By David Futrelle
I wrote a quick post on Jordan Peterson earlier this week — just some brief commentary on a couple of videos Sam Seder did on the Canadian crackpot. It must have gotten linked someplace Peterson fanboys gather, because a small army of them invaded my comments section.
“The misinterpreted information in this article is not only stupid is very calculated stupid,” charged someone called Bren, which is almost a compliment, suggesting that my stupidity is something I do on purpose instead of something I can’t help.
Another took issue with my choice of words.
Wow. The amount of hate Peterson gets is really high. I mean, the man speaks about passionate subjects but I don’t think he deserves to be called a “cornball weirdo”.
Au contraire, mon frère! A cornball weirdo is what he is.
There were the inevitable claims that Sam and my critiques of Peterson were invalid because we focused on, you know, specific arguments he has made rather than EVERYTHING HE HAS EVER WRITTEN IN ITS ENTIRETY. Some suggested in unison that we were all a bunch of NPCs in an echo chamber — or, as one of them put it, an
ECHO…..Echo…..echo…..CHAMBER…..Chamber…..chamber…..you Neo-Marxists are hilarious. And extinct (Just like the Mammoth!) in about 5 years as the population turns on your tiresome bullshit.
Bu my favorite of the bunch was a fellow called Jason D, who showed up with this impressively sententious opening statement:
A warning from a wiser one indeed! Unlike most of the Lobster invaders, who dropped their indignant comments and immediately fled, Jason stuck around for awhile, posting one long screed after another, making grandiose pronouncements, lashing out with insults, linking to studies he clearly hadn’t read. He posted more than 1100 words in all in response to a post of only 350 words. (He also claimed he wasn’t really a big Peterson fan, but whatev.)
He repeatedly suggested that the commenters were, yes, a bunch of “Neo-Marxists” and NPCs who needed to scurry “back to your gender studies course before you miss out on another patriarchal conspiracy.” He praised his own writing as “quite erudite.”
Alternately defensive and indignant, he responded to those who pointed out his assorted logical and grammatical whoppers were “horribly pedantic people” engaged in “some sort of denigration exercise.” Doing his best to affect a blithe unconcern, he mocked those who
apparently have time to write grammatically correct novellas in response to my casual little quips.
Quips? His comments were in total three times the length of my original post,
He demanded that we respond to his specific arguments about the wage gap, and read the small pile of studies he linked to — introducing one link by declaring “[w]ow your world view is going to be rocked.” But when assorted commenters — led by the redoubtable Scildfreja Unnyðnes — tore these arguments to shreds and noted that the studies he was citing did not actually support his claims, he ignored them completely.
“Not a single one of you smug liberal NPC’s has proven any of JP’s assertions as in-correct in these posts,” he sniffed.
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.?
Having answered precisely none of the serious questions raised by his critics, Jason finally fled, but not without issuing one final would-be zinger. “So long,” he declared, “good luck in your Amazon Utopia!”
If you have the time, I’d urge you to read the comments to my Peterson post in full. It’s an entertaining ride; the rebuttals of Jason are quite informative and often, as he would say, quite erudite.
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@John Batiste (JP troll whose comment finally showed up on page 1, commenters may have missed him):
Yes. This is a mockery blog. It’s kind of in the job description.
Speaking as someone who has taught writing in the past: You do not get to accuse anyone of being long-winded if you add things like “I must say” to your sentences. Not that there’s anything wrong with such phrases! You just don’t get to call others long-winded if you use them. Likewise if you resort to your thesaurus and choose an uncustomary (see what I did there?) adjective like “anaesthetic” when you mean “soporific”.
You also don’t get to dispense such patronising advice to a Jordan Peterson critic unless you can demonstrate 1) that you are qualified to do so (i.e., can prove you are a writer teacher) and 2) that you have also passed it along to JP himself, who is in dire need of the discipline provided by an undergraduate writing course or two, which might teach him to trim excessive verbiage, clarify recondite asseverations, dispense with disputatious rodomontades, and cleanse his lexicon of its propensity to bootlessly endeavor to demonstrate verbal dexterity in the stomach-churning manner this sentence has just illustrated.
Of course, if he did that, he would reveal himself to be an emperor without clothes, but I think we could all live with that.
