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Welcome back! As we prepare for round 2, we have a short warm-up round to help exercise your tolerance for cognitive dissonance and blisteringly hot takes. This isn't a JP text, it's...JP-adjacent. And it's much shorter than the real thing, so use this contest to get your neurons ready for the real thing. The Rules: 1. Starting from the top, read as far as you can bear without switching tabs or looking away. 2. Post a response with the last couple words you got to. You're on the honor system! 3. Feel free to also discuss the deep philosophical and social meanings of the text below. The Text: The text this time is a scorching take from Caitlin Flanagan, an editor at The Atlantic, that premier Journal of Ideas. Mrs. Flanagan is best known for her book and many articles championing the housewife lifestyle. What does she have to say about Jordan Peterson? Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jordan Peterson The Canadian psychology professor’s stardom is evidence that leftism is on the decline—and deeply vulnerable. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/why-the-left-is-so-afraid-of-jordan-peterson/567110/ oh. oh dear. The Prize: Prizes are a tool of leftist soyboys to feminize us. The text begins in the first post below. Make sure you've gone to the bathroom/vomited/taken your drug of preference before beginning. Discendo Vox has issued a correction as of 04:06 on Aug 10, 2018 |
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Aug 10, 2018 04:02
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Two years ago, I walked downstairs and saw one of my teenage sons watching a strange YouTube video on the television. “What is that?” I asked. He turned to me earnestly and explained, “It’s a psychology professor at the University of Toronto talking about Canadian law.” “Huh?” I said, but he had already turned back to the screen. I figured he had finally gotten to the end of the internet, and this was the very last thing on it.That night, my son tried to explain the thing to me, but it was a buzzing in my ear, and I wanted to talk about something more interesting. It didn’t matter; it turned out a number of his friends—all of them like him: progressive Democrats, with the full range of social positions you would expect of adolescents growing up in liberal households in blue-bubble Los Angeles—had watched the video as well, and they talked about it to one another. The boys graduated from high school and went off to colleges where they were exposed to the kind of policed discourse that dominates American campuses. They did not make waves; they did not confront the students who were raging about cultural appropriation and violent speech; in fact, they forged close friendships with many of them. They studied and wrote essays and—in their dorm rooms, on the bus to away games, while they were working out—began listening to more and more podcasts and lectures by this man, Jordan Peterson. The young men voted for Hillary, they called home in shock when Trump won, they talked about flipping the House, and they followed Peterson to other podcasts—to Sam Harris and Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan. What they were getting from these lectures and discussions, often lengthy and often on arcane subjects, was perhaps the only sustained argument against identity politics they had heard in their lives. That might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. With identity politics off the table, it was possible to talk about all kinds of things—religion, philosophy, history, myth—in a different way. They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology. All of these young people, without quite realizing it, were joining a huge group of American college students who were pursuing a parallel curriculum, right under the noses of the people who were delivering their official educations. Because all of this was happening silently, called down from satellites and poured in through earbuds—and not on campus free-speech zones where it could be monitored, shouted down, and reported to the appropriate authorities—the left was late in realizing what an enormous problem it was becoming for it. It was like the 1960s, when kids were getting radicalized before their parents realized they’d quit glee club. And it was not just college students. Not by a long shot. Around the country, all sorts of people were listening to these podcasts. Joe Rogan’s sui generis show, with its surpassingly eclectic mix of guests and subjects, was a frequent locus of Peterson’s ideas, whether advanced by the man himself, or by the thinkers with whom he is loosely affiliated. Rogan’s podcast is downloaded many millions of times each month. Whatever was happening, it was happening on a scale and with a rapidity that was beyond the ability of the traditional culture keepers to grasp. When the left finally realized what was happening, all it could do was try to bail out the Pacific Ocean with a spoon. The alarms sounded when Peterson published what quickly became a massive bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, because books are something that the left recognizes as drivers of culture. The book became the occasion for vicious profiles and editorials, but it was difficult to attack the work on ideological grounds, because it was an apolitical self-help book that was at once more literary and more helpful than most, and that was moreover a commercial success. All of this frustrated the critics. It’s just common sense! they would say, in one arch way or another, and that in itself was telling: Why were they so angry about common sense? The critics knew the book was a bestseller, but they couldn’t really grasp its reach because people like them weren’t reading it, and because it did not originally appear on The New York Times’s list, as it was first published in Canada. However, it is often the bestselling nonfiction book on Amazon, and—perhaps more important—its audiobook has been a massive seller. As with Peterson’s podcasts and videos, the audience is made up of people who are busy with their lives—folding laundry, driving commercial trucks on long hauls, sitting in traffic from cubicle to home, exercising. This book was putting words to deeply held feelings that many of them had not been able to express before. It’s hard to think of a best-selling self-help book whose author has not appeared on the classic morning shows; these programs—Today and Good Morning America and CBS This Morning—are almost entirely devoted to the subject of self-help. But the producers did their part, and Peterson did not go to their studios to sit among the lifestyle celebrities and talk for a few minutes about the psychological benefits of simple interventions in one’s daily life. This