The Jordan Peterson Thread - V2 -

[Bullitt68]

I have noticed he quotes Foucault in one of his gibberish filled papers. That is hardly surprising. Foucault is incredibly influential with postmodern scumbags

I think Foucalt himself admitted that most of his intellectual "quests" were motivated by the desire to get closer to young boys.

Atleast he was more brutally honest than many of his followers.

Quick story. So I've been doing the PhD thing in my department for three years now. On two separate occasions, in two completely different seminars, I've brought up the same example to challenge people (mainly my professor, who I like and respect and get along with very well but who is regrettably a hardcore poststructuralist and who loves Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault) and have been met with silence both times. The first seminar was devoted to Volume 1 of Foucault's The History of Sexuality and the second one was just a general seminar. In both instances, I was trying to demonstrate the dangerous consequences of doing away with the concept of objectivity in favor of ideas of "social constructs" and all that.

The example that I brought up was Foucault's position on philia. He addresses philia in The History of Sexuality and gives it the standard twist with the poor and oppressed phile who just wants to be free to express his honest-to-goodness sexuality. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. It's pages 31-32:

"One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called 'curdled milk.' So he was pointed out by the girl's parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration [...] This was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday bit of theater with their solemn discourse. So it was that our society - and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures - assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating."

This story never ceases to turn my stomach. You can see the equivocation, going from ignorant children playing a "game" to "alert children" who know exactly what's going on. But, putting that shit aside and focusing on the philosophical issue: If there is no such thing as objectivity, then you can't say that philia is objectively wrong and that people shouldn't be free to engage in sex with children.

First off, philia is just a social construct, and the concepts of "right" and "wrong" don't apply to mere constructs. But even if I were to be granted use of the concepts of right and wrong, if objectivity is out the window, then my thinking philia is wrong is just an arbitrary, subjective opinion no better or worse than Foucault's arbitrary, subjective opinion that it's right. Who am I to say, and on what grounds can I possibly prove, that any sexual desire - or, really, who am I to say, and on what grounds can I possibly prove, that anything - is wrong? Since it's all just a power game, my position that philia is wrong is really just my desire to arbitrarily oppress the righteous philes (ignore the fact that, in the absence of concepts of right and wrong, Foucault still thinks he's right), and if I were a halfway decent person, then I'd make the "institution of knowledge and power" that is "solemnly" trying to stop, just for the sake of "pettiness," the "inconsequential bucolic pleasures" of kids jerking off hobos stop oppressing those poor upstanding citizens and let them be free.



My professor has two small children, so I'd like to think that he finds Foucault's philia shit suitably horrifying - though I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't even aware that Foucault, along with a number of other members of the French intellectual "elite" of the era like Sartre and Althusser, signed a petition in 1977 to get rid of consent and statutory rape laws - but nobody knows how to respond to simple shit like this. It's easy to talk the postmodernist/poststructuralist talk, but when confronted with the kind of world they'd actually be living in/are helping to bring into existence, there's always silence as the gears of denial start to go into overdrive the second it comes time for them to walk the walk.

When people like Peterson talk about how this shit isn't just "academic" in the sense of being trivial and having no bearing outside of pretentious classrooms, this is what he's talking about. Ideas can have practical effects and consequences that FAR exceed what the ideologically possessed have ever fathomed/are capable of fathoming, and it's so often the case that, if anybody was even half paying attention to what their ideological leaders were saying - and, even more importantly, why they were saying it - then they'd run for the fucking hills.

 

[TheGreatA]

Quick story. So I've been doing the PhD thing in my department for three years now. On two separate occasions, in two completely different seminars, I've brought up the same example to challenge people (mainly my professor, who I like and respect and get along with very well but who is regrettably a hardcore poststructuralist and who loves Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault) and have been met with silence both times. The first seminar was devoted to Volume 1 of Foucault's The History of Sexuality and the second one was just a general seminar. In both instances, I was trying to demonstrate the dangerous consequences of doing away with the concept of objectivity in favor of ideas of "social constructs" and all that.

The example that I brought up was Foucault's position on philia. He addresses philia in The History of Sexuality and gives it the standard twist with the poor and oppressed phile who just wants to be free to express his honest-to-goodness sexuality. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. It's pages 31-32:

"One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called 'curdled milk.' So he was pointed out by the girl's parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration [...] This was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday bit of theater with their solemn discourse. So it was that our society - and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures - assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating."