You are also strongly encouraged not to recommend the use of a spell-checker without evidence of incorrect orthography in passages not directly quoting illiterate trolls. (Seriously, what are you talking about? I grant you the dangling comma, but aside from that?)
Apparently, what you care is that it allows you to see how well you can affect a pose of finding it beneath your notice while still responding to it.
The aim of this blog is, as noted, to provoke hilarity, so I suppose it’s nice to know it even makes lobsters laugh. You may also be pleased by the fact that its liberal white knight rules prevent me from telling you to [CENSORED.]
Accusing David of (to use a phrase I’ve occasionally used on my blog) shameless hit mongering is amusing when the discussion is Peterson. 3 years ago Peterson was an academic pretty much unknown to anyone outside his students, fellow faculty, and some other members of his discipline. It was his comments about Canadian bill C-16 that brought him to widespread public attention. A lot of what he’s done since seems to be primarily intended to keep him in the public eye. He’s certainly making a hell of a lot more money than if he hadn’t come to public attention.
@Ozarks, hi! Welcome. I don’t know whether you should contact her workplace, if she wants to inform them she will. Same with the police. Thank you for mentioning it, though, and I hope she stays okay. If something *does* happen that requires intervention, and I hope that doesn’t happen, then she’ll do it herself when she’s ready.
@Tohka, yes, absolutely. More than you think there, probably. They don’t want to go back 60 years. They want to go back 300.
There has been a deeply regressive movement at play the last decade or so – I mean regressive in the proper sense, “moving backwards”. It’s called the Dark Enlightenment. It’s based on the premise that while the technical and scientific achievements of the Enlightenment were great, but the social and political reforms were harmful. They believe that democracies are destined to fail and that western countries should revert to monarchy, they believe that social support programs should be “humanely” removed (i.e. let the injured and disable just die) and that women are naturally happier when confined to the home to raise children. Etc, etc.
Basically they’re all nerds who’ve read too much fantasy and sci fi with noble kings and lineages, and who habitually and instinctively look down on everyone else as being incapable off taking care off themselves. The “cure” for SJWs is to throw out democracy and suppress anything that they don’t like.
Notably – they generally don’t think that they’re fit to be the ones ruling. As long as someone who has their beliefs is in charge, they gladly admit they’d be a loyal servant.
Not all of the Alt-Right and conservatives believe this explicitly – many are even unaware of the Dark Enlightenment. But those ideas propagate out from that philosophy to pretty much every corner of the manosphere. They pretty much all think democracy is a failure and that the common people need authoritarian leadership “for their own good”, it’s a very common belief that people have too much freedom, especially any group that isn’t straight white cis male.
Peterson is an unofficial member of the Dark Enlightenment. I don’t know if he embraces the term directly, but all of his ideas line up squarely. “Clean your room and take responsibility for yourself” is a sanitized way to say “claim your manhood by enforcing patriarchal and traditional norms on the places and people you interact with,” but it means the same thing. Get in line as a foot soldier for the tyrants.
That was longer than I intended! Mea culpa.
@John Batiste! I love your work on Late Night with Stephen Colbert.
Oh, different one? Yeah, my mistake. Shoulda seen it coming. Colbert’s Batiste is a sweetheart and wouldn’t ever drop a poop on the floor like that.
Anyways, thank you for commenting! It’s frankly excellent news that David’s blog is getting hit so frequently by random google searches. His popularity is just skyrocketing!
I mean, it couldn’t possibly be the case that a mob of lobsters is dive-bombing in and, seeking false credibility, they’re lying about how they got here. If there’s one thing that defines a Peterson fan it’s an unshrinking fealty to the truth, after all! They’d never lie for fleeing advantage in something as dumb as starting an internet slap-fight.
Well, lovely chatting. Have a wonderful journey around the Internet, and I look forward to hearing from you again!
– Skaldfreja Gebismerað
P.S. David has written for multiple international publications, and has been paid for that work! No offense, my duck, but it seems unlikely that a rando drive-by with a comment that flows like chunky sewage would deliver critique of much merit. David’s good at taking on advice, though, so I’m sure that if there’s any valuable advice in that bilge, he’ll find it!
@Rabid Rabbit
This is a thing of beauty.
