Dragons, Monsters, and Men by Jordan B. Peterson (6.5/10) | Dragons, Monsters, and Men by Jordan B. Peterson (6.5/10) | Power Forum | Power Dynamics™ - "Peterson says not to ask, “How do I find the partner that’s right for me?” Ask yourself instead, “How do I become the partner who’s right for someone else?” (Figure out what women want then start from that list.) The idea is that if you concentrate on being the prince, you’ll (eventually) find the princess."
Clearly showing why he is the king of incels, since he tells men to improve themselves
Why I love Great Britain - "In 2018, when I last travelled to Britain, I met with several Cambridge professors and began to discuss the possibility of arranging a seminar there, focusing on some key Biblical texts. A formal offer of a Visiting Fellowship was proffered to me in February 2019, facilitated by Dr Douglas Hedley, Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Clare College, and arranged through the necessary actions on the part of Cambridge and the University of Toronto... My invitation raised some hackles behind the scenes, however, based on what I would call a wilfully blind “misinterpretation” of my putative political views. In consequence, the invitation was unceremoniously rescinded, on an excuse which I later learned had been manufactured post-hoc. This happened, conveniently as well as treacherously, when Dr Hedley, my sponsor, was absent conducting his affairs in India. I discovered that I had been cancelled not as a formal notification, but accidentally, on Twitter. This, to say the least, was a shock. Earlier this year, however, I received an invitation to return. In the aftermath of my cancelling (and other too-similar incidents), an intense battle had been waged to make the sort of gratuitous forbidding that had been applied to me impossible. A group of Cambridge dons arose to challenge and reword a set of revisions to the university policy on free speech that would have, ironically — if that word is strong enough — made future similar cancellations both easier and more likely. Then they attempted to find twenty-five people who would affix their names to a petition that forced a full, anonymous and binding vote on the matter. This specific effort took months. People were afraid to sign; afraid that making their support for such a change public would expose them to sanctions similar in consequence to those that befell me; afraid that they would be mobbed and cancelled. But enough people eventually did so, and the matter was duly brought forward to Regent House, Cambridge’s ultimate governing body. And when the vote was called, an unusually large proportion of those eligible to cast their ballots turned out to make their opinions known. Almost nine out of ten of the fifteen-hundred or so who did so voted to make such cancellations impossible in the future — a larger margin of victory than any of the academics I spoke with about such issues of governance could recall. Obviously, something was transpiring of far broader significance than the mere revoking of my individual fellowship offer. And, so, to the first of many reasons why I love Great Britain. Cambridge (like Oxford, from which it is descended, much as it dislikes to admit it) has a highly decentralised college structure... This arrangement allows for maximal liberty and creativity in thought and action at the most vitally important level — the local — while simultaneously enabling an optimal level of cross-college rivalry and cooperation. Furthermore, and most significantly, this free and loose organisational structure makes bureaucratic capture of the entire institutions extremely difficult. This, in turn, makes the rectification of mistakes, which will inevitably be made, possible and even likely. And that might just be the salvation of the rapidly-corrupting modern university, as well as everything downstream from that culture (and that is everything).... My talks at both Cambridge and Oxford appeared uniformly welcomed by faculty and students alike (with a single exception: a rather courageous and comic young woman, dressed in a full-body lobster suit, who popped in during my most public talk at Cambridge to shout “feminism” and dance briefly about)... Such a public response seems at curious odds with the idea so invidiously insisted upon that I was and am a fundamentally malign person, characterised by literally unacceptable political opinions. The same mode of interaction made itself evident in what were many dozens of encounters with individual students on the streets and in the colleges at Oxbridge: no fear, no disgust, no contempt, no hatred — just a series of extremely inviting, pleasant, and often surprisingly deep and intimate individual encounters with fine mostly young people, striving with all due effort upward and onward, informing me forthrightly that they were doing so."