should have stopped progress, except Peterson was by then engaged in something that can only be compared to a conventional book tour if conventional book tours routinely put authors in front of live audiences well in excess of 2,500 people, in addition to the untold millions more listening to podcasts and watching videos. (Videos on Peterson’s YouTube channel have been viewed, overall, tens of millions of times.) It seemed that the book did not need the anointing oils of the Today show. The left has an obvious and pressing need to unperson him; what he and the other members of the so-called “intellectual dark web” are offering is kryptonite to identity politics. There is an eagerness to attach reputation-destroying ideas to him, such as that he is a supporter of something called “enforced monogamy,” an anthropological concept referring to the social pressures that exist in certain cultures that serve to encourage marriage. He mentioned the term during a wide-ranging interview with a New York Times reporter, which led to the endlessly repeated falsehood that he believes that the government should be in the business of arranging marriages. There is also the inaccurate belief that he refuses to refer to transgender people by the gendered pronoun conforming to their identity. What he refuses to do is to abide by any laws that could require compelled speech. There are plenty of reasons for individual readers to dislike Jordan Peterson. He’s a Jungian and that isn’t your cup of tea; he is, by his own admission, a very serious person and you think he should lighten up now and then; you find him boring; you’re not interested in either identity politics or in the arguments against it. There are many legitimate reasons to disagree with him on a number of subjects, and many people of good will do. But there is no coherent reason for the left’s obliterating and irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson. What, then, accounts for it? It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind. When the poetry editors of The Nation virtuously publish an amateurish but super-woke poem, only to discover that the poem stumbled across several trip wires of political correctness; when these editors (one of them a full professor in the Harvard English department) then jointly write a letter oozing bathos and career anxiety and begging forgiveness from their critics; when the poet himself publishes a statement of his own—a missive falling somewhere between an apology, a Hail Mary pass, and a suicide note; and when all of this is accepted in the houses of the holy as one of the regrettable but minor incidents that take place along the path toward greater justice, something is dying. When the top man at The New York Times publishes a sober statement about a meeting he had with the president in which he describes instructing Trump about the problem of his “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” and then three days later the paper announces that it has hired a writer who has tweeted about her hatred of white people, of Republicans, of cops, of the president, of the need to stop certain female writers and journalists from “existing,” and when this new hire will not be a beat reporter, but will sit on the paper’s editorial board—having a hand in shaping the opinions the paper presents to the world—then it is no mystery that a parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system. When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying during a speech he delivered in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man—and when even this mayday is ignored, the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end. In the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one. His audience is huge and ever more diverse, but a significant number of his fans are white men. The automatic assumption of the left is that this is therefore a red-pilled army, but the opposite is true. If you've gotten this far use the word screw in your response. The alt-right venerates identity politics just as fervently as the left, as the title of a recent essay reproduced on the alt-right website Counter-Currents reveals: “Jordan Peterson’s Rejection of Identity Politics Allows White Ethnocide.” If you think that a backlash to the kind of philosophy that resulted in The Nation’s poetry implosion; the Times’ hire; and Obama’s distress call isn’t at least partly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, you’re dreaming. And if you think the only kind of people who would reject such madness are Republicans, you are similarly deluded. All across the country, there are people as repelled by the current White House as they are by the countless and increasingly baroque expressions of identity politics that dominate so much of the culture. These are people who aren’t looking for an ideology; they are looking for ideas. And many of them are getting much better at discerning the good from the bad. The Democratic Party reviles them at its peril; the Republican Party takes them for granted in folly. Perhaps, then, the most dangerous piece of “common sense” in Peterson’s new book comes at the very beginning, when he imparts the essential piece of wisdom for anyone interested in fighting a powerful, existing order. “Stand up straight,” begins Rule No. 1, “with your shoulders back.”
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Aug 10, 2018 04:03
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His obsession with lobsters is straight up Prufrockian
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Aug 10, 2018 04:06
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i got to the point she said long haul Truckers are listening to jordan peterson and lol
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Aug 10, 2018 04:11
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what an atlantic writer thinks is going through a Trucker's mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rTg9S_-pto what is actuall going through a trucker's mind:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egcXvqiho4w
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Aug 10, 2018 04:12
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Shoulders back and a screw up your rear end, so you can fake your masculinity through your surrogate Joe Rogan.
mazzi Chart Czar has issued a correction as of 04:38 on Aug 10, 2018 |
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Aug 10, 2018 04:25
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got to "annointing oils of the today show" fuuuuuuuuck youuuuuuuuuu
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Aug 10, 2018 04:49
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Mayor Dave posted:got to "annointing oils of the today show" great post/av combo. what's the av from?
