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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Lobsterfans, just on that “you need to whole context” argument you keep using. No, we don’t. If Peterson, who wants to be a public intellectual, cannot articulate his points succinctly and with clarity then he is a poor communicator. If it were a one-off poor choice of words then fine, we all do that on occasion. But Peterson seems to view himself as being very exacting and very particular in what he says and how he says it. He wasn’t searching around for the right way to express a concept and picked enforced when he should have said socially encouraged monogamy, despite his attempts to rewrite his words. Monogamy already is socially encouraged. He chose, deliberately, to use the term enforced monogamy, and he chose to say it in specific response to male violence against women.
And another thing, for all his wordiness not only is Peterson a poor communicator, he’s a very undergraduate one. He’s that 16/17/18 year old who knows a bunch of fancy words and wants to show everyone all the fancy words he knows so that everyone can see what a super duper genius he is (I was one of these at that age). But just throwing around fancy words doesn’t make you smart. It might convince some people who think that because it’s said with an air of authority and they don’t quite understand all of it then it must be really important and really good knowledge. But if you stop and look at what he says and strip it back, all he does is take ten minutes to say something mundane he could say in a sentence.
Also, if anyone hasn’t already treated themselves to Laurie Penny’s deconstruction of Professor Surf ‘n’ Turf, well, consider it a late Christmas gift. You’re welcome. Oh, and don’t forget to read her article about the time she went on a Bitcoin cruise while you’re at it because, let’s face it, the intersection on the Venn diagram of “Peterson stans” and “Bitcoiners” is surely a non-empty set.
@ weirwoodtreehugger
Also violence, given the old “I’d slap you happily” outburst.
No doubt that there’s just some bit of context that we’re missing that would make his behaviour in those cases totally ok!
@ Pie
Had to read through the comments to see if anyone was going to inform the lobster brigade about the full-context thing. Thanks for coming through. Although, when I started reading, I really only needed to go through about 12-18 months of the back catalog to get what was going on here.
I think the collective noun for sock puppets is a “stink”.
A stink of sockpuppets has invaded the mammoth, lol!!
@Fernando and other JeeP fans
Yeah, so does the guy selling copies Dianetics outside the local Scientology Center, that’s not enough to justify putting my mental well-being in his hands!
I take Peterson very personally because not only is he a black mark on the alma mater of not only myself, but my entire family. We all have degrees from the University of Toronto. And the only time it ever gets in the news is beside the name of this tedious wad babbling about “post-modern degeneracy” caused by short-haired women waving a placard at him.
Moreover, he made his bones by being an asshole to his trans students. Then he went in front of the SENATE of my nation to ramble a bunch of legal falsehoods to lawmakers who should have been hearing from an actual trans person who has been the victim of discrimination. He tried to undercut the well-being of my fellow citizens… for what? For his ego? To fleece rubes like you?
As others here have pointed out, not only is this man wrong about everything he talks about, up to and including Jungian concepts, but he’s also not really a “free speech” champion because he wanted to blacklist professors he accused of being “Neo-Marxists”! Yeah, that was him!
And the worst part of it is that other, dumber people are copying him! He’s already the new cool dad version of Deepak Chopra, but even Megan McArdle is trying to cash in on his ruse!
In short, fuck Peterson and all the bullshit he stands for! He’s a symptom of a great illness in this culture and we need a treatment for it before a legion of bargain-bin Deepak Chopras are self-helping the world into its climate-change-fuelled oblivion.
David Futrelle this article says more about you than about Peterson.
*in nature documentary voice*: And then, after brigading the blog with bad faith arguments, the stink of trolls vanished, just as suddenly as they appeared.
Also, any claim of misrepresentation or character assassination regarding jordanshit is automatically invalid. This is the man who literally claimed that the views of the ENTIRE LEFT is the same as a genocidal regime. Because, y’know, trans people wanting to be treated like human beings = genocide.
And that’s exactly the people JPiece of shit threw his lot in with. The kind of people who claim trans people’s existence is an attack on society. JP even opened up the very question of trans people giving up their right to exist to satisfy other people’s feelings by asking his token trans fan if she would do so, to her face, live, in an interview.
More anti-Peterson clickbait incoherent drivel. Nothing to see here.
JasonD:
Yes, you all can keep believing in a mythical wage gap, the oppression of women in a patriarcal society.
Which should I trust, a survey of employers or some drive-by commenter who’s never seen the word “patriarchal” written down before?
Peterson is espousing truths that you don’t want to hear because it grinds so basely against your liberal world view.
“You can’t handle the Truth!”
if you end up getting what you want, you wont like the result […] Change it too much and the result wont be pretty. Just a warning
“I’ll give you something to cry about.”
you all live in the freest, most tolerant society ever created by mankind
“Worse societies exist/ed, so this one is beyond critique.”
Built over centuries by the same men […]
“We hunted the mammoth!”
[…] from a wiser one.
Who’s this “wiser one”, and why did they pick you to speak for them?
PZ Myers has just posted about one of JP’s wherein the imminent fall of the STEM disciplines are predicted! You read it here first!