More proof that it's a small, intolerant minority intimidating others into silence - when there's an anonymous vote free speech wins. So much for Cancel Culture being about listening to the People
Exclusive: Jordan Peterson hits back at director Olivia Wilde over 'this insane man' comments - "Jordan Peterson has hit back at actress and film director Olivia Wilde, who said the sinister character in her upcoming film, Don’t Worry Darling, was based on the controversial Canadian psychologist... “We based that character on this insane man, Jordan Peterson, who is this pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community,” said Wilde. In the interview, Wilde described incels as “disenfranchised, mostly white men, who believe they are entitled to sex from women.” “They believe that society has now robbed them — that the idea of feminism is working against nature, and that we must be put back into the correct place,” Wilde said. “But this guy Jordan Peterson is someone that legitimizes certain aspects of their movement because he’s a former professor, he’s an author, he wears a suit, so they feel like this is a real philosophy that should be taken seriously.” In his statement, Peterson hits back at Wilde’s criticisms. ”I am, currently — just to set the record straight — professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, which among those not pseudo-intellectual themselves still constitutes professor and member there of a department of psychology which is in the top 15 such departments worldwide,” Peterson said. He points to his author, or co-authorship, of “more than a hundred objectively influential research papers,” and was an active researcher between 1993 and 2016. “I also taught and conducted research at both McGill and Harvard and was arguably successful at both institutions,” Peterson said... “Many of the young men whom the progressive and cancel-culture-facilitating mad woke mob (which contains no shortage of bitter, self-righteous, victimhood-brandishing, virtue-signalling, accusatory and even outright demented mean-girl feminists) have shamed and tortured into cowering for ever daring to manifest a single masculine attribute have turned to my work and found some solace therein,” Peterson continues. He adds that he as “repeatedly and very publicly” told young men and women that they should “think very hard about their own personal shortcomings and not the evil of the opposite sex, and that they should in consequence strive to amend themselves in the very ways that would make them attractive.”"
Liberals have no idea what they demonise, since they never actually look at the ideas they claim are "dangerous"
How Jordan Peterson became a punchbag of Hollywood know-nothings - "They never learn, do they? If the tumultuous events we have all watched with growing horror over the past few years taught us one thing, it is this – people don’t care what the pampered starlets of Hollywood have to say about politics. If we did, then Hillary Clinton would be comfortably enjoying her second term as the pantsuit POTUS, Jeremy Corbyn would be prime minister of the UK and we would all be driving electric cars. But regular people are smarter than actors, which seems to drive the luvvies wild with fury. Rather than accepting that maybe, just maybe, there is another side to the argument, the tossers of Tinsel Town insist that anyone who doesn’t fully embrace the so-called progressive agenda is simply a monster... [Jennifer Lawrence] even seemed proud of the fact that a throwaway line in a sitcom triggered some sort of Damascene conversion to what is now so tediously known as ‘the right side of history’. Predictably, following the Vogue interview, Lawrence was hailed as a modern-day Joan of Arc – for refusing to be ‘passive about politics’. But there is no real bravery involved in simply having the courage of other people’s convictions – she knows which way the political wind is blowing and is bending to it. That’s not all that brave, is it? But while we can all roll our eyes at the flamboyant stupidity of famous millionaires who like to scold the rest of us, there is a rather more sinister aspect to the burning desire of stupid celebrities trying to pretend that they are smart. Take actress and director Olivia Wilde, for example. Her latest flick, Don’t Worry Darling, has already commanded column inches simply due to the myriad reports of strife on set and, apparently, the fact that the star of the film, Florence Pugh, seems to hate everyone who was involved in the production... The difference between the idiotic burblings of Jennifer Lawrence and the fatuous witterings of Olivia Wilde is that while most people can agree to disagree with Lawrence as a matter of opinion, Wilde is simply wrong on a matter of fact... The idea that Peterson is ‘king of the incels’ is not just stupid – it also completely flies in the face of the facts and everything he actually stands for. How can a man who tries to tell young men to be more responsible in their treatment of women be accused of being some cheerleader for the obnoxious, misogynistic group known as incels? (Although, interestingly enough, even they are not as misogynistic as the widely celebrated trans brigade.)... clean your room, have a shower before you go on a date and always remember that nobody owes you anything, sexually or otherwise. These are hardly the words of a ‘king of the incels’ – they are simply bits of advice that your dad might dispense as you are growing up. Yet to people like Wilde, and so many others, the actual facts of a matter are now deemed secondary to their own personal feelings, or even better, their ‘lived experience’."
