Jordan Peterson / Cathy Newman debate

Post Reply New Topic

Something else that's interesting about John Gray, I'm listening to his Uncertain Minds (Part Two) which is the Q&A and he actually takes a shot at modern nihilism, essentially that before the last few hundred years few people believed in the perfectibility or undeviating progress of humanity and that people like Homer and others got on just fine without it necessitating deep depression and hopelessness. On a similar note but a very different interview/lecture I remember John Michael Greer mentioning that people fell in love, procreated, etc. just fine in the dark ages and it's a wonder that it's so difficult now. That makes me wonder to some extent, is it possible that our orientation to meaning and to each other has perhaps been deprecated that much, maybe by overstimulation or overleveraging in certain areas? If that were the case it's so pervasive that I'm not even sure how we'd get under it to figure out to what degree its happening or what the most poisonous items in our psychological or sensory diets would be to that effect.

I watched the full Peterson/Newman debate on YouTube for the first time yesterday. I learned about Peterson only recently; it looks like this debate occurred at a time when my mother was starting to get very ill health, so I missed his "rise" to status, so to speak, because obviously I was needing to tend to family at the time.

After seeing this, some other videos, and reading some articles about him, I've noted that he is extremely precise in his speech and logic. Most I've seen. He doesn't resort to snark, use too many words, go off on tangents, or react with ad hominem hyperbole, as most journalist talking heads (like Newman) do -- or even most people in general, for that matter (witness the schoolyard insults on any generic social media debate, or any 'comments' section on any Internet article).

He shares a number of concerns and views on issues that are very similar to mine. We look at the world and life in many of the same ways.

It is nice to see someone like him bring sense to today's chaotic and confused milieu. We need more rational and moderate Petersons, and fewer extremes like President Trump and the SJWs who -- while hating each other's guts -- happen to share a tendency toward over-the-top inflammatory speech and aggressive insult-trading at the expense of careful, objective reasoning.

I find myself liking a lot of Bret and Eric Weinstein's ideas for similar reasons. They'd both label themselves as progressive but as far as I've listened to them they mean 'progressively spot and work to remedy problems' rather than progress toward full socialism. In that their lectures I think they do well at spotting a lot of problems that are causing capitalism to sour more than it needs to or confusions of concept between what markets actually do well vs what kinds of things you really don't want in the hands of markets but we sort of pass them on anyway in a sort of faith-based manner (for example the degree to which they turn around and dictate our lives seems to risk accelerating competition and any mooring to human culture right off the map).

He chooses his words to make relatively precise statements, and his logic is sound, true.
Except that he, more often than not, attacks postmodernists and neo-marxists, - throwing them into one bag without distinction, or understanding their thoughts or the historical facts. He makes a precise statement about a vague group that he made up - I believe it's called a strawman argument.
Peterson's logic is sound, except that he ignores a lot of variables, and arbitrarily sets fixed values for others - in other words, his logic is sound, but it's based on a lot of assumptions, rendereing the outcome of his logic setup useless in reality.

He uses Nietzsche as a source for his arguments in a way that makes me wonder if he has even read Nietzsche - mainly because he goes on to attack postmodern neomarxists for things Nietzsche said, not Marx.

And his ad hominems are not explicit insults - however, they are implicit insults. He calls postmodern neomarxists "resentful". That sounds like a psychological statement, but diagnosing a large, made-up and ill defined strawman is pretty careless for a clinical psychologist.

Yes, he expresses himself in a civilized manner, but that only makes the debate appear more civilized, and doesn't automatically raise it to a higher level. It's just slow-burning, and not the full-blown garbage fire of Trump and the SJWs.
Inflammatory nonetheless.


Do we need more Petersons? I don't think so. I'd prefer it if public intellectuals were less biased, and weren't trying to push their own agenda and would engage with the real world, rather than with their own ideological constructs which they try to label as "real world".

Shut Out: Peterson, Rubin Propose Free Speech Funding Site

Online media platforms are slowly taking away the ability for conservative-leaning creatives to have an income. Now, some social media stars are talking about a solution.

After the deplatforming of a famous free speech YouTube personality on Patreon, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Rubin Report host Dave Rubin have been assembling a team to create their own crowdfunding platform. Peterson has made public statements both on Patreon and YouTube with Rubin, lamenting the platform’s censorship while proposing a solution.

This happened in the wake of Patreon booting free speech YouTube personality Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, for using a slur (out of context) to mock racists online.

This interchange did not even happen on the Patreon platform or even in Benjamin's own channel. Benjamin was essentially stripped of a major source of income for an out of context exchange on another website.

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/techw ... nding-site

Jordan Peterson has disconnected from the fundraising site Patreon because of its hostility to non-leftist causes.

The fatal flaw in American leftism, from Peterson.

Is Jordan Peterson aware of the fact that Marx didn't advocate for equality of outcome?

Peterson now taking on Big Diet (like Big Pharma):

Probably. A lot of things Marx didn't advocate for made its way into what became Marxism.

"All I know is that I am not a Marxist."
-Karl Marx, Letter to Schmidt, 1890.

The recent conversation Slavoj Zezik had with him reveals he didn't. All he did was read The Communist Manifesto.