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Aug 10, 2018 05:05
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Discendo Vox posted:great post/av combo. what's the av from? the film "baraka" by way of sid meier's alpha centauri
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Aug 10, 2018 05:10
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i got as far as “intellectual dark web” and now i have died, so thanks for that i guess
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Aug 10, 2018 05:25
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I read the whole thing and at the end erupted into spontaneous orgasm
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Aug 10, 2018 12:50
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I'm good
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Aug 10, 2018 13:13
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"I wanted to talk about something more interesting." Me too
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Aug 10, 2018 13:38
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read the whole thing, banal as gently caress and has laughable assumptions but i've read worse screw you for this anyway
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Aug 10, 2018 19:02
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I read the whole screwy thing and yeah, I don't see the big deal either way. It's super boring but that's probably because it's just rehashing stuff you already know. The article might have some use to people who aren't familiar with Jordan Peterson, I guess.
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Aug 10, 2018 19:15
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Got to the end. They're making correct points about the fading of old media like the today show, but their conclusions are screwed up by a lens of making sure everything means it's the downfall of the left.
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Aug 11, 2018 00:18
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:Got to the end. They're making correct points about the fading of old media like the today show, but their conclusions are screwed up by a lens of making sure everything means it's the downfall of the left. The left is smarter. With any luck the left will grow a pair of balls and adapt
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Aug 11, 2018 00:19
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here's how you assail jordan peterson: point out that he's just someone arguing for traditional gender roles under a veneer of academic thought. it's really not that hard
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Aug 11, 2018 00:22
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lol im not reading any of that poo poo
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Aug 11, 2018 00:32
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"end of the internet" which is to say, like four lines in.
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Aug 11, 2018 00:35
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I think I've built up immunity to
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Aug 11, 2018 02:55
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I skimmed it and honestly, meh
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Aug 11, 2018 05:36
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the games and puzzles section of highlights is more intellectually stimulating than the atlantic
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Aug 11, 2018 05:39
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I appreciate y’all’s feedback and will do my best to incorporate it into round 2. I’ve definitely got the message that you need more bite than a half-baked Atlantic column offers. How was the length? Should I go full onslaught of words next time? Text or video format?
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Aug 12, 2018 02:18
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read the whole thing. i used to read local newspapers. i laugh at your feeble challenges.
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Aug 12, 2018 02:27
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Discendo Vox posted:I appreciate y’all’s feedback and will do my best to incorporate it into round 2. I’ve definitely got the message that you need more bite than a half-baked Atlantic column offers. How was the length? Should I go full onslaught of words next time? Text or video format?
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Aug 12, 2018 02:31
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i like how he starts out admitting that he didn't actually care about what his son was watching also i got to "That might seem like a small thing, but it’s not." before getting too bored to care anymore
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Aug 12, 2018 03:01
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Yinlock posted:i like how he starts out admitting that he didn't actually care about what his son was watching The author is a woman thanks for gendering her
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Aug 12, 2018 03:15
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i read the whole thing and predictably she never gets around to saying just what is screwed up about "identity politics" or what great ideas lie beyond it
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Aug 12, 2018 03:26
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Gazpacho posted:i read the whole thing and predictably she never gets around to saying just what is screwed up about "identity politics" or what great ideas lie beyond it I don't think she knows what that is. It's probably because she is motivated by her ovaries and tacitly agrees with her dominant son. Just ask jorp he'll tell you the same
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Aug 12, 2018 03:27
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It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, This is the exsct word that I checked out on
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Aug 12, 2018 03:29
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Gazpacho posted:i read the whole thing and predictably she never gets around to saying just what is screwed up about "identity politics" or what great ideas lie beyond it I like that she doesn't even explain what identity politics is
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Aug 12, 2018 03:29
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it's at least fundamentally readable unlike the original challenge which was basically Passage à l'acte in text form
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Aug 12, 2018 03:38
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Ground floor, which is higher than Jordan Peterson's career ever should have gotten.
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Aug 12, 2018 03:39
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Discendo Vox posted:I appreciate y’all’s feedback and will do my best to incorporate it into round 2. I’ve definitely got the message that you need more bite than a half-baked Atlantic column offers. How was the length? Should I go full onslaught of words next time? Text or video format? I'd prefer text, but I'm not categorically opposed to video so long as it isn't from a total crackpot.
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Aug 12, 2018 05:15
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R. Guyovich posted:read the whole thing. i used to read local newspapers. i laugh at your feeble challenges. Im not sure you did im on the net me boys posted:I'd prefer text, but I'm not categorically opposed to video so long as it isn't from a total crackpot. I think you might want to reread the name of the thread
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Aug 12, 2018 05:29
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Discendo Vox posted:Im not sure you did i did, and i read the last one as well. she didn't even lay out her premises at the start, which is column writing 101
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Aug 12, 2018 08:48
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Discendo Vox posted:
I mean like Alex Jones level
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Aug 12, 2018 08:50
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Alex Jones has to my knowledge never blamed anything on a dragon
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Aug 12, 2018 11:36
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stopped herequote:Rogan’s podcast is downloaded many millions of times each month.
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Aug 12, 2018 14:44
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