Just to follow up on Scild’s remarks about the “Dark Enlightenment”, if you want to learn more about this stuff may I recommend Liz Sandifer’s Neoreaction: A Basilisk? (Disclosure: I backed the book when it was a Kickstarter project but that isn’t an Amazon affiliate link or anything like that, pinky swear!) It covers the neoreactionary movement by focusing mainly on three personalities: Nick Land, a British academic; Eliezer Yudkowsky, a self-taught AI researcher and pusher of some fairly out-there theories on the “technological singularity” who is not a reactionary per se but many of whose followers are; and Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, a computer programmer whose odious opinions on how slavery wasn’t such a bad thing really (!) have had him kicked out of conferences, causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the FREEZE PEACH peanut gallery. With side-quests into the works of 18th Century visionary poet and artist William Blake (the title is a shout-out to the title of one of his works; Sandifer is a massive Blake fan and references to him turn up in a lot of her stuff), Gamergate (Sandifer had already written on perennial WHTM favourite (sic), Vox Day) and Austrian school economics!
Sandifer’s writing style, while not post-modern as such, is heavily influenced by related movements such as situationism, particularly the notion of “psychogeography”. I mention this only because some people I recommended the book to found the style a little off-putting to begin with. Personally, I don’t think you have to be an academic or anything to enjoy it– after all, as has been previously been established, I am an Engineer of Little Brain whose knowledge of situationism and psychogeography and the theory of the Spectacle has all been picked up from Jon Savage’s history of British punk rock, “England’s Dreaming”. Also, Sandifer is trans, a fact I mention partly because the book was published originally under her dead name and still shows an “author” listing on Amazon for that name which might cause some confusion; but mainly because a book about neoreactionaries by a trans author written in an unashamedly post-modern-inspired style is apt to make smoke come out of the ears of both the subjects and their disciples ?
Also, just a follow-up to my follow-up ?: Liz Sandifer and friends have a very good blog here if you’re into Doctor Who, comics, SF and general weird shit
@Wild Cat – (from page 1)
I don’t like this comment at all.
Going to a hospital isn’t something to be ashamed about, and being an alcoholic isn’t a moral failing. You might also be interested to read this article about AA, and their pretty abysmal success rates.
It’s also a religious program, and you’ve said he’s an atheist. It doesn’t surprise me that it doesn’t work well for this person.
I hadn’t realised that there was actual medication you could take to help you resist drinking! One that makes it taste bad, and one that counters the effects of the alcohol, if I remember correctly. Why aren’t those used more? (hint: because society in North America sees it as a moral failing, that you should just will yourself out of.)
Re, the coors light… This is something I’ve actually thought quite a bit about. I used to be very negative about people who are drinking ‘cheap’ beers, but then I smartened up when I remembered what my parents taught me: “Don’t comment on someone else’s food.”
It doesn’t matter what someone else drinks, as long as they aren’t forcing me to drink it.
It’s also pretty classist to gripe about how someone doesn’t drink a better (read: usually more expensive) beer.
All of this to say: He’s a Jordie P fan, and that’s not great. But the rest of this stuff doesn’t paint a picture of him as a loser, it paints a picture of you, and what you consider a ‘loser’ to look like.
You might want to think about that.
Oh, man. I have some big classism issues I’m still working on. Restaurant and beer choices are the big things that bring that out of me. I like beer, but since it’s so filling, I drink wine more often. So when I do drink beer, I get either an import or a domestic craft beer. Once you get used to that, Coors/Miller/Bud/PBR really do start to taste weak. I have to remind myself that some people can’t afford anything but the cheap stuff and some people can’t or don’t want to acquire a taste for the stronger tasting beers and that’s okay. It doesn’t affect me at All! It’s hard to get out of the “ugh, chain restaurants and macrobrews” mentality because so many people I know have that mentality too. Bad WWTH! I also think it’s hard to shake because food and drink preferences have gotten really tied in with political affiliations, so they begin to feel like major parts of our identities.
@Rhuu
You might be thinking of disulfiram (brand name: Antabuse) which is a near-last-resort medical treatment for folks who have been unable to quit drinking alcohol and are facing severe physical/emotional/financial consequences if they drink again.
It doesn’t just make booze “taste bad”, it’ll make you *violently ill* if you drink. Like, projectile vomiting and messed up for hours if not days. And – fun fact! – if you’re particularly sensitive to it, mere exposure to things like alcohol-based hand-sanitizer will set off a reaction (one of the reasons that it’s a last-resort – that and it’s really quite hard on your liver, which is probably already feeling under the weather because of however you go to the point of needing antabuse in the first place). It’s wickedly powerful stuff.
