Yeah but if it were Hillary vs white dude, youd probably have President Palin right now

HOLY **** THAT WAS THE 14200TH POST TO THIS THREAD AT 4:20 ON 4/20

lol

blaaaaze it

Why do these things always happen in Canada?

A wise man once said: "The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments." Makes me wonder if Jordan Peterson is a secret communist lol.

Good question. All I know is the debate was surprisingly cordial.

Thank christ for 2x speed.

Ugh fuuuuck peterson is gonna spend the next 3 hours psychoanalyzing a pamphlet isn't he

So far I’m not sure what exactly this debate is even supposed to be about, Marxism the revolutionary goal or Marxism the system of economic thought, but what I am sure of is that Jordon Peterson crammed for it on the ride over.

I thought it was very gracious for the moderator to not introduce him as a neutraceutical spokesman who hosts book signings every Tuesday and Thursday from a spare lecture hall

P: Complaint not about capitalism, really about hierarchical structures. Endemic to nature. Why limit complaint to capitalism?

- As Communist Manifesto says, the structure of capitalism is specifically disadvantageous to working people in excess of the winner-take-all hierarchies of previous systems. Manorialism, feudalism, and prior documented systems extracted a defined share of the workers' surplus for their own benefit, but the bulk of the surplus was the workers' own. Capitalism extracts 100% of the workers' surplus and remits only a defined portion.

P: Marxism talks about class struggle, not against struggle against nature or "the evil we are individually capable of"

- The Communist Manifesto advocates open revolution. So, uh, no, it's not gonna tell people to confront the evil they're capable of doing, it is literally trying to weaponize it.

P: We have to organize ourselves in some manner, therefore hierarchical structures are necessary

- Direct democracy doesn't involve hierarchical structure. Many human organizations use direct democracy, both historically and today. This statement is trivially false.

P: Hierarchies are an efficient way of distributing resources

- Um. This is literally an argument for central planning.

P: Marx thinks history is a binary class struggle with clear divisions between the proletariat and bourgeoisie

- No he doesn't. The Communist Manifesto mentioned three, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the petty bourgeoisie. Das Kapital mentions a number more, including landlords (/royalty), the lumpenproletariat, farmers/capitalist farmers, the peasantry. Marx considered these distinct classes, but didn't worry too much because, among other things, he was primarily concerned about the relationship between the proletariat (industrial workers) and bourgeoisie (the owners of industrial capital). Again, because he considered this relationship much more exploitative than the relationship between the landlords and the serfs from prior eras.

The Communist Manifesto specifically mentions the petty bourgeoisie as a distinct class which is the origin of fascism.

P: Marx argued that wages get driven downward because capitalists compete against other capitalists

- ????

[Aside: at this point, I'm pretty sure I noticed the moderator and Zizek heckling him]

P: Dictatorship of the proletariat can't work because replacing the capitalists with members of the proletariat will corrupt them, and they can't make decisions effectively because they're too complicated.

- But I thought hierarchy is an efficient way of distributing resources????

P: Capitalists can't just exploit workers, the notion that capitalists and business managers don't contribute meaningful labor is absurd.

- A study last year (https://hbr.org/2018/07/the-leaders-calendar#how-ceos-manage-time) found CEOs work 24 hours a week on average, once you exclude "executive time", "exercise", "personal appointments", and all of the other **** you and I do for free on our own time that the Harvard bootlickers counted as work.





ya no I give up, I'm not sitting through any more of this. I don't know if Zizek wins the debate but I'm pretty sure everybody who watched the whole thing lost.

I hate that people applauded any of this. What a bunch of inbreds.

Zizek is actually very polite to him but ultimately Peterson learned that people who self-profess to be Marxists are not literal strawmen, so hopefully something good came of it.

Imo it gets better but not much better, only listen if you have nothing better to do (you do).

Ultimately Zizek seems to actually respond to a few of Jordan Peterson's views, like when he compares cultural marxism functionally to nazi antisemitism. It takes a while of rambling to get there but it's a good critique.

sage

Both of these guys are walking memes...

Zizek actually has insights from time to time which are neat, but mostly yeah I agree.

I used to watch some of his stuff (probably because I saw it posted here), but at a certain point I got the feeling that a lot of time he's trolling on some level.

For example, when all that NSA stuff came out, he said he didn't care if the government spies on him, and that it might be a good thing, because if they read what he wrote the government agencies "might learn something". :wtf:

What's the issue? He's clearly making a joke but he's not wrong that most of us will not notice government spying. I know we like to think of ourselves as edgelord hackers but most of us are really boring people.

