By David Futrelle
I ran across this Tweet this morning from an intrepid Jordan Peterson debunker on Twitter and, well, it’s pretty much spot on:
https://twitter.com/zei_nabq/status/1083015376022224896
For evidence of this, we need look no further than some of the off-the-cuff comments about birth control and the allegedly scary consequences of women controlling their own sexuality that Peterson recently made to a small audience that included, among others, Charlie Kirk, “Bumble Jack” Posobiec, and weirdo MAGA couple Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle at Turning Point USA’s annual Student Action Summit.
As Sam Seder points out in this clip from his Majority Report show, Peterson seems to be pushing the idea that what he sees as feminists’ preoccupation with sexual consent is basically a left-wing “sexual taboo” roughly equivalent to the right-wing “taboo” against gay sex. (Peterson being Peterson, he doesn’t quite come out and say this outright.)
Sam has been taking on Peterson’s nonsense for some time. Here’s another video in which Sam discusses a Peterson appearance on the Joe Rogan show in which Rogan, an oddball in his own right but still pretty sharp, gobsmacks the Canadian beef-eater by pointing out a very basic issue with his promotion of “enforced monogamy.”
While Peterson’s utterances do seem to be getting weirder by the day, he’s been saying awful crap about the often fraught relationship between women and men for years. And for a time, during a sort of pickup artist phase, he did so dressed like a 1930s gangster.
Sam’s got a video on that, too.
And this guy is seen as a leading light in the “intellectual dark web.” It’s really a testament to how fucked up this political moment is that a cornball weirdo like Peterson is taken seriously by anyone at all, much less the adoring throngs that attend his talks and watch his videos and buy his books.
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@Knitting Cat Lady:
And I, for one, am more than happy to see them both go there. The end will be messy, and I have plenty of corn for popping.
Ha, what Peterson fan site did this get posted to to bring out all these dudes?
Centrist, we’ve talked about the “enforced monogamy” thing many times here. I even wrote a whole long piece on it for Broadly that I linked to in the post. I think we understand it at least as well as Peterson himself does, and from the Joe Rogan clip it seems we understand the implications of it better than he does.
@Catalpa
Yeah, it’s a good thing that Peterson has a fan army to defend him and his “ideas” — in the vaguest way possible, of course.
I’m not willing to spend time that I won’t get back looking at a video in which Peterson expounds at greater length on some idiotic notion of his.
The term “enforced monogamy” speaks for itself.
Experts on names for groups of things, help me out here:
A gaggle of geese
A murder of crows
A ballet of swans
A ? of sockpuppets?
@David: Try grepping the server logs for the HTTP “Referer”[sic] header in the POST requests that submitted the socks’ comments. Though ten’ll get you one it was either Reddit or 4Chan.
This looks like a TMZ 2 audition tape.
On second thought the “Referer” for the POST requests themselves should be this site. You’d have to look for the preceding GET with the same source IP, from when they loaded this article page preparatory to leaving their, er, deposits. So: find POST for one of the sock comments, find sender IP, find a GET with the same IP and a slightly earlier time (a few minutes or less earlier, most likely), and then find “Referer”. Should identify where they clicked through from. Again, probably 4Chan or Reddit.
@Some centrist
This site is dedicated to mocking the manosphere. I’m not sure how you think that its purpose is to make manospherians see the error of their ways. The only reason they would even read the articles is to rage-post and sealion in the comments section. As we have seen.
@Surplus to Requirements
Terms of venery are just pulled from thin air to make the person using them look erudite, but I’d suggest “hamper”, as in laundry.
Oh joy. Now they’ve started randomly spamming other threads, including very old ones. Looks like you’ve really stirred up the hive!
Hello Peterson fanboys (and it is only boys)!
Before you tell me how scientific JBP is, please read his books and follow all the sources. After you realize that he wildly misinterprets data or outright tells the exact opposite of what the source says (like how lobsters brains melt and regrow), THEN we can talk about science. Seriously, the man has been part of less than 20 peer reviewed articles and his grand opus is based on the discredited work of Jung a pre-science psychologist. He is a relic of psychology’s dark past before it claimed evidence based content and JBP is stuck in that time.
As for his “alternative world view”… NO! There is nothing alternative. He’s a trad-con! He is for order and stability through rigid roles and conformity.
Dear JBP fans,
any psychologist still taking Jung seriously is not worth listening to.
Science marches on and the Jungian psychological framework was disproven ages ago.
And JBP tries to use the Jungian framework for everything.
JBP tried explaining Nazi actions during WWII using Jungian psychology. He failed miserably. His explanations contradicted primary sources from that era. And he completely embarrassed himself due to the GIANT gaps in his historical knowledge.
In other words:
JBP is a know nothing know it all.
