gets easier to ignore (or never find out) how he is also an ignorant, self-destructive hypocrite. It's sort of like if your therapist is loving you while telling you who to vote for, these boundaries don't really exist with the Harris/Peterson space where your spiritual guide is also your source for news and politics and opinions.

In addition to having a hate boner to most things he stands for, I've come to low-key sympathizing with Jorp & co. through reading some of those evil postmodernists that he claims (breaking the 12 rules, as you do) have murdered god, and who, in their infinite powers from beyond the grave, are destroying the eternal, immutable essence of Peterson's universe. Deleuze's reading of Peterson's favorite in Nietzsche (who was postmodern as gently caress), and attack on Hegel, is about something like how one's ability to produce meaningful creative acts doesn't very well start from reacting against someone. You'll always be dependent on what it is that they're doing. You can sneer at the ridiculous things he and the cultist followers say, but that's not enough, I guess I mean. Peterson is sort of trying to do something novel with his fever dreams about grandma pubes and Jungian mysticism and all that stuff. I find it's fundamentally counterproductive, reactionary mysticism, but opposing him should think a lot more about inventing a tangible third way of tackling the same human problems that he has been amazingly successful in plugging into. Maybe then his opponents get to set the rules of engagement, so far I'm not so sure how well that is working out. I know quite a few people who fell into their Peterson rabbit holes, and the ones who got out replaced him with someone else. If they are desperate to find a master, whether they know this or not, who should it be? What's the alternative?

Sorry, I've written far too long essays on this elsewhere, so I'll make this the cutting point. Time for this dead lil' comedy forum to solve the case. Push Gabor Mate into being a political agitator and spend millions making him famous, I guess.

BIG BABY JESUS posted:

but the hate boner does come from a real creative place - jorp is the reaction to the creation and the hate boner is about his incomprehensible attack on that creation! there is already a viable alternative to the conservative fever dream of purposeless manhood and its to read butler and friends, get on board with the new world where men need to earn the right to speak rather than just being handed the mic, and loving create their own masculinity with their pals, either on the football field, camping, looking after your kids, or in the loving truckstop bathroom wearing a short skirt at the gloryhole - whatever. For all his mewling against people being soft in the world and needing to earn his respect, his reactionary perspective is that men have some Divine purpose in the world. "Men" is a concept that barely exists and jorp's perception of it was mostly invented as an ad campaign by cigarette companies in the 60s.

Ihki posted:

I don't completely disagree with the message, but the problem is with the medium and the messaging. We're starting from the point where this



... is the realest poo poo there is to the followers,

Ihki posted:

All I'm saying is, don't expect to change too many minds without reaching some hearts.

Who What Now posted:

LMAO his followers have never in their lives seen that diagram. His followers watch YouTube clips and audio essays, they don't read. All the really out there poo poo like chaos dragons and granny pubes are for Jorp and Jorp alone because he to be like a Guild Navigator floating in a tank of his own farts. The stuff for his fans are all the videos about how women wearing makeup means they want to be raped and how trans women will turn you gay.

quote:

Who here is trying to change minds? That doesn't happen on a paywalled forum where Jorp fans refuse to look.

Ihki posted:

I sort of agree that Peterson is largely made famous by his haters, though it's more complicated than that. The first problem with Peterson is that he is tuned in to a real problem, which is how lost conservative young white men are with their place in contemporary society. Like most anyone else, but this is not the most fashionable demographic, for some good reasons and bad. But there will always be people who are conservative and fearful and incurious by nature, something's going to be there for them to draw influences from. American brand conservatism (which is starting to assert increasing influence over my Nordic home) and right-populism at large is about the most cynically hateful pursuit for power and money. No wonder if all you feel is empty inside. I think Peterson can offer something genuine into this emptiness, and ignoring this is a mistake. If you disregard the parts where he tries to fake having read any post-WW1 philosophy or Marx whatever, and put aside everything he says about politics, there's a powerful message of how this being lost is itself some grand, ageless metaphysical struggle for the soul of mankind. Spend twelve hours a week staring at a poster of Stalin, sobbing uncontrollably while thinking about gulags and you'll be a better man for it. When you subscribe to that message, it gets easier to ignore (or never find out) how he is also an ignorant, self-destructive hypocrite. It's sort of like if your therapist is loving you while telling you who to vote for, these boundaries don't really exist with the Harris/Peterson space where your spiritual guide is also your source for news and politics and opinions.

