lol

The funniest thing to me about this was Hannity's claim that it was unprecedented for a presidential portrait to have sexual innuendo. Clearly, he never saw Clinton's:



That's one lusty looking president. (The shadow next to him, by the way, is supposed to represent the famous blue dress.) And the newspaper, hanging down next to his dick, as if it were his dick?

With his pelvis pointing up like that I'd have thought he was posing for a porno, save for the fact he's clothed.

I love how much criticism there is in this portrait. I think there's a lot of criticism in GWB's official portrait, too. I think it says something good about America that our presidents are commemorated warts and all in their presidential portraits.

This makes me so sad. I couldn't finish it. Peterson's writing is pretty bad. Is that really his book, or are those just lectures notes? Jesus. And then the reasoning of the guy who wrote these posts is just as bad. And now here I am, commenting on it. So much wasted life and effort. This is nihilism, right here, what I'm living through. Aghh...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcb_iN2RhpM

So now Youtube is adding a tag to RT videos saying they are funded by the Russian state.

This is a really good move. I only hope they'll continue this forward and begin tagging all videos by who funded them.

I don't know what it's from, but I don't think it's from anything written because, after searching, I found no evidence he's ever written at length on postmodernism.

It's this:



transcript here: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/06/05/jordan_peterson_why_you_have_to_fight_postmodernism.html

Elsewhere he comes across as astute and well-informed in the history of philosophy. Not so much here. This speech is bad enough that I regret defending him earlier. I suppose I'm more anti-anti-Peterson than pro-Peterson. :p

Ya know, even then... I don't think he's completely off the mark. I agree that he's kind of sloppy, but he also engages with the ideas themselves in a way that is admirable. I'd still go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy if I wanted to know what a philosopher thought before I'd check out one of his videos, but I don't think there's something fundamentally dishonest about him.

Call me a postmodernist relativist, but I generally think people have a right to interpret things as they want. And even though I might quibble about many of the details, there are some big picture things that I think are accurate, or, at least, more accurate than most philosophy that makes its way into public discourse.

And even though some of his criticisms of the far-left and of campus politics are better and more sophisticated than many (public intellectuals, at least), it draws from and channels an anger that I find that quite off-putting. Just as I find the us-vs-them attitude of certain corners of the far-left to be unappealing, I find the same to be unappealing about Peterson.

starting at 9:24. I'm beginning to think he's a kind of secularized-Christian benign-fascist liberal.

I don't think he's dishonest. Just poorly informed and too full of himself to admit he might not have all the facts straight.



Isn't us-vs-them exactly the attitude he's fostering though? By insisting postmodernism is an intrinsically corrupting force, and that these departments are fostering ideas which will destroy the west, so that he needs to create a watch group web page and wants to limit enrollment in the humanities, he seems to be creating a hostile, take no prisoners environment.

Yes, definitely. It's something I'm saying I dislike about him.

Oh right, that is exactly what you said. Derp.

He grew up in rural Alberta, so

"People who haven't integrated the shadow at all are naive"

That's some comic book tier **** lol

who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

the jungian pseudoscience knows. I guess.

This is one of my favorite parts about Kermit, is his public evangelism of mysticism. Now he believes it rather than looking at it as a matter of convenience and so do his followers, which makes them dangerous, but Its such fun to watch go on.

His use of responsibility is really idiosyncratic... it doesn't really have anything to do with seeing yourself as the source of your decisions and your general welfare, and therefore seeing yourself as accountable to yourself. It's like some kind of.. introspective tranquility, or some kind of intuition, or felt understanding, that you're at one and in harmony with yourself (and, simultaneously in harmony with the cosmos, which is where this idea that "responsibility is the cosmos" comes from). I think that's why he opposes "human rights" (or just "rights") to responsibility, which is also strange. The idea is that if you're trying to effect political change, you're likely in the grips of the false (he'd probably even say delusional) idea that your purpose as an individual resides in something outside of yourself, which amounts to some kind of spiritual alienation (through self-neglect). You're not being responsible because you're not directing your energies to self-cultivation. Instead, you're living outside yourself, being divided rather than "integrated", as he keeps saying.