Cathy Young 🇺🇦 on Twitter - Jacobin on Twitter - "Jordan Peterson is one of the most famous public intellectuals in the world. But his pronouncements in favor of capitalism and hierarchy collapse at the slightest bit of scrutiny."
"I'm no fan of Peterson, but you guys once ran article suggesting that Soviet architecture represented a more egalitarian and human use of public space"
Social justice lunatics celebrate Jordan Peterson’s struggles - "Dr. Jordan B. Peterson’s personal troubles are celebrated by his detractors. After his daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, opened up about the difficulties her father faced during this past year, a torrent of ill-wishes were released to social media... Peterson has been vilified by detractors in media and the public at large about as much as he has been praised. The reasons behind this are that people don’t like to hear that relativism is not the best way to live life. People who are mired in our contemporary driving philosophy of meaninglessness, that no one way to live is better than any other, that no one choice is a better or worse choice than another, don’t want to listen to someone who says that the hard work of life is worth doing."
Facebook - "Three years ago, we started an organization that publishes books in Arabic and distributed them for free because of the restrictive censorship climate, mostly imposed by governments and society. Book publishers in the MENA region really don’t dare to sell certain books because of the undue risk they’ll attract. Here, internal employee revolts at several book publishers are trying to prevent books from being published. Now it’s Jordan Peterson’s new book, in contract with Penguin Randomhouse. Where do you think this path leads?"
Meme - "THE FUCK!? NOTHING IS GETTING INTO HIM!!"
"KEEP YELLING THE BUZZWORDS PEOPLE!!"
"DON'T LISTEN TO HIS REASONING!!!"
"BIGOT RACIST NAZI"
"HEY HEY HO HO"
"IT IS WORKING!! MAKE MORE NOISE COMRADES!!"
"I'M GOING TO SHOW MY TITS!!"
"QUICKLY NOW!!!"
"PUNCH THAT FASCIST IN THE FACE!!!"
"HEAR ME... CREATURES OF THE UNDERWORLD. THE EVIL ARCHETYPE, SATAN TO CHRIST, CAIN TO ABLE, LOKI TO THOR"
"DARKNESS TO LIGHT, CHAOS TO ORDER"
"SOMEONE CALL THE POLICE!!!"
"I COMMAND YOU... GO HOME"
"THAT CAN'T BE..."
"AND CLEAN YOUR ROOM"
Meme - Natalie Wright, PhD @coereba: "I'm an evolutionary biologist with expertise in mating systems and sexual selection, and "enforced monogamy" is not a term evolutionary biologists use."
Eric Weinstein @EricRWeinst...: "Okay. So, I'm not an evolutionary biologist with expertise in mating systems. But I do have an internet connection, a deep love of nature, and once stayed in a @holidayinnexpre ss. A paper on "Enforced Monogamy" from the "Journal of Evolutionary Biology": onlinelibrary.wi|ey.com/doi/fu|l/10.10...
Want more? This is funny. So, not only is "Enforced Monogamy" a reserved academic term in a few different areas, the @nytimes own search engine shows at least 2 separate positive references to the term as a positive progressive ideal in 2000 & '02 before @jordanbpeterson's use.
Here the @nytimes publishes a review pointing out "enforced monogamy" should be a positive progressive *feminist* ideal in humans, likely to "[reduce] sexual conflict", increase paternal investment in child rearing obligations & giving healthier offspring. nytimes.com/2000/01/23/boo... Hrdy recognizes this inconvenient legacy but dreams of a which men and women invest equally in the welfare of th... Experiments on fruit flies, normally a promiscuous speci..."