In addition to having a hate boner to most things he stands for, I've come to low-key sympathizing with Jorp & co. through reading some of those evil postmodernists that he claims (breaking the 12 rules, as you do) have murdered god, and who, in their infinite powers from beyond the grave, are destroying the eternal, immutable essence of Peterson's universe. Deleuze's reading of Peterson's favorite in Nietzsche (who was postmodern as gently caress), and attack on Hegel, is about something like how one's ability to produce meaningful creative acts doesn't very well start from reacting against someone. You'll always be dependent on what it is that they're doing. You can sneer at the ridiculous things he and the cultist followers say, but that's not enough, I guess I mean. Peterson is sort of trying to do something novel with his fever dreams about grandma pubes and Jungian mysticism and all that stuff. I find it's fundamentally counterproductive, reactionary mysticism, but opposing him should think a lot more about inventing a tangible third way of tackling the same human problems that he has been amazingly successful in plugging into. Maybe then his opponents get to set the rules of engagement, so far I'm not so sure how well that is working out. I know quite a few people who fell into their Peterson rabbit holes, and the ones who got out replaced him with someone else. If they are desperate to find a master, whether they know this or not, who should it be? What's the alternative?

Sorry, I've written far too long essays on this elsewhere, so I'll make this the cutting point. Time for this dead lil' comedy forum to solve the case. Push Gabor Mate into being a political agitator and spend millions making him famous, I guess.

gleebster posted:

Elevating political agitators is a poor idea, whether it's Peterson or Mate or anyone else.

ikanreed posted:

I still can't believe that diagram originated in his peer reviewed papers, not his book.

I tried reading over his actual cv one time to see if there was any legitimate research with his name on it, and once you get past the relatively recent "what if college liberals are too neurotic because they're too open minded for their own good" that was his post-fame writing, it was all just this batshit stuff.

All of it.

gleebster posted:

Elevating political agitators is a poor idea, whether it's Peterson or Mate or anyone else.

Rutibex posted:

you ever read peer reviewed humanities papers? they are all like that

ikanreed posted:

Actually you should elevate me and I can agitate for the political change this country really needs.

Potato chip bags can no longer be made of mostly air.

AcidCat posted:

I don't know that this is true. I would say he is not out there TRYING to HURT people, but has a viewpoint that certain people perceive as being hurtful. And that therein lies a tangleweb of poo poo that I'm absolutely not ready or willing to address because Imma Go NighNight, but thanks for your thoughtful response.

Rutibex posted:

you ever read peer reviewed humanities papers? they are all like that

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

This is the same kind of anti-intellectualism that jorp feeds and feeds on. If more people took basic logic courses or learned how to analyze literature or film, and weren’t salted against it first by a culture that trains them to hate and suspect philosophy and English professors, they’d have some inoculation against jorp and everything else in the category, fascism included.

AcidCat posted:

I don't know that this is true. I would say he is not out there TRYING to HURT people, but has a viewpoint that certain people perceive as being hurtful.

BIG BABY JESUS posted:

also for an "intellectual" he sure hasn't read any of the postmodernism or marxism he goes the gently caress on about.

Powerful Katrinka posted:

Intent doesn't matter as much as impact, are you a child? "A viewpoint certain people perceive as harmful," like "Women wear lipstick because they want to be raped" is a neutral statement? "Calling people by their preferred pronouns is oppression," yeah I guess that can be interpreted in a negative way, but i'M nOt An eXpErT wHo CaN ReAlLy SaY?

Read this thread AND THEN come back and tell us how Jorp is just misunderstood, dipshit.