Lol i thought this was satire until the pathetic comments. What the hell is this trash and the people reading it? I feel sorry for you people. You must be really miserable and unbearable to be around in real life
“This is from China. This is Fuxian (?) I think I’ve got that right but I just love that… so insanely cool, this representation. So you see, is the sort of, the primary mother and father of humanity emerging from this underlying snake-like entity with its tails tangled together. I think that’s a repr– I really do believe this although it’s very complicated to explain why– I really do believe that’s a representation of DNA”
“It’s very complicated to explain why”. I dare say, given how X-ray crystallography wasn’t developed in the West until the late 1920s, and it then took another 20-25 years of development until the technique was refined sufficiently for it to unambiguously identify the structure of DNA as a double-helix. But I’m sure all of these doughty defenders of Professor Peterson’s honour who’ve read all his books and watched all his lectures and know all of this magic context which we doubters are forever taking him out of will be able to fill us in, right? Right?
Most of Peterson’s fans would consider themselves skeptics. When mountebanks like Erich von Däniken parade their horseshit in front of them, they’d laugh them out of the room; but just because Peterson aligns with their ideological prejudices, they swallow his patter like rubes when he pulls the same stunt. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Well, get the kettle boiling and break out the bibs; we’re being attacked by a lobster army.
Use your words, Lobsterman fans! Tell us HOW we’re wrong;.
The writer of this article and Sam Seder have the combined comprehension level of a marshmallow. Their lack of being able to grasp what Peterson’s saying is baffling. Even when they attempt to take Peterson out of context, Peterson still says enough to prove exactly that.
Catmara, Peterson’s snakes and DNA:
Strange indeed, I agree. But, that is from a small setting of a classroom and he’s talking about some speculations he has. That’s intuitive thoughts, which of course are hard to explain.
Any person, including professors can be fascinated at something weird in old age symbols.
During his long time of severe depression he’s been thinking a lot, many years in fact, of mythology and how to combine it with modern science. Some thoughts lead somewhere and some do not.
Those (mating?) snakes and DNA might be among those leading nowhere. His eager and intese persona may be the other side of depression and can make his mouth running too fast for his thoughts.
His fans will of course instead try to listen to the whole body of concepts while his critcs will pull fragments out of it to ridicule.
-Tom Hummel, Norway.
Oh ew, a lobster infestation. Prepare for whines of “you took him out of connnnntext, you have to watch the WHOLE VIDEO/WHOLE SERIES/ALL HIS VIDEOS/ALL HIS BOOKS AND VIDEOS/LITERALLY EVERYTHING HE’S EVER SAID OR PRODUCED to understaaaaand!” These guys are so predictable. Sophism hasn’t changed since Socrates, and there’s no point in arguing as they just keep moving the goalposts and aren’t arguing in good faith anyway.
Very intelligent comment. Why it hurts you people so much if someone disagrees with your views?
If everyone would think the same way we would be still collecting Berri in the bush.
Here’s the thing, if Peterson is saying what he seems to be saying, he’s awful and we’re right to be critical.
If the things he says mean something other than they appear and you have to read several books and watch several hours long videos to understand him, then he’s a really poor communicator and on that basis should not be admired as a public intellectual. There are plenty of academics who become media figures. They tend to be concise and clear enough so that you get some idea of what they stand for. If Peterson can’t or won’t do that, he has no one to blame but himself when people interpret his words to mean what they seem to mean. Try worshipping someone who actually knows how to speak and write well. Me, I say we send him to Rigmoral Town.
Gay marriage: Telling other people what not to do with their bodies.
Feminist consent: Telling other people what not to do with our own bodies.
The guy is an idiot. I mean, he doesn’t even try to be logical. A glaring false equivalence there.
It’s hard for me to even question my beliefs (which I like to do) when the people I disagree with speak like they never mentally matured enough to make a clear designation between fantasy and reality.
“This is inside my head, this is outside my head.”
I think most people do that by age 5. So….
Maybe it’s just the narcissism. I know they believe the world exists only in their minds. Explains the whole, “I have to tell others what reality is,” thing.
@Ledasmom:
@Lebrice
You’re taking it out of context. You’re going to need to read the whole of the rest of WHTM. Let us know when you’re done.
Uh oh, someone sounds like they’re not 200% for free speech. They’re gonna take your lobster badge, bro.
Doesn’t Peterson threaten people who write critically about him with lawsuits? Doesn’t seem very free speechey to me.
Another stupid hit-piece. A tragic waste of the writer’s time because Petersen’s actual words are all over the web and nowhere is there any evidense to support the argument in this article. Pathetic.
@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee:
You are correct. He rode the FREEZE PEACH Pity Bus to Patreon fame & fortune, then started chilling others’, the odious shitgoblin.