Meme - "Well its like tits vs. ass (sniff) I mean tits are life giving, tits are milk, tits are beauty, THAT's order but ass...well...ass is shadow, (voice cracking) ass is CHAOS, and ASS...that's NOT GOOD. Ass is the pit where man must slay the dragon just (trails off)"
Rex Murphy: Goodness, gracious, Ottawa survived Jordan Peterson - "It’s a pleasure and a cheer to be able to start a piece with some good news. As of Tuesday morning having duly scanned the various news services I may report that Ottawa is still standing. The nation’s capital is still the unscarred and tranquil repository of all that is good and sweet that it always has been despite Dr. Jordan Peterson’s having been allowed within its precincts, despite too, being allowed to speak to thousands of Canadians who wanted to hear him. A curious note, though a whole basket of NGOs and other highly-sensitive special interest groups, some even funded by the Government of Canada, spent much time and energy warning that Ottawa would become a hell-pit of bigotry and hate (maybe evening requiring its own Special Representative to combat Petersonia — take note, Omar Alghabra) none showed up to protest the event. Anti-bias clinicians explain this as a clear instance of premature or “anticipatory” traumatisation: when the thought of an event supersedes in dread and anxiety the actual occurrence of the event. And disables the gland responsible for protest and moral grandstanding. It is particularly common among the woker members of the population and is co-symptomatic with an allergy to free speech."
Damn white fragility!
Barbara Kay: Jordan Peterson enters rough waters in Sports Illustrated's swimsuit controversy - "Canada’s most notorious cultural gadfly, Jordan Peterson, is a courageous fellow. He took one look at full-bodied swimsuit model Yumi Nu on the cover of last month’s Sports Illustrated (SI) Swimsuit Issue, and without hesitation, opined on Twitter, “Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.” The backlash was so swift, and so harsh, that Peterson announced he would be quitting the social network. Society’s preoccupation with “fatphobia,” it would seem, is back... Women, it would appear, are resisting such alleged patriarchal pressure in huge numbers. A Johns Hopkins University study found that more than half of college-age Americans are overweight or “obese,” a word considered so triggering to anti-fatphobia activists, the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Public Health says it should be banned and replaced with “larger bodies.” Alas, manipulating vocabulary can’t change material reality. It’s settled science that weight and health deficits are intimately connected. For one poignant example, a U.S. study found that almost 80 per cent of patients hospitalized for COVID-19 were either overweight or the O-word... Even if we can all agree that our culture is wrongly obsessed with body perfection (not just female), our understanding won’t automatically translate into admiration for amplitude... Popular fashion catalogues started featuring older women some years ago, because their boomer clientele was aging. But their silver-haired models are still slim and lovely for their age. That’s a marketing decision. Now they are featuring plus-sized models because of upward trends in weight in all demographic groups. That is also a marketing decision. (But their plus-sized models wear modesty-themed, concealing swimsuits.) Unlike a company like Lands’ End, however, SI doesn’t sell swimsuits. It sells female beauty (at least its annual swimsuit issue does). The magazine’s Yumi Nu cover aggressively declares: women can be beach beauties at any weight, and we dare you to say otherwise (Peterson took the dare). If SI’s editors really believed that, they’d make a habit of such covers. The odds of that happening are slim (excuse the expression)... In the charming Netflix film “Falling for Figaro,” the protagonist, Millie, is portrayed by a very pretty, but obese actor. Her character is smart, gracious, high-achieving and personable. Her weight is never mentioned, as is appropriate for the point the film is making. All well and good. But in real life, she would not be paired with her film boyfriend, Charlie, played by an actor who is so tall, fit and gorgeous, with flashing black eyes and a knockout smile, you can’t take your eyes off him. Why couldn’t her boyfriend be more average looking? If they really believed weight makes no difference, Millie would not emerge from under the covers after a tastefully choreographed lovemaking scene fully covered up. It was an exercise in gaslighting, just like the SI cover."
