Nothing much. He's still a professor at UofT despite having no academic merit, only because the administration is afraid of what he might tell his fans to do (as they should be - I think I'm gonna start calling this 'alt-tenure'). He wrote a self-help book for manchildren. He left Patreon in a huff along with a bunch of other alt-right celebrities, purportedly in protest, but almost certainly because their Patreon haul was quickly and publicly falling (probably as their more moderate "why isn't there straight pride" / "why isn't there white history month" viewers started to clue in to what was really going on). More recently he has spent his free time helping his indigent daughter sell pseudoscientific diets and nutriceuticals.

Do you think he brought enough skinning knives for everybody, or did he just tell the Republicans to bring their own from home?

I shouldn't joke. As Peterson has repeatedly said, he's only trying to help. These young men are angry and frustrated and liable to turn to fascism without Peterson's father-like advice. I'm sure somewhere out there is a troubled young man who was getting ready to do something awful, but got his life put back on track after Peterson told him that his feelings of frustration and inadequacy are actually because of an academic conspiracy to emasculate him.

No academic merit? He has a PhD from UofT, and he's reasonably well published and cited. He'd also a talented speaker. Hard to expect better from a professor, and easy to get worse. But he isn't teaching, anyway.

I don't really follow Peterson, but I think it's natural that he's going to go off the rails a bit when he strays outside his field of expertise. It's no different with Dawkins or Hitchens, except that his primary field probably leaves him a bit better equipped for his forays into popular topics outside his field.

McGill, actually.

Peterson HAD a good CV. His early work was well cited and widely respected, which earned him both an assistant professorship at Harvard and later got him tenure at UofT. The problem is... he's not doing that kind of work anymore. He's gone way off the political deep end, not only personally or as a side gig, but professionally, too. Not just since he became internet famous, either; he started going down this road many years earlier. All of his academic works of the past decade have been thoroughly ignored, except in the rare cases that he's offered pity authorship over something that someone more reputable has done.

Put simply, he is not the well-published, well-cited, or even well-respected professor that he was when he came back to Canada. He hadn't been for a long time. And now he settles academic disagreements with violent threats instead of dissenting papers. Like, you know, most respected academics.

You can't really have a career as a relevant academic and simultaneously produce material for the public. In my experience, the best lecturers were the ones who spent less time on publications. I mean, look at Dawkins, he hasn't published any academic papers since 2004, and even then, he hadn't done any real research for more than a decade before that.

It seems pretty lame to make something about a tweet claiming that he'd slap someone if they were in the same room. Academics are frequently socially mal-adjusted *******s. A display of twitter indignation is hardly beneath the "dignity" of academia.

While Dawkins and Peterson are both equally guilty of masturbatory fits of polemic, the main difference between them is the fact that when you squint just right, what Dawkins is doing still looks almost like the blurry afterimage of evolutionary biology public advocacy, and what Peterson is doing still looks like manning the wide end of the Infowars funnel. And while we’ll never know for sure, I’d bet that if they had to apply again, Dawkins would get tenure and Peterson never ever ever ever ever would. The man went insane.

Actually I was talking about threatening to put his colleagues on a public list of “dangerous thinkers”, for his followers to do with whatever they wish. But yeah, now that you mention it, he does have a habit of threatening to bop people on the nose.

Kind of like that wacko Luboš Motl, who was also at Harvard early on (but basically forced himself out of academia by being impossible to get along with, to put it mildly).

ah but how can we blame the parent for 4chan?

their parents probably post there

Heh. I remember a friend from college who told me his dad browsed Stormfront and tried to use TheRedPill theories to control his wife.

Holy ****. Trump's in control of a nuclear arsenal.

How long before they were divorced?

As far as I know they are still married.

Ah, hopefully she gets out of that relationship.

Just to be clear, from what my friend told me his dad isn't some kind of abusive or domineering husband. Just that he had made a pastime of browsing sites like TRP and Stormfront out of curiosity and then habit, and I guess bought into some of their ideas. For example, my friend put it that TRP is a "theory of how women work", and that (the theory goes) you could somehow use it like you use physics to do kinematics calculations, etc. :downs:

TRP's advice is inherently abusive. I guess some people are willing to tolerate a bit of abusive behavior.

So conservatives are really mad that Google employees think poorly of JBP and Ben Shapiro.

Isn't it interesting how, as soon as it effects them, conservatives begin lecturing other people on how they should use their private property? From liberal to Stalinist in 0.02 seconds.

Despite it being, you know, something everyone has complained about for years that you accidentally watch one JBP video and suddenly your suggestion bar is filled with x DESTROYS y and all that crap. BuT tHeY cAlLeD hIm A nAzI, grow up. Like y'all aren't calling AOC a Maoist. People use stupid hyperbolic speech behind closed doors.

