So fusspot Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson got himself suspended from Twitter for a tweet about actor Elliot Page that pretty clearly broke the site’s rules on hate speech.
To get back on, all he has to do is to delete it. But he refuses to, issuing a 15-minute-long video response to the suspension in which he rants more about Page and the alleged evils of the trans “industry,” declaring, like some defiant emo teenager, that he would “rather die” than take down the tweet. “Up yours, woke moralists,” he concludes, doing his best to sound like a tough guy, which, with his voice, is a rather difficult thing to pull off.
After hearing about his suspension I took a look at the Jordan Peterson subreddit to see how his fans were reacting to the suspension, expecting lots of long screeds about “cancel culture” and “free speech” and the right of every middle-aged ex-professor to misgender trans people online. But there was very little of that kind of talk to be found.
Instead, I found a bunch of Jordan Peterson stans who think a suspension from Twitter will do him some good. In the top post in the thread, with several hundred upvotes, a JP fan called LogicalView suggests that Peterson needs a time out, like a tantrum-throwing child.
I used to prefer when Jordan was more into philosophy and culture in general. More intellectually focused and driven.
Now he seems to be more focused on making mean comments about individual people who didn’t really do anything to him. Like in this case and in the case of the big sized woman on the magazine cover. You can make your point without being mean.
Not sure what he is going through now, but I think Jordan needs a time out for his own good and also the good of the many people who benefit from his wisdom.
“Wake up Jordan,” wrote typeplus.
You are helping noone with this spate of silly behaviour.
It’s not you and it doesn’t suit you.
“Frankly he’s better off Twitter,” sighed DoodleBuggering. ” I don’t think it’s been helping him mentally or his image.”
“I hope this makes him rethink,” someone called ILOVECORNSYRUP432 added.
Lots of people put off his philosophy because of his Twitter rants- he should stay off Twitter for a while and promote his thought
A number of commenters blamed Twitter for turning wise old Peterson into an raging asshole.
“Peterson is a fantastic psychologist and most of what he says he is spot on with,” dosn wrote,
but he needs to get off of twitter. Its not good for him (or anyone else for that matter).
“I agree with a lot of people here saying that he’s caught up in the toxic Twitter environment,” wrote Szikk.
This is not philosophical and nuanced, it’s “owning the libs” just like the “sorry, not beautiful” tweet. He’s going from being more libertarian to being just plain right wing. It’s not Big Brain like he thinks to publicly shame people who are undergoing these elective surgeries, even if you don’t agree with what they’re doing. He just looks like a dick, imo.
Weird that there are millions of people on Twitter who somehow don’t end up being shrill transphobes constantly throwing fits.
Peterson has declared himself done with Twitter in the past only to return to it the next day. If he manages to stay off this time, I guess we’ll see if he’s really an asshole, or if that’s just what being on Twitter does to him.
I’m guessing it’s the former.
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What was the tweet?
@Elaine
deadnaming Elliot and calling his surgeon a “criminal”
@Elaine Deadnamed, used feminine pronouns, and said the physician who did his top surgery was a criminal.
Also started with “Remember when pride was a sin?”
Hardy har, Peterson.
The Redditors are partially correct. Twitter certainly can bring out the worst in some people but it has to be in them in the first place. Twitter didn’t make Peterson into this monster any more than it made him nearly die from drugs/COVID/beef/cider/hubris or made him quit his stable, lucrative and respectable job as a tenured professor to become a right wing grifter. Peterson’s problems are all his own. Twitter is just his preferred platform for displaying them.
Well, the first part is dead on: Peterson is helping no one.
The second part is laughably wrong. Peterson has always been an asshole, who intellectualizes issues in order to convince himself that he’s superior to others, even though **intellectualizing** isn’t synonymous with **thinking rationally** much less with **thinking morally**.
You know you’ve gone too far when even your worshipping cult fanboys think you’ve gone too far. Or, at least normal people would — flibbertigibbet Jordy’s going to keep doubling down.
He really needs to have that inappropriate anger and childish oppositional defiant disorder looked at. But if someone could remove that from him, he’d disappear in a puff of (hickory, mesquite, or charcoal) smoke.
@danielregal: Exactly. Well-said.
… says someone who’s caught up in the toxic Reddit environment.
That is the way the pipeline flows. I mean, just look at how techbro libertarianism somehow gave rise to a royalist, in the person of Mencius Moldbug. And he doesn’t even seem to have been the only one. These days though the pipeline simply spews out Nazis.
Meanwhile, we should consider that there may be a disability angle here. Peterson not long ago spent a goodly chunk of time in a coma after a near-fatal overdose of something. (Benzos?) His diet and other things also contributed to wrecking his health. He may quite literally not be quite the same after medical woes that serious. Cognitive faculties, such as they were, might have been blunted or lost. He just might no longer be capable of the kind of higher-brow assholery he was known for before his recent spate of low-brow assholery on Twitter …
David sums it up pretty well here: Twitter doesn’t magically turn you into a raging transphobe.
