Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Smearing Jordan Peterson

7 Comments:

Blogger Aa said...

There are actually some valid criticisms of this guy and his work out there. It seems like many who support him are about as knee jerk as those who despise him.

8:07 AM  
Blogger Aa said...

For example:

"But witches don’t exist, and they don’t live in swamps, I say."

"“Yeah, they do. They do exist. They just don’t exist the way you think they exist. They certainly exist. You may say well dragons don’t exist. It’s, like, yes they do — the category predator and the category dragon are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists. What exists is not obvious. You say, ‘Well, there’s no such thing as witches.’ Yeah, I know what you mean, but that isn’t what you think when you go see a movie about them. You can’t help but fall into these categories. There’s no escape from them.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html

The article doesn't see to be a hatchet job, and I've read about this guy other places as well as much of his book (sorry, couldn't take all of it). Why is he so great again?

3:27 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

I don't think he's so great. I think (a) he's pretty much right about some stuff, and (b) he's right about the kind of stuff the media can't even imagine that anybody could be right about--e.g. that the "transgender" stuff is bullshit; and that men are having a rough time, and are as deserving of attention (as a group) as women are.

That witch stuff is just dumb. I think I can guess what he's trying to say. But I have no sympathy for trying to say it in that way.

News flash: witches (in the ordinary sense of 'witch') don't exist.

But man, that NYT article doesn't even *try* to be fair to the dude, IMO. At one point the author says something like: Peterson favors redistribution of sex, implying that he means that women should have to have sex with "incels."

3:49 PM  
Blogger Dark Avenger said...

He sits with great men throughout history who believed in witches, like King James I.

11:40 PM  
Blogger Pete Mack said...

So, I finally read the NYT article. Your points a and b above are something of a stopped clock argument. There are surely better advocates of the cases where he is correct? Because I don't remotely understand what he means by redistrubitve sex. There's a term that already exists for it, and it isn't complimentary: the pity fuck.

8:47 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

I don't understand why you would think they are stopped-clock arguments. I don't see that at all.

As for redistribution of sex--I'm not sure what he means either, but he kinda seems to mean something about old social/sexual mores that basically redistributed sex by socially enforcing monogamy (so that more desirable people weren't getting all the sex, and less-desirable ones none of it.)

So far as I can tell he's not advocating a return to such mores; he's just saying that eliminating them caused a new problem, and one way to solve that problem is to reinstate them (or something like them).

If the guy is so awful, why be unfair to him? Why not address his actual points?

Again, I'm not some huge fan; but there's no doubt that he's right about some important things (and absolutely not in a "stopped-clock" kind of way).

9:00 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Also:
The Cohen piece is only addressing the "antisemitism" smear against Peterson. Though there are other pieces out there that address other criticisms...many of which are also unfair, but at least some of which are legit, I'd say.

9:03 AM  

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