Nah, not really. One of JP’s manbaby followers gets his undergarments in a bunch because he is forced– forced, I say!– to read the works of a blue-haired woman! Oh, the humanity! ?
Damn, I’m out of practice at this. Wrong kind of quoting, and I missed the edit window.
Hee! Peterson’s trolls are so great, huh? They’re like the herbivores of the MRA world. They hear word that Peterson, their Lord And Saviour’s good name is being besmirched, so they blithely amble over in a big herd, do a little nibble of the grass and wander off again. So majestic.
Come to think of it, they also encapsulate Peterson’s thinking pretty well, too – you hear that, doods? You think a lot like your patriarch! As in, your idea of challenging a position is appearing from nowhere, disgorging an egregious cud of half-chewed verbiage, and then ambling off again before anyone can reply. There it sits, stinky and wet, undigested and forlorn, for someone else to clean up.
Didn’t you Petersonians ever get that whole “clean up after yourselves” advice?
I’m not sure if this is the right metaphor though. Poor, timid creatures are particularly skittish, it seems; they disappear at the first sign of a confrontation. Cows and their kin tend to claim their turf and stand their ground, and even stotting antelope put on a great display of strength as they flee. This, I don’t know what this is.
(Yes – if any of you Peterson fans are still reading, I’m making fun of you for being cowardly. You talk a big game, but you sure are timid about actually defending your beliefs. I’d rebut any or all of your dumb positions, but others have done so already and we all know you ain’t coming back.)
Anyways, I was gonna suggest a drawer of sockpuppets, but a stink is way better.
Just waiting for an actual clinical psychologist to come here and refute him. Unless you all are.
I like the idea that the descriptor of the type of sock puppet is variable. For this one, I like ‘a crustacean of sock puppets’.
XD
@Rhuu: merciful hour, don’t be making me think of “crusty socks” where Peterson’s stans are involved… ?
Ah yes, sorry to have mis-spelled a word. I love how horribly pedantic people such as yourself point to it as some sort of denigration exercise. The fact that most of my remaining post was quite erudite meant nothing to you. You only attempt to insult and demean me for having an opinion that differs from yours. How about actually responding to my claims instead of the clever but useless exercise of breaking down my individual quips with neanderthal-like quotes. I can fling reports around as well, how about this one: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0205349 . Shows men are worse off than women in a majority of countries across the world including discrimination against men in the more developed ones. And the gender pay gap does exist but not because of some over-reaching, sinister male conspiracy, but rather on a less-glamourous scale resulting (in part) due to life-style choices focusing on family instead of career. Its pretty simple if you really think about it. Stop being so goddamn smug and open your eyes and ears to different opinions and consider them carefully. The history of mankind is THOUSANDS of years old and social structures built during it were in place because they worked. Were now in a massive 50 year old societal experiment where the outcome is unknown and cracks are beginning to show at the seems. (increase in loneliness, family nucleus break-down etc.) Like I said, careful what you wish for as you may not like what you find at the end. Fools rush in.
Not a single one of you smug liberal NPC’s has proven any of JP’s assertions as in-correct in these posts. Its all pathetic jibes and insults aimed at the man who threatens your perfect little Marxist utopia’s. Typical NPC twitter. Whats your Sociology professor tell you to write as a comeback to this little CHE jr.? Why is the pay gap not a result of female life-style choices (ie. popping out babies and caring for them for 18 years + all the while working as well.) and inherent biological profession preference, ie. the desire to work with people as opposed to things? And yes, from the very start of the article (with the meanest/maddest image of Peterson you could possibly find) to the very end its out of context attacks on virtually all his contentious assertions, none of them actually touched upon in any meaningful sense. Hit piece? nah, more like Character assassination of the highest order. You should be ashamed of yourself for such a biased piece of crap article.
Funny how having a family only negatively impacts the careers and earnings of women when most families have two parents.
Not sure if I linked the Star’s reporting on Peterson followers, but it was worth a read merely for confirming exactly what I thought about people who listen to this jackass: https://www.thestar.com/edmonton/2018/11/27/jordan-petersons-superfans-say-theyre-not-who-you-think.html
If it isn’t the very-online Pepe trolls and twenty-something glibertarians, it’s the local “cool girl” who detests “victim culture” and the religious housewife looking to reconcile indoctrination with the world around her. These people are exactly who you think they are.
Ya know, Peterson’s output reminds me a bit of the Bible, in that people are able to use it to prove any point that they want it to, and that its very vagueness seems to make its followers cling all the more.
@jasond
Lol u funny :DDDDD
Oh my god one came back.
@Jason D, congratulations! Almost all Peterson-types drop a message and disappear shortly thereafter.
You wanted your post taken seriously? Okay, awesome. I’m going to go read the paper you dropped and I’ll get back to you on it, okay?
Let’s test the quality of your erudition
Isn’t “be precise in your speech” one of the 12 rules?
The offerings from the Jeepers B Peepers fans are downright shameful.
Clean up your rooms!