By David Futrelle
It’s been another long week, so let’s end it with this completely unwatchable video of Jordan Peterson blathering over lo-fi hiphop beats that are decidedly not perfect for studying or anything else.
This dude has made like a million of these videos. I only made it through a few seconds of each one I looked at. If you can make it all the way through, let me know.
Once you’re done with that, here are some completely insufferable Jordan Peterson memes collected from around the internets. Why are his fans like this?
Not an ounce of humor in any of them. Also, I’m guessing that the Marxist ones were made before his embarrassing (for him) debate with Slavoj Žižek, in which it became clear that the only thing by Marx he’s ever read has been the 35-page Communist Manifesto.
By contrast, this tweet is pretty good.
She’s right. Cats are tough little fuckers.
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@Katamount:
TCAF is, unfortunately, a bit cozy. That’s one of the downsides of actually holding the convention in a library which is still operating as a library at the time as well. At least it’s a big and relatively open library with function space. And there’s no charge to attend.
@Talonknife:
Yes, Toronto does; that was back in March. Furnal Equinox is on the order of about 2000 people nowadays, so not quite in the leagues of the larger conventions, but a decent size.
@Sarity
Thanks for the link! I was hoping that would happen.
@Richard Smith:
You know, I was chuckling at that, then I went back to look at that image, and ohhh, that adds a whole new level of awful to the meme.
That ‘hat’ is definitely of the west coast First Nations design, same sort of design work you see on ‘totem poles’. I don’t think it’s Haida (the eyes look off) but I’m not exactly an expert on the distinctions between Haida, Tlingit, and Kwakiutl design motifs, despite having grown up in B.C. (And there was enough trade up and down the coast that they often incorporated other’s motifs.) Of course, almost certainly whoever created that meme was even less of an expert than I am.
Not certain what animal it is either; the flattened head and depression between the eyes says ‘snake’ to me, but the nose and tongue suggests more ‘wolf’. As I said, I’m no expert.
Putting that get-up on about as white-bread a man as you could get and saying ‘This man is your friend; He fights for freedom’… that has all sorts of unfortunate implications. Especially given the long history of issues between Canada and the First Nations peoples.
I prefer Tron. He fights for the users.
@ Jenora Feuer
Peterson has claimed he was initiated into a native tribe at some point and (I believe) claims he was given a “native name.” The tribe in question says not so much. He was welcomed into a family in a ceremony, as he had helped one of the family members, a carver, somehow. I’m guessing that’s what it’s referencing, but really, who knows with these dudes.
I think I remember hearing something about Jeep having some connection with First Nations peoples, but I don’t really want to muddy my search history by looking for it.
I’ll never be able to get the Jeep results out, if i do that. D:
@Rhuu
He has claimed a few times to have been “inducted into the coastal Pacific Kwakwaka’wakw tribe.”
Apparently he’s mates with an artist who’s a member of the tribe. His mate’s called BS on the claim.
The Walrus has a bit of an article on it: https://thewalrus.ca/the-story-behind-jordan-petersons-indigenous-identity/
@Rhuu
There has to be a “Jeep Cherokee” joke in there somewhere.
@Talonknife *applause*
Katamount – We had a floral happening here in the Inland Empire of Southern California this year that makes me sympathize with you.
Due to specific rain conditions this Winter, there was a prolific and somewhat rare wildflower bloom in the area. This caused some rather unfortunate traffic problems because people were parking on the freeway to get a glimpse, which is highly illegal and even more highly hazardous on a stretch of highway where the speed limit is 70 mph!
This led to landowners with property adjacent to the freeway charging fees for parking and even some hastily arranged bus tours and more than a few porta-potties for a few weeks this Spring. And the viewers STILL backed up the off-ramps and messed up traffic! Travelling on US 15 was not recommended, especially on the weekends.
There are some nice YT videos and we got caught unawares in the traffic on the 15 one weekend (a great way to see quite a lot, as it turns out, lol!) when all the colors were at their peak.
@Lindsey, Shadowplay:
Okay, that makes sense. He has an actual connection, but he’s playing it up as more than it really is and at the same time using it in a bit of an ‘I have a black friend’ mode.
The whole ‘He fights for your freedom’ meme is still absolutely full of unfortunate implications given the history involved. Especially given things like the way ‘this is for your own good’ excuses were used during the suppression of the potlatch.
I couldn’t make it through the video, oh well.
I prefer Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics or anything by Alan Watts to the ramblings of Jordan. Sheesh!
@Jenora:
And the kidnapping of children to be raised at residential schools. Even if those schools had never been full of abuse – psychological, physical & sexual – taking kids away from their parents is, on its own, a horrifying crime destined to create long lasting traumatic effects.
I’m not saying that only white people have committed crimes, but HOLY FUCK the crimes of white people are so numerous and so monstrous. Maybe if I’d been raised in China I could readily call to mind a list of catastrophic crimes of apocalyptic scale by east Asian peoples to rival the crimes of white people, but the crimes of white people are what I know and they are so fucking bad.
To say nothing of the fact that doing so en masse with the express purpose of raising them in a different culture, so their own birth culture will have no future generations, constitutes genocide.
@Crip Dyke
Well, what China has done in Tibet and is currently doing in Xinjiang is pretty awful. But not necessarily any worse than what white people have done over the years.
The Khmer Rouge were pretty memorable, though.
@Crip Dyke:
Oh, the residential school thing was lots worse, yes. I brought up the potlatch partly because it would almost certainly have been part of the culture of the particular First Nation that JP is claiming here, partly because it’s a lot less commonly brought up (it was a mostly local thing to the West Coast), and partly because a lot of the arguments in favour of banning it were more economical in nature rather than purely cultural, so it had a bit more of a patina of ‘this is for your own good’.
A lot of the crimes here have been very much of the ‘we think we know better’ sort. I keep getting reminded of the C.S. Lewis quote>
@Rabid Rabbit:
Of course, one of China’s weapons in that sort of battle is moving enough ethnically Han Chinese into the region to be able to control how a ‘democratic’ election would go as well. Who needs gerrymandering when you can just actively encourage the ‘right’ people to move in?
That’s probably going to have a more long-term effect than claiming that they get to define who the Dalai Lama reincarnated as.