During my first year’s recovery, I had an open ‘scrip to get a week’s worth of it when I had a high-stress event coming up, such as a family wedding (it takes a few days to be effective, so one has to prep in advance) and it definitely made life easier because I knew that I absolutely couldn’t have a drink, no matter how much I wanted one – being sick as a dog for 2 – 3 days thereafter wouldn’t be worth it. But I reached for it sparingly because I didn’t want to find out I was on the hand-sanitizer-sets-it-off end of the bell-curve…
Oh, boy, that original thread was entertaining!
Scildfreya, Cat Mara, Rhuu, and many others… have I mentioned recently that I admire your quick wits and actually erudite — as opposed to, well, our great example of not-erudite-at-all — responses, both there and here?
Also, Johanna, that disulfiram (Antabuse) stuff sounds like nasty stuff. I’m glad it helped you with the high-stress events in the first bit of your recovery, though!
Thank you @Johanna! That is…. Hoof, that is a lot. I can see why they wouldn’t want to prescribe it willy nilly!
@contrapangloss: Thank you for saying so.
@Johanna, @Rhuu, there are certain kinds of mushrooms that have the same effects as Antabuse: that is, they’re perfectly safe to eat, provided you don’t drink alcohol with them. If you do, the effects are reportedly not pleasant. I’d a friend in school whose father once threatened to prank some of his friends in this way, serving them up a mushroom stew and glasses of wine while he drank grape juice. I don’t know if he ever did it; it would be a mean trick to make someone think they’d eaten poisonous mushrooms… ☹️
That previous thread, and this one, are good fun. I’m also very happy to see @Cat Mara in full stride (no guilt trip intended, but I miss seeing you around the interwebs!).
Re the APA guidelines on masculinity – lordy, they’ve sparked a shitshow of responses, and at the front is our very own Dr Peterson. As we know, his masculinity is terribly healthy and not at all disturbing, as his frequent revenge musings demonstrate.
On classism and food specifically, when I saw this via Twitter today…
…my immediate reaction was “ew, tacky” and “omg hilarious”.
But I grew up dirt poor and my diet is not exactly fancy at the moment, either. Plus chips (fries) are yummy. So I’m conflicted 🙂
Mish – I don’t eat fast food because it’s too expensive for what you get. Being retired on disability, I have more time than money. My son probably doesn’t realize that we eat homemade bread and pizza because it’s cheaper than ordering in.
From my perspective, the unintended hilarity of the image is not so much that it’s fast food; it’s that it’s being served on silver platters beside gilded candelabra. Dolt 45’s entire aesthetic summed up in one unexpected juxtaposition.
Fun fact: They took the fries out of their fast food sleeves to put them in paper cups with the presidential seal on them
In case you were unsure about how ridiculous these dorks are.
Re: Presidential Fast Food
As has been noted elsewhere, the main reason this is happening is that most of the usual White House catering staff is included in the government shutdown, so they’re not working right now.
Someone over on Pharyngula posted this bit from Vice Sports:
And student athletes – at least those on scholarships – are very often from working class backgrounds and very often not white. Trump’s commentary about the meals had an air of “they’re peasants, might as feed them peasant food” to me. Would he have fed fast food to someone he saw as elite? Fuck no.
@wwth:
Someone else already commented about the ‘not white’ part with ‘at least he didn’t get them KFC’.
Which, of course, could just mean he hadn’t thought about it in that much detail.
Also… how good is fast food that’s been sitting out for a while? Cold fries?
Uck.
I’m catching up because I’ve been on jury duty (actually got on a jury for the first time!) and just wanted to say that I want this:
embroidered on a pillow, stat!
I discarded the notion of having it on a t-shirt or bumper sticker since I figure JP fans, MRAs, conservatives and the like would think it applied to them. 9_9
Also, Eddi, consider the fact that maybe most of the women who turn you down do not turn down most of the offers they get.
Maybe they just turn you down.
Because you’re a manipulative asshole who doesnt’t care about the person, only what you’d like to do to their body, and it shows.
Ha, wrong thread… am I rusty or what?