Lol, I read Peterson’s entire book, 12 Rules for Life.

I listened to most of the rest of the debate while doing other things. I stopped listening when they started sucking each other off so hard that their jaws started clicking in rhythm, which I guess I shouldn’t find surprising since they’re both pop psychologists trying to debate a subject way above their stations.

My favourite part was how Zizek argued passionately in favour of modern mixed economies while Peterson argued passionately in favour of centrally planned command economies, although neither of them seemed to realize that’s what they were doing. Peterson sounds like he’d be perfectly fine living in a country like China so long as the leaders didn’t have too much dirt under their fingernails. I do agree with Peterson about one thing, though: Zizek is a pretty strange Marxist, because judging by this debate he doesn’t seem to share any beliefs with other self-titled Marxists. The only salient point I heard was the association between paranoia of cultural Marxism to antisemitism, which isn’t even his idea, it’s an actual historical fact that the Nazis made up cultural Marxism and attributed it to Jewish malice.

I also liked Zizek’s point that happiness isn’t a good goal for an economy, but he completely failed to respond to Peterson’s exceptionally weak argument that efficiency is a goal (where efficiency means maximizing consumption, and therefore capitalism is great because feudal lords didn’t have Facebook).

Really the few bits and pieces I agreed with fall into this sort of mould, where the statement is so vacuous and obvious that it’s hard to disagree even if I’m trying to be petty, but there isn’t anything of real substance that might threaten to make the opposing fans switch sides. We’ve already done a better job debating this subject in this very thread.



Yeah you won’t notice until you run for Congress on a platform of intelligence oversight, and then you get an anonymous package in the mail containing webcam shots of you jerking off at your desk to My Little Pony fanfics.

why.

How was it?

You're not wrong.

Someone I know got a copy of it as a gift and left it at my house so I read it.

I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either.

One thing that’s surprising about it is that much more of the book then you’d expect is centered on elaborating his philosophical interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve and using philosophy and literature to supplement it. He starts talking about it in the second chapter and keeps going back to it in most chapters of the book. Some of the ideas would probably be interesting to someone who doesn’t have much of a philosophical education, especially someone who doesn’t know anything about Christian theology or existentialism. But I do, so I just enjoyed it because it reminded me of profound ideas that I hadn’t thought about since I was an undergraduate. It made me want to go back and read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.

Aside from that, I think what he’s up to is trying to bring back the confidence to judge oneself and others that he probably grew up with in small town Alberta. In my experience, in small rural towns, especially when they have a strong religious culture, people can make very declarative statements about how people should behave, what’s right, what’s wrong, and the beliefs are often based on religious views that everyone in the community shares, and which no one questions. People in such communities feel confident about making really harsh judgments about other peoples’ character because of the confidence they have in their morality — something which is really different from the mentality which exists in cities, where diversity just as a pragmatic matter requires you not to judge so harshly. I got the impression that he was effectively trying to urge his reader to have the same confidence in their judgment, while acknowledging that life is fundamentally tragic, that decision-making is complex and difficult, and that it can be very, very hard to be good.

Ah yeah, I have that experience quite often with second-hand sources. Occasionally I'll listen to a podcast about e.g. Nietzsche, and all it makes me want to do is go read Nietzsche instead of hearing the podcast. It's better to just get the thing directly. It makes sense to have a market for lighter readers though.



That makes sense. A kind of "courage of your convictions" thing. I find this an interesting subject. Generally I find it's more courageous to attack one's own convictions rather than stand by them. However, the danger of that is being so skeptical or postmodern you are unable to form any convictions at all. So like, I get it. Having something to strongly believe in and not care what others think is hard, and difficult, and the negation of strong beliefs is hard. The reality of postmodern life is that all of our myths are dead.

It's definitely hard to know how to be a man these days. Since so much of male identity is tied up in "toxic masculinity", you know, the dissociative effects add up to where nobody has a sense of identity or purpose. I'll grant JP that. I'm just not a fan of his conclusions.

edgelord hackers? What are you even talking about? And what does that have with a right to privacy vs. a legally dubious dragnet boondoggle?

If I were a known (wanted) terrorist I would firehose out billions of terror plots/suspicious messages, and then hand out a one time pad that tells people which was legit and which wasn’t.

Dragnet surveillance is a massive disinformation factory, basically. I don’t know the point of it other than to accumulate blackmail on specific people just in case you need it.