You're only allowed to glorify obesity, not say that it's not attractive
Jordan B. Peterson film sparks threats: 'We really don't want to have to bring out the guillotine' - "Filmmakers Patricia Marcoccia and Maziar Ghaderi recently spoke to a Seattle newspaper about their documentary, “The Rise Of Jordan Peterson,” along with threats to those who want to share it with the world. Theaters in Toronto and Brooklyn canceled showings. A church pastor was also forced to take extra security measures before a showing... “The people who run these venues are so worried about getting in trouble,” Mr. Ghaderi said Monday, The Stranger reported. “An old professor of mine once told me that artists are supposed to be fearless, but when I’m reading these emails from these gatekeepers, I’m thinking, ‘Man, you people should go work for the government or something.’” Author Katie Herzog’s piece then notes the moment Mr. Ghaderi “received a text message from a pastor outside of Portland. The pastor had agreed to screen the film at his church and had been getting complaints — and threats.” One threat forwarded along gave the pastor a “fair warning” as to what he was getting into be considering the film. “Several community organizations are planning to shut down your showing of the Jordan Peterson propaganda film,” the threat read. “While many of us aren’t Christian and some even flat-out condemn the religion, we do not want any harm to come to your place of worship or those within. However, we cannot allow fascism to continue to rise and will not tolerate its presence in our city, whether it is on the streets or on the waterfront or in a church. Read some history books, read about eugenics, read about sex and gender and then compare it to Peterson. Pray on it if you must. Do the right thing. As much as we joke about it, we really don’t want to have to bring out the guillotine to fix society.”... Ms. Herzog added that “The Rise of Jordan Peterson” is “not exactly pro-Peterson propaganda.” “The film makes ample space for his critics, including one of his old friends and former colleagues who wrote an article calling Peterson ‘dangerous,’” she wrote. “All of this — the myth of Jordan Peterson versus the reality of Jordan Peterson — is what this film is about.”"
Rex Murphy: Oh, the sweet irony of Jordan Peterson's fame - "If, in place of honourably debating him, his opponents hadn’t tried to howl him down, tag him as a bigot, and have him fired, he’d today most likely still be placidly wandering the grounds and groves south of Bloor Street, one among many of the unsung pedagogues of the University of Toronto. Honourable men and women, all, but not, as a rule, to be found lecturing in Madrid one day, Oxford the next, felling shallow leftist interviewers on the BBC (redundancy) the next, podcasting to hundreds of thousands, and racking up more twitter hits than everyone except, maybe, Taylor Swift and Meghan Markle. So here he is, just two years on, with 12 Rules for Life surpassing two million in sales, YouTube his (almost) private dominion, his ideas radiated through all the old and new media, and saluted and high-certified by one of the most independent minds in this age of mush-think, Camille Paglia, as “restoring a peak period in North American thought, when Canada was renowned for pioneering, speculative thinkers like media analyst Marshall McLuhan and myth critic Northrop Frye.”... She continues with what at least I see as the incontestable observation that she has “yet to see a single profile of Peterson, even from sympathetic journalists, that accurately portrays the vast scope, tenor and importance of his work.”"
From 2018
Jordan Peterson was vilified for his crusade against political correctness and is now seriously ill - "It is a feature of our toxic age that people who like to present themselves as the kindest can be relied upon to be vicious as hell in a cause they think is good. Those social-justice activists who Peterson exposed when he was well are now being vile because he cannot remonstrate. The Independent website attacked him as an 'alt-right figurehead' who has attracted 'widespread accusations of transphobia'. The Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore tweeted gleefully: 'Hello Editor types. Jordan Peterson holed up in rehab in Russia. F*** me gently with a chainsaw… let me do that story. Come on!' A fellow Canadian academic, Amir Attaran, wrote on Twitter under the hashtag 'Karma': 'Jordan Peterson, oracle to gullible young men, preacher of macho toughness, and hectoring bully to 'snowflakes', is addicted to strong drugs and his brain riddled with 'neurological damage'. 'He deserves as much sympathy as he showed others.'... This is the terrible personal cost that must be borne by anyone—and especially conservatives— who wish to speak truth to power. Because the animosity of the Left is almost visceral. What has become clear, though, is that the most intolerant people today are those who champion the cause of tolerance. For it’s not freedom of thought or expression which they desire but the unconditional affirmation to their own political agenda."