Making myth as central as he does turns truth into a feeling and makes all thought symbolic. Something is true, for him, when it resonates, when it feels right. The search for truth is merely the search for symbols that satisfy a yearning for what we don't know until it's found. There's so much delirium in this. I understand a little better now why there's so much appeal from the alt-right. It's funny that he goes after postmodernists so much, because, even though he accuses them of relativism, there's a deep relativistic strain in his thought too, although not because he's drawing from postmodernism, but because he's drawing from romanticism. His romanticism (e.g., the aspiration for cosmic harmony of the individual with the universe) is weirdly in tension his liberalism and his high regard for Enlightenment ideals. The unity of the two is a little reminiscent of some of the fascistic thought I've encountered from the 1920s and 1930s.

He absolutely sees things in a sort of mythological determinism or whatever you would call what you just described. This is why I emailed him asking him if he was familiar with Crowley:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Will

He said he was familiar but not in a way that made me think he had any influences from that weird world, so I am left trying to figure out exactly where he got this from. I think it's just reading Jung, tbh.

Yeah, that's the impression that I get from the video, having not read Jung and not knowing any of his ideas or his system first-hand.

IMO, Jung should be considered an occultist first, as alchemy is basically built in to his major theories. That lessens his work for lots of people, but I think it bolsters the value of his work when you look at it that way

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_and_Alchemy

That would certainly explain why 4chan is so easily impressed with him, since 4chan is basically engaging in the creation of new deterministic myths by combining fragments of existing culture without critical thought ("memes") and their own internal fears (the "Jungian" thing).

I had something like this is mind when I mentioned delirium and symbolic thinking above. It seems very connected to meme culture. Also, there's a self-help component to Peterson that seems like it'd be right up the alley of alt-right'ers/4chan users.

Don't forget the (supposed, I haven't verified) the bizarre fascination of the Nazis with the supernatural.

I read Spook's comment first and then realized you had already said the same sort of thing. So I guess I indirectly plagerized you by inferring the idea from his response.

IT'S THE ARCHETYPES!!

I wonder what percentage of posts in this thread are people explaining weird miscommunications like that lol

wtg with that classist diatribe about literacy, Eversor

which one?

There's a strange tension in /pol: on the one hand, they are all superior by mere virtue of their white ancestry, but on the other hand damned by their own failure to live up to the high standard of the master race.

Incidentally, the self-help angle at play fits precisely into the ultimate attribution error:




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error

Isn't that where "the Jews" usually comes in? Isn't the idea that if they're not top dog even though they're supposed to be, it must be because some external force is sabotaging them?

If you look the first paragraph of that Wikipedia article for ultimate attribution error, there is a link to "in group out group", which itself is intimately connected to the theory of scapegoating members of the outgroup.

But yes definitely.

Interesting to see that psychological phenomenon formalized in this way. What discipline is this from? Sociology?

Psychology, but unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to actually verify scientifically as previously thought, and many supposedly fundamental studies failing to be reproduced (although the reproduciblity crisis could be overblown).

Rene Girad developed the exact same ideas purely by critically reading texts, and he wasn't a scientist at all, but more of a literary critic.

Wikipedia calls Girard's work "anthropological philosophy"

Amusingly, later in his life, he became friends with Stanford alum Peter Thiel. Perhaps as a consequence of this, he is all the rage on Hacker News.

I still think his ideas do a great job at explaining tribal behavior. His theories on the origin of language might be a bit more tenuous.

I never read Girard myself, but I met someone once who was writing his dissertation about him. I remember hearing that he has some interesting things to say about sacrifice and Christianity.

I wrote about it somewhere in this thread, lol.

If you use the search function on massassi, it might actually work if you just search for "Girard", since the word is obscure enough that I am likely to have been the only one to use it.

I can't remember if Girard also has something to say about debt, and if that has something to do with the need for sacrifice in ancient religions, or if I'm just reading that back into my half-memories. Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals talks about debt that is owed to dead ancestors as one of the original inspirations of religion, so I might've fused that idea with my memories of Girard (he reminded me a lot of Nietzsche when I heard about him, probably a decade ago by now).