They aren’t libertarians, dude. Pro-market rhetoric is just conservative dogwhistle for keeping the king in crowns.

Woah are you telling me that Republicans/conservatives are hypocrites? Big, if true!

I guess the idea that partisan politics have become completely unmoored from principles that either side expects to apply to both to not only their opponents but also to themselves is pretty clear, and has been for some time. All the way from HRC saying to “civility can start again” once Democrats are back in power, to this recent hubbub with the Quilette journalist getting attacked. The cynicism with which any kind of principle or realism is being jettisoned for the sake of partisan gain is alarming stuff. Goes right along with what Jon was referring to when he talked about “fundamentalism” in US politics.

We're in an era of revolutionary fervor. Pick your era, there are strong parallels. Western society is headed for political crisis and the forces pushing us towards factionalism are only growing stronger, while the opposite forces weaken. And people's lives are only getting worse. Just be glad people aren't forming gangs and openly killing each other yet.



They're ad hoc libertarians, it's a convenient rhetorical flex but it's always funny to see the blatant contradictions laid out.

https://i.redd.it/q8p80ifqok731.jpg

Unfortunately the worker faction won't have nukes and drones.

I don’t think that’s really accurate. I think we’re living through a decadent age, where it’s clear that none of the ideologies of the mainstream/establishment consensus are at all suitable to reality. If it seems like a revolutionary period, it’s only because spaces that had been uncontested are suddenly becoming contested, and opened up to voices that had been on the margins. But I don’t think the fervor is really “revolutionary.”

Not sure how thoughts can be inherently abusive. Maybe if I adopted a Nazi ideology when doing my homework, some of the problems I exterminate could form a resistance group or something.

At any rate, putting aside the harmful parts of PUA/TRP, relationships between men and women (or between any people) in general are fraught with some form of subconscious manipulation (not all of which is necessarily bad). Although presuming my friend's dad isn't himself prone to abusive behavior, I do find he thinks he can 'control' women with some kind of abstract theory to be pretty amusing.

Although actually, now that I realize it, maybe it's the fact that the theory probably doesn't work as prescribed without resorting to abuse that makes you potentially right here.

Maybe the purveyors of NLP are themselves using NLP to manipulate men into becoming poor competition for them. ��

lmao what?

also if I never hear about nlp again itll be too soon

There are two common uses of the abbreviation NLP. One is a rats nest of pseudoscience being peddled by a group of unethical businesses and individuals onto a gullible public, and the other is about getting laid.

Sounds like the same demographic to me tbh

“Alexa, how do I pick up women?”

Filipino worker being paid pennies to pretend to be a computer: :|

An increasing number of people see the system as inherently unfixable. They may not yet be acting out, but given a kick or two you might see some real action.



Isn't the premise of TRP that women are emotional, have the brains of children, can't be trusted or keep promises, and are easily manipulated by psychopathic men? I fail to see how trusting that's true on any level couldn't result in abusive behavior.

I've heard Jordan Peterson a few times on the Jocko Podcast and I haven't heard anything extremist from him.

Jocko runs a self help business, that's pretty much petersons wheelhouse, so you'd expect it to make more sense. That said I havent listened to it.

What's extreme is he continues to posit a conspiracy theory about academics he doesn't like, "cultural marxism". Sure he doesn't advocate violence but he dedicates alot of time to reassure everyone that English departments are one step from Stalinists ready to destroy Western culture. If you don't see why that kind of attitude towards people he disagrees with is radicalizing, I don't know what to tell you.

Sure, but dysfunction and revolution aren’t the same thing.

"Dysfunctional fervor"?

Or “dysfunctional foment”.

I haven’t really paid much attention to what Peterson has said about this stuff, but I do think in some respects it’s panned out. Just to clarify, I don’t know if he literally thinks that there is a conspiracy of an organized group who are programmatically attempting to infiltrate academic institutions and government bureaucracies. If he does think that, then he’s a wacko, which he may very well be. But I think one can look at how “woke” politics have in fact been infiltrating bureaucracies and are being institutionalized, and it may not be wrong to see that as a troubling development.

Just want to emphasize again: I don’t know what JBP actually thinks about this stuff, so I’m not defending him. But he may be at least in the ballpark when he raises the concern, despite that the particular way that he’s done it has been demagogic and concerning in its own right.

Just to make this distinction into something a little more substantive and not merely a semantic distinction, revolution and violence aren’t the same thing. We may be headed towards a period with more violence, but I don’t think the violence is/will be revolutionary in character or in intent. Maybe we don’t need to get into a philosophical discussion about the nature of revolution, though.

Of course. There's just no evidence that's what's happened in the case of my friend's dad, because I don't know how far he's taken it.