Jordan Peterson and how the left seek to destroy those it hates | The Spectator Australia - "Does anyone recall a pile on from conservatives when Women’s Electoral Lobby founder, civil libertarian and high profile feminist academic, the late Beatrice Faust, published an account of her own addiction, Benzo Junkie, in 1993. No? There was none. Instead, the following year, she reviewed a book on the then much-hyped Prozac for the Centre for Independent Studies magazine, Policy. Well over a decade later The Australian was still citing Benzo Junkie as a must-read on the subject. How different are the modern left. The problem is not just that the tweets are so vindictive and cruel, but that so many thousands of people have agreed by liking them. Why dump on a person when they have just had a year of what they describe as being ‘absolute hell’ and then withdrawn completely from public life?... What has become clear is that compassion and common decency are frequently lacking in those who consider themselves to be ‘progressive’. Indeed, it seems that they feel justified in treating their opponents this way because they are considered as being not just being wrong, but morally evil
Why mock Jordan Peterson's suffering? - "Jordan’s story arc has thus far been inescapably Christ-like, even if the Peterson Pieta is diminished by his body being metaphorically cradled in his daughter’s somewhat compromised arms, rather than those of his Mother, Beverley Ann. Or, alternatively, he is just a bloke who got rich telling young men to tidy their rooms, yet couldn’t even keep his own House in order, or indeed his mental integrity, in the teeth of an imminent spousal bereavement, an adverse reaction to benzodiazepine and grotesque levels of public scrutiny. Ha ha! So, while it is a little disappointing that so many for whom compassion is, if not to be cultivated, at least to be signalled, found it just too tempting to get stuck in — it’s not a surprise. A degree of rancour is inevitable in the battle of ideas, and Peterson’s insistence in the right of the Right to be right stirred more than most. But the publication this month of a new feminist history does I think offer a way to reconsider and even reconcile a little. In a neat twist, it’s by Helen Lewis, who has history with Jordan Peterson. She conducted a well-publicised interview with him for GQ in 2018. And she also wrote about him in the New Statesman, describing the man who had, if not destroyed, then at least carefully dismantled C4’s Cathy Newman, as a “Cargo Cult Intellectual”, ie an empty outer shell, with no working machinery But with her new book, Difficult Women, she makes the very worthwhile point that much of the progress made over the last two hundred years in women’s rights was won by troubled, flawed, even monstrous individuals. The uncomfortable truth is, according to Lewis, that pretty much every one of those great pioneers of that long march have been women whose company it would be hard for a modern feminist even to tolerate for very long, or whose wider views they could endorse... if you want to break the ice which is ever forming on the surface of society, you have to accept the kind of people who wield axes for what they are. Decide to wait, instead, for a man or woman without inconsistencies, without hypocrisies, without flaws, who is not human, and you will either wait for a very long time, or you endure sermons of a very thin gruel — a meal not even fit for Hyaenas."
From 2020. "When they go low, we go lower". Liberals still claim being woke is about empathy and kindness
What Hating Jordan Peterson Tells You (about yourself) - "So Jordan Peterson’s politics irritate you. But can you also host the generosity of a clinician who has provided millions with free access to hundreds of hours of lectures on YouTube, lectures that thousands upon thousands are using to make personal changes, sans expensive psychotherapy? Read the comments under the videos. People are getting help from his materials. In Canada, where we have socialized medicine, each person who voluntarily and independently takes responsibility, resolves a substance abuse problem, cleans his room, all this without accessing, say, support from a psychiatrist, saves taxpayers’ dollars. On that note, think about it. How many people do you know who fail to take responsibility, resolve a substance abuse problem, or clean their rooms, even with the support of a therapist? Peterson is, at the very least, helping some people sort themselves out. For two years, Jordan Peterson travelled around the world, teaching how to turn chaos into habitable order. Then his life fell into chaos. Then our lives fell into chaos. And now his materials remain available, a legacy and gift for those facing turmoil. Given the times we now live in, many people cannot afford professional help. How many of these will turn to his resources and garner inspiration and direction? I know. You still hate Jordan Peterson. Ironically, you may need his insights more than others. The problem: his free lectures are way too expensive for you. In order to give a listen, you’d have to surrender something you’re clinging to. I would refer you to the work of one Jerusalem Kabbalist, Sarah Schneider. Her book should matter to you. The title: You Are What You Hate."