By David Futrelle
Just a reminder that Jordan “Slappy” Peterson’s fanboys are totally not cult members in a cult or anything, why would you even think that?
Ok, ok, he doesn’t mean a LITERAL voice in his head telling him what to do and not to do., that would be weird, just that “‘the little voice’ telling [me] not to do stuff often takes on Peterson’s tone and speech pattern.” Which is TOTALLY NORMAL.
I mean, seriously, who doesn’t have some strange Canadian dude in their head — FIGURATIVELY — telling them what to do? In my case, it’s the late Doug Henning, the fuzzy-mustached magician dude who was born in Winnipeg.
In case you’d like to know what it would be like if Jordan B. Peterson were a voice in your head, this brief video should help.
The Muppets has gotten weird pic.twitter.com/fFLTQxD0ei
— Wild Geerters (@steinkobbe) March 30, 2018
@ Catalpa
As I understand it, “eye-dialect” (spelling the accent phonetically) is now considered heavy-handed at best and racist at worst; but I’m always impressed by a writer who can hint at the accent by use of distinctive syntax or vocabulary (as Kate Beaton does in the cartoons where she’s visiting her family in Cape Breton).
I hear every book voice in my own voice. However, I suffer from that condition whereby my voice sounds very different in my head than it does in real life, so I read things in my head-voice rather than in my speaking-voice.
Interestingly, this applies even if I read something written in the voice of someone I’ve met in real life. Stephen Hawking doesn’t sound like Stephen Hawking when I read him, he sounds like my head voice.
This may be part of the reason why I find that phonetically written speech really grates on me. Using word choice and sentence structure to indicate voice is great fun to read and will draw me into a character, but misspelling words to indicate pronounciation trips me up constantly and makes things aggravating to read.
EJ(TOO):
My head-voice sounds like the voice I hear when I speak, which is undistinguished but ok. But that’s mostly due to bone conduction, because when I hear myself from a recording, I always sound like a depressed fedora-wearer. Absolutely hate it.
You’d better avoid both Feersum Endjinn and Riddley Walker, then.
“… if you gotta hear a Canadian guy in your head telling you stuff… might as well be Maurice LaMarche.”
YES
ALWAYS
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7uWW–w4SRs
Also? I despise Peterson. I did a lot of Neo-jungian therapudic work as part of my psych degree and to watch this hack do a Greatest Hits of Jung’s “flirting with fascism” period with zero awareness of any of the significance or depth or recent developments in it is wildly infuriating.
Someone mentioned hating it when English actors put on fake accents in order to sound foreign, instead of just speaking English or “language with subtitles”.
I provide a counter-example: The TV series ‘Allo! ‘Allo! would not work well at all. It does have other issues, of course, but the basis of at least one of the jokes is badly spoken French sounds like mis-spoken English with French accent.
Good moaning!
@ JS
I wasn’t listening very carefully; would you mind saying that again?
@Katamount:
To the list of famous U of Toronto graduates, I would add Brian Kernighan, who got his Bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics there. For computer folks, Kernighan is the ‘K’ both in ‘K&R’, the original C language book, and in ‘AWK’, a little parsing language.
(I got to hear him speak when I was at Waterloo.)
@JS, Alan:
Good lord, I remember ‘Allo ‘allo. Yeah, that’s a series that is probably pretty much untranslatable given just how much multi-lingual humour is involved.
Then again, Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad got translated, and there’s some fun with language in there.
@ jenora
What; did he announce the train departures or something?
@Alan:
Waterloo, Ontario. Specifically, the University thereof.
(I know we’ve joked before about just how many English town names are also the names of towns in Ontario.)
It was actually quite interesting, at least if you’re interested in computer language design. He gave a talk just on AWK and the principles of ‘little languages’, small special-purpose languages like AWK which don’t take up much space but which are flexible enough to most simple parsing tasks.
I don’t hear voices in my head when I read, most of the time. I’m sort of fascinated every time I’m reminded that other people do.
On Jordan Peterson: My cousin (who is Canadian, I am not) got SUPER into him recently, and suddenly it became impossible to talk about politics with him without extreme frustration and lots of very slow explaining. After the November election he stopped talking to me altogether.
@ jenora
Waterloo here is a railway station. With typical Brit good taste, it’s where we originally had the Eurostar from France arrive.
Defiantcreatrix:
That’s remarkable! We will need to study your brain. Please lie down on this table, while Igor here fetches my instruments.
@Jenora
Niiiice!
I’ve listened to a couple interesting talks. Nobel Laureate John Charles Polanyi talked about nuclear disarmament (which has been of concern to him since the 1950s) and my convocation speaker was none other than Judea Pearl (the leading authority on probabilistic artificial intelligence, also the father of slain WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl).