Rutibex posted:

he skimmed the communist manifesto 10min before debating zizek

ikanreed posted:

He's a psychologist. He's not in "the humanities" he's in a "soft science" and I've read enough social psychology papers to know empirical rigor and coherence isn't an occasional oddity outside garbage journals.

Also, given that the humanities includes history, there's plenty of non-insane serious research there too.

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

This is the same kind of anti-intellectualism that jorp feeds and feeds on. If more people took basic logic courses or learned how to analyze literature or film, and weren’t salted against it first by a culture that trains them to hate and suspect philosophy and English professors, they’d have some inoculation against jorp and everything else in the category, fascism included.

AcidCat posted:

I don't know that this is true. I would say he is not out there TRYING to HURT people, but has a viewpoint that certain people perceive as being hurtful. And that therein lies a tangleweb of poo poo that I'm absolutely not ready or willing to address because Imma Go NighNight, but thanks for your thoughtful response.

Ihki posted:

I don't completely disagree with the message, but the problem is with the medium and the messaging. We're starting from the point where this



... is the realest poo poo there is to the followers, but someone like Butler, in their own esoteric corner of academia, is an obscurantist fraud read by the worst degenerates in the entire history of the academic world. If you're meant to read Gender Trouble or Anti-Oedipus or Écrits to get away from Jorp then it's worth asking who can even afford to do that. I think back to the Onion video about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpzVc7s-_e8

It's a nice dream which makes for a good two minutes of video entertainment, but I fail to see how it could be made into a practical reality. If it's a third way, it is never going to be admitted as such. You can convert some conservatives by being a dick about how their clique is made of illiterate, subhuman idiots, but not many of them. Maybe Butler and this lineage of gender theorists are the future, but they are not this totalizing force in our present, nor are they accessible to the guy who reads at a high school level but has listened to thousands of hours of podcasts.

I don't subscribe to how this is the place where we'll find some true universaility of human subjectivity, anyway. I guess I do implement and uphold the positionality of my gender in a performative dialectical motion, but this doesn't have a definitive impact on my politics. People will agree and disagree for a lot of reasons. I don't expect this to mean much to some 90%+ of the population as a grounds for a political project when they have no idea whatever the gently caress that even means. Most people who are influenced by Butler haven't read them, nor is the total package of Jorp's metaphysical battle primarily about gender hierarchies. It's a theory of everything, basically. I'm more for polite alienation in the vein of Zizek or McGowan: I don't want to be an ally for ally culture, in fact I feel it's delusional to think I could be, and I think this culture is (again) far more dependent on reactive exclusion than proactive inclusion. But I can be a neighbor. Jordan's delusions of a history that never even existed can be thrown away, but so long as we're meant to be ourselves as a social media broadcasting station (all of our microidentities neatly catalogued in our Twitter profile), or even worse, deal with each other, I figure that requires starting from being fine not wanting to know your next door neighbor's name while greeting them politely. Extend this to online spaces. Do real things with real people, not necessarily by setting aside irreconcilable differences, but through accepting that common ground and struggle can be found in spite of them. People used to do this before the internet, sometimes, can it still be done, I dunno. Get involved in practical politics over culture wars. Don't use theory as a weapon if you can help it, because people don't (can't) read anymore. Make fun of loving Jordan Peterson, too. All I'm saying is, don't expect to change too many minds without reaching some hearts.

ikanreed posted:

He's a psychologist. He's not in "the humanities" he's in a "soft science" and I've read enough social psychology papers to know empirical rigor and coherence isn't an occasional oddity outside garbage journals.

Also, given that the humanities includes history, there's plenty of non-insane serious research there too.