I saw a stupid weblord on HN talking about how he’s not scared of his webcam, he’s scared of people seeing what’s on his screen. Yeah like bank account deets and ****.

Well, any state is gonna get that stuff out of you if they want. Your bank password is conveniently located behind your kneecaps and can be easily accessed with a good swing of a pipe wrench. What they won’t get with a pipe wrench is a video of you yiffing with your mailboy, released just in time you run for office or publicly criticize the fascists’ favourite hairless neon orange president.

Which is why Zuckerberg covers up the webcam on his laptop. He’s not a paranoid idiot. He doesn’t want Saudi Arabia/Trump to blackmail him like Jeff Bezos.

Yeah, not to mention a subpoena.

On the other hand, the first thing I checked when all this NSA stuff came out: will they be sharing a dossier on people fitting a profile of likely drug offenders with the DEA? Kind of makes you wonder what they'd do with that kind of data, since there are so many ways to bust people.

I mean... remember that time that Nixon started the drug war in order to suppress leftists and blacks?

Remember that time Teddy Roosevelt started the FBI in order to suppress leftists and blacks?


I mostly just like how liberal millennials are so scandalized by what the FBI did during redscare and the civil rights movement, but nobody seems to talk about the fact that they were just operating within their founding mandate.

A lot to respond to here, but just this for now. I’m pretty sure somewhere Jordan Peterson says that “identity politics” isn’t just an analysis of society but a vision of morality that offers rules about how to guide personal behavior, but they’re inevitably bad rules, because they aren’t focused on the individual as such, but on the individual as an individual is defined by their hierarchical place in society. I think that’s a good point that’s often overlooked.

But yeah, Wesley Yang wrote a good piece about JP for Tablet a while back and I think it fundamentally gets JP right. It’s unfortunate that for so many his ideas were mediated through a social media frenzy which demanded people to identify as being either for him or opposed to him, and that whether one falls one way or the other is seen as indicating that one is an atavistic, white identitarian or a woke such and such. It’s just a book. I wish I could relate to it more freely, and be free from having to take a stance on it.

Yang article: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/262280/jordan-peterson

I think “this book isn’t even noteworthy enough to have a stance” is a stance, and it’s certainly as much as Peterson deserves.

IIRC Zizek just says most of us really have nothing to hide, so dragnet surveillance is a waste of time and resources. It's "stupid", in that sense. The point has nothing to do with rights.



This is literally what Russia does, btw. They just flood the NSA with crap data.

He's saying that he doesn't care because he doesn't see any repercussions for himself personally and generalizing that to everybody. But he's a philosopher, not a politician running for office (or even a MLK-like figure, who the government certainly did spy on, for very nefarious purposes I may add).

Most of the time the guy strikes me as a charlatan speaking off the cuff and coughing up as much BS that he can muster before his time is up.

Finally, another reason he probably doesn't care is that even if the NSA finds where he's been buying all that cocaine (how many times did he rub his nose in that video??), he's not in the FBI's jurisdiction.

Alright then. I mean I don't fully agree but I see where you're coming from.

Would he even be famous without all those sjsjssjssss and snorororros?

I don't disagree that he has a point about bureaucratic incompetence, including when it comes to surveillance. And surely this is a reason to doubt the efficacy of such a massive program, from the point of view of the taxpayer. Nevertheless I sense that he is downplaying the issue here, in a way that seems characteristic of him in general. It's like he has everything figured out by some kind of off the cuff twisted logic that he probably daydreamed when he was bored one day (though to be fair, most great ideas probably are like that). In fact he reminds me a little of Hitchens, but frankly Hitchens already had everything figured out and reserved the improvisation aspect for finding more amusing ways to decimate his opponent. But in the case of either one of them, the theatrics were mostly for show from what I can see. In other words, I don't see myself changing my worldview on anything after hearing what either one has to say, amused though I may be at their delivery.

A bit much to call someone a charlatan because they said something they didn't fully think through.

Oh, it's more than just this. I've seen enough of his stuff to notice the pattern. Perhaps I'm overly critical, but he just strikes me as somebody who says things because they sound true. Basically, an entertainer of sorts.

That said, I probably ought to withhold judgement, since I imagine I'd have to read his books to really understand what he has to say.

In some ways, he strikes me as a much more ridiculous version of Noam Chomsky. Although with Chomsky, even if he is pretty clearly engaging in some form of persuasive writing / debating much of the time, he clearly has spent a great deal of time researching and thinking about what he has to say).