I have the recording of Pearl’s speech somewhere… I should rewatch it at some point.
Also former Premier David Peterson is kinda creepy in the flesh (he was Chancellor at the time). Liked to shake the ladies’ hands a little too long.
I heard that bit in Maurice LaMarche’s voice too.
Possibly LaMarche doing Peter Lorre.
That could be one of those “Do You Push the Button?” memes:
“Your IQ will increase by 50 points, BUT everything you read, you will hear in your head in the voice of Peter Lorre.”
Come to think of it, there’s not much downside there.
Sometimes I wonder whether this whole alt-right tomfoolery isn’t an ideological framework as much as an attempt by opportunistic hucksters to start personality cults.
Stefan Molyneux has one such cult, as does Sam Harris to an extent.
The alt-right is not a unified movement, so there is no single one-size-fits-all explanation for it. Some of it is a result of opportunistic hucksters starting personality cults. Some of it is deliberate, paid-for propaganda from business and other interests that stand to profit, or ideologically motivated theocrats. Some of it is genuine grassroots populist anger, misdirected (particularly by the hucksters and ideologues and propagandists above, for whom such populist anger is a fruitful source of “useful idiots”, or just marks to milk for Patreon dollars). Undoubtedly there’s a bona fide conspiracy or ten in there for good measure, by Russians to screw up their chief geopolitical rival, by Saudis to undermine climate regulations and get friendly (read: willing to sell arms to them) foreign policy, by other nation-state actors, and by internal groups with assorted axes to grind, such as neo-Nazis and Dominionists.
This is reflected in the composition of the current administration:
DeVos, Tillerson, Mnuchin, et. al.: Business interests, for whom favorable (read: profitable for them) economic policy is the goal, and the deplorables are useful idiots.
Bolton and the other neocons now in foreign policy positions: puppets of Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and to some degree domestic oil firms (see also: Tillerson).
VP Mike Pence: Dominionist.
Pres. Trump: Huckster building a cult of personality.
Bannon and Gorka (fortunately since fired): neo-Nazis.
(Absent: the aggrieved-entitlement rabble, since right-wingers never put mere peons in any position with clout; and Russians, since that would be too damn obvious and red-flaggy. But Trump and Kushner are likely being blackmailed by Putin’s goons, and it probably has something to do with money laundering via real estate, though there might also be a pee tape in there somewhere.)
@Alan:
Yeah, that sounds like a very English thing to do. England is where Canada learned passive-aggressiveness from. Though living next to the U.S. has given us lots of opportunities to hone that particular blade.
(I’ve long said that the cornerstone of Canadian humour is self-deprecation. Nobody else takes us seriously, so why should we?)
I remember at one point being upset that an elf had an American accent, and then thought, “but honestly, why is that less elfy than any other accent?”
My point is, with such a prissy Upright Citizen as a figurehead, why do these people keep swearing and calling people cucks? Why does that dirty laundry get to stay on the floor?
Now what’s really baffling is why Poirot still has his accent even in flashbacks to his life in Belgium!
@Diptych
Maybe he is in reality a Frenchman after all and speaks Dutch with a French accent… Would you put it past him to lie to everyone? We must remember the wig after all.
Caveat: haven’t seen the tv series/movies/whatever you are refencing.
Caveat 2: I’m usually not as funny as I think I am.
Son of Caveat: Somebody tell me you got the wig reference, damnit.
Caveat Strikes Back: Neither comment nor caveats have been proofread and automatic proofreading threw in the towel about an hour ago when it claimed that “hevthe” is a correctly spelled word in English while “proven” is not and should be spelled “pr oven”, especially when used as a verb.
I thought he only wore the wig in his last years. Didn’t he lie about having a twin brother, though? Or perhaps about not having a twin brother, depending on the fan theory.
@Mooncustafer: I, too, imagined Maurice LaMarche summoning Igor–but channeling Vincent Price. (LaMarche chose to interpret Dr. Strange as Price, perhaps in homage to the probable influence of “The Raven”[1963] on Ditko and Lee.)
@CheerfulWarthog
Have you ever seen this?
Eh, I mostly lurk here and I’ve never posted.
Is it really so weird to say that a) there is somebody you regard as a role model and b) when you are trying to persuade yourself towards good behavior you often frame it mentally as “what would so-and-so do?”
Whether you think Jordan Peterson is role model material or not is sort of beside the point as the premise of this post seems to be that anybody that personifies their conscience is a weirdo.
If somebody said the exact same thing about, I dunno, Nelson Mandela or John Muir or, heck, their grandma would anybody really consider this “cult-like” behavior?