@GSS ex-noob – I was told I had oppositional defiance disorder as a kid! But it seems a fairly meaningless label in retrospect. It just identifies a single type of behaviour that by itself isn’t all that significant.
Not meaning to oppositionally defy you here, though 🙂 It does seen appropriate that Jordan Peterson be defined by vague psychobabble.
@epitome: No prob! If Jordi can make up evo-psych bullshit about lobsters as a role model (I am still WTF about that), I can certainly apply a semi-legit psych term to him.
@Surplus: Yeah, but he was a pompous asshole before the benzo-and-beef diet, so the self-inflicted health problems had very little to do with it. He may have lost some IQ points, though, I agree with that idea.
The only good thing on Twitter is Jorts the Cat. I love him whether in dumb orange kitty mode, or union-organizing strategist mode.
Well, that’s just it, though. He was a pompous asshole. Now he seems to be just an asshole.
@Crip Dyke:
Peterson can’t even manage to help himself, much less anybody else.
I think a lot of the ‘restraint’ there is strategic. Elliot Page currently has a lot of positive buzz going and is starring in a show that is generally viewed very positively. They’d probably be on board if it was a lesser known, less positively viewed creator, and be fully ok with the content of the tweet then.
The low point was him comparing the doctors that performed Elliot’s surgery to Nazi doctors. Because an elective surgery done by one person with a licensed physician is the equivalent to experimenting on humans without their permission using vivisection, inflicting people with disease, amputations, sewing twins together, and subjecting people to extreme temps and pressures. Anyone stating that is deranged.
My youngest child is 13 and transitioning to a boy, and the other day I told him (mostly in jest) that if he grows up to be the kind of man who stans for Jordan Peterson I would disown him.
He said that was fair.
The man’s original claim to fame was transphobic scaremongering, but… okay
@GSS ex-noob – I reread what I wrote yesterday and I regret the tone. My apologies. I’m no psych expert. It’s just that I was/am a bit bitter at how some people made an issue of my “oppositional” behaviour when I was a kid, while I didn’t get my ADHD diagnosis until age 23. But this is very much not YOUR problem, so I’m sorry for giving you attitude!!
@Battering Lamb – I also suspect Twitter itself might not have suspended him if he’d attacked someone less famous.
@Surplus: Point taken. Now he’s a whiny asshole.
@epitome: Seriously, it’s all good. No hard feelings on my part — sorry I accidentally hit a sore spot. Jordi’s like those people who ignored your ADHD.
@just_a_nerd: That’s a good kid you’re raising right. Hope he turns out as cool as Elliot.
one of the weirdest bits in that video (ok the whole thing is deeply weird) is when he notes that he’s had “some post-coital regrets” over the posts. kermit, what do you normally do while you’re tweeting, dude?
it’s quite interesting that his fans are not impressed with the recent shenanigans, though
@GSS ex-noob
hey, I’m on twitter too, you know 🙁
seriously though, Jorts is one of the very best things to have happened in the recent hellscape. a cute ginger ray of sunshine.
Jordan Peterson would do better to log off twitter and do anything else.
I’ve seen a lot of young men write that Jordan Peterson’s advice helped them sort their lives out. His problem – well, one of his many problems – is that that’s not much of a basis for a continuing relationship. Once he’s taught you to “clean your room”, what further need of him do you have?
Yeah, a bit puzzled how Peterson suddenly thinks “moralist” is an insult. I thought his entire schtick was basically moral rules and improving your life via morally correct actions etc. The whole “clean your room” thing.
The next day? I don’t think his last flounce lasted 15 minutes.
Does Jordan Peterson have a social media addiction?
I first learned of Petersen back in 2010, or thereabouts, when someone sent me a videoed lecture of his that was quite philosophical/academic in nature and tone. At the time I thought he was talking about interesting ideas, but then I more or less forgot about it.
This latter-day incarnation of Petersen is repulsive. I believe Surplus to Requirements may definitely be onto something with the “disability” angle…without getting into whether this is *true* disability (whatever that means), it’s probably safe to assume that Petersen is no longer who he once was. He seems to have lived a quiet life of a relatively respected professor (with dickish tendencies, but he’d hardly have stood out amongst his academic brethren there) up until he began to publicly align himself with transphobia.
Possibly he always was like this, but he finally felt that he could stop caring what other people thought about his personal opinions. In other words, he never really had much of a moral compass (re: don’t go round hurting people with less power than you to make yourself feel better) but felt he had to seem like he did in order to keep getting invited to events. *eyeroll* He seems to have always seen himself as a cut above the rest of humanity and that’s not a good look.