BIG BABY JESUS posted:

yeah ok, i mean, you were talking about a third way for "lost young conservative white men" and the performativity of butler, covers all those categories

quote:

and - to expand on the idea that jorp and his followers are taking the high ground "locus" of objectivity, is that they highlight and elevate the "sokal squared" hoax (for the uninitiated, where people got trash articles into gender studies journals) as proof that these disciplines are "unreal" and "impractical". BUT, that's purely focussed, selective culture war garbage

Boris Johnson posted:

There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief

Ihki posted:

It covers the categories in the same sense as becoming a millionaire is one way to get away from crippling poverty. I guess you could do the same with Deleuze or Lacan or Zizek/Hegel, who would be my picks. Just like with Butler, I also have my problems with each of the three as a totalizing force (whether in scholarly interpretations, political practicalities and/or questions of identity). All it takes is a university degree or years of intensive personal studies to get to some basic core understanding with them, which is where you can actually start figuring out what you think about their projects. As a political praxis, they are not centralized sources of truth but something a lot more ambiguous. In the 21st century, Deleuze has been a growing influence to esoteric far-right politics. Judith Butler emerges with a hot take on Guardian every now and then, but nobody goes to them for politics (nor do they seek the fame). She's not going to sell you on some all-soy miracle diet, either, and that's part of what's missing as a crucial category. We're talking about a prophet, a teacher, a guru, a father and a master. You don't replace that with a nice academic theory. Zizek (who's been dying for years now) plays the public intellectual trope quite well, but he's also been pretty insistent on avoiding the master's role.

Even supposing that were to change, it just doesn't matter if the pieces fit so long as, by definition, nobody wants to play your game. First, because they are physically or mentally or educationally or materially incapable of reading academic literature, or maybe they just don't want to because podcast magnates give them the feeling of education without any of the effort. Second, because the image of Judith Butler already stands for everything that they believe is wrong with modern society. You sort of conceded this yourself in saying Peterson is a reaction to this whole act of creation, poststructuralism, third wave feminism, queer gender theory or whatnot -- which I don't think is quite enough when I'd say Peterson's success is a sort of third way postmodern conservatism (Matt McManus wrote a great book about this, btw), but that's not important here. That would then make it the 1st way to Jorp's 2nd. For the little I've read I find Butler's work often insightful, but fundamentally, I disagree with it (even moreso some applications of it) as a foundation for a political project or emancipatory subjectivity. I have no problem people getting what they want and need out of it, but like in the Onion video, if you suppose it is a real practical possibility that the Jorp worshipping loser who wears a bowtie to school every day is going to pick up Gender Trouble to better understand gender performativity, that's just a daydream. To cure your postmodern problems as a conservative white Christian male, all you need to do is stop being so conservative, white, male and Christian. Then you can be whoever you want (within a certain set of social constraints)! If that's not going to happen (and it's not), the question becomes: should anything? I don't think that's a demand that seeks true universality, either, but this is too much to get into here. That's what I'm looking for with how they'll never be allies by the rules you try to set for them, but neighbors could be a target.

If I cold have my pick of the litter, by the way, I'd probably steer Peterson followers towards Peter Rollins, a poststructuralist negative theologian (atheist, I think?) who draws a lot from Lacan, Zizek, Caputo etc., and who really does have a kind of a guruesque but approachable personal style within his own clique of pyrotheology, followers and all. So far as I know, he's not like a toxic weirdo or an intellectual fraud or a cult leader. He doesn't have much funding from TPUSA, Prager U, Thiel Capital or whatnot, though, so that's the first problem. Second is -- and Peterson is right about this, by they way -- leftists don't really take religion seriously enough, whether in obscure theory or as a political practice. It took me a while to get around to the concept that a lot of folks actually do believe in gods, weird poo poo.

Ihki posted:

Yeah, coming from a background in teenage New Atheism and a self-absorbed love of what was commonly known as rationality,

BIG BABY JESUS posted:

That "centralized source of truth" that you mention is the very problem peterson addresses - but that's also the very idea that has been attacked so comprehensively over the last few decades.

BIG BABY JESUS posted:

I don't imagine a world where the bowtie guy is going to read Butler. That's not what's happening in this thread.

packetmantis posted:

I never would have guessed!

Batterypowered7 posted:

BIG BABY JESUS posted:

psychology is one of the least replicatable disciplines

is peterson projecting???