This story never ceases to turn my stomach. You can see the equivocation, going from ignorant children playing a "game" to "alert children" who know exactly what's going on. But, putting that shit aside and focusing on the philosophical issue: If there is no such thing as objectivity, then you can't say that philia is objectively wrong and that people shouldn't be free to engage in sex with children.

First off, philia is just a social construct, and the concepts of "right" and "wrong" don't apply to mere constructs. But even if I were to be granted use of the concepts of right and wrong, if objectivity is out the window, then my thinking philia is wrong is just an arbitrary, subjective opinion no better or worse than Foucault's arbitrary, subjective opinion that it's right. Who am I to say, and on what grounds can I possibly prove, that any sexual desire - or, really, who am I to say, and on what grounds can I possibly prove, that anything - is wrong? Since it's all just a power game, my position that philia is wrong is really just my desire to arbitrarily oppress the righteous philes (ignore the fact that, in the absence of concepts of right and wrong, Foucault still thinks he's right), and if I were a halfway decent person, then I'd make the "institution of knowledge and power" that is "solemnly" trying to stop, just for the sake of "pettiness," the "inconsequential bucolic pleasures" of kids jerking off hobos stop oppressing those poor upstanding citizens and let them be free.



My professor has two small children, so I'd like to think that he finds Foucault's philia shit suitably horrifying - though I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't even aware that Foucault, along with a number of other members of the French intellectual "elite" of the era like Sartre and Althusser, signed a petition in 1977 to get rid of consent and statutory rape laws - but nobody knows how to respond to simple shit like this. It's easy to talk the postmodernist/poststructuralist talk, but when confronted with the kind of world they'd actually be living in/are helping to bring into existence, there's always silence as the gears of denial start to go into overdrive the second it comes time for them to walk the walk.

When people like Peterson talk about how this shit isn't just "academic" in the sense of being trivial and having no bearing outside of pretentious classrooms, this is what he's talking about. Ideas can have practical effects and consequences that FAR exceed what the ideologically possessed have ever fathomed/are capable of fathoming, and it's so often the case that, if anybody was even half paying attention to what their ideological leaders were saying - and, even more importantly, why they were saying it - then they'd run for the fucking hills.

I'm of the opinion that the entirety of Foucalt's intellectual work was built upon the desire to bring down social standards and excuse his own sexual degeneracy. Considering that he made the same claims, it's a statement that can't be too far off the truth.

Many people's ideologies are motivated by their personal desires, be they sexual or what not, but in Foucalt's work, this desire spills over to influence him to such an over-whelming extent that it is difficult to take him seriously, as anything more than an intellectual pervert.

 

[Devout Pessimist]

Quick story. So I've been doing the PhD thing in my department for three years now. On two separate occasions, in two completely different seminars, I've brought up the same example to challenge people (mainly my professor, who I like and respect and get along with very well but who is regrettably a hardcore poststructuralist and who loves Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault) and have been met with silence both times. The first seminar was devoted to Volume 1 of Foucault's The History of Sexuality and the second one was just a general seminar. In both instances, I was trying to demonstrate the dangerous consequences of doing away with the concept of objectivity in favor of ideas of "social constructs" and all that.

The example that I brought up was Foucault's position on philia. He addresses philia in The History of Sexuality and gives it the standard twist with the poor and oppressed phile who just wants to be free to express his honest-to-goodness sexuality. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. It's pages 31-32:

"One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called 'curdled milk.' So he was pointed out by the girl's parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration [...] This was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday bit of theater with their solemn discourse. So it was that our society - and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures - assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating."

This story never ceases to turn my stomach. You can see the equivocation, going from ignorant children playing a "game" to "alert children" who know exactly what's going on. But, putting that shit aside and focusing on the philosophical issue: If there is no such thing as objectivity, then you can't say that philia is objectively wrong and that people shouldn't be free to engage in sex with children.

First off, philia is just a social construct, and the concepts of "right" and "wrong" don't apply to mere constructs. But even if I were to be granted use of the concepts of right and wrong, if objectivity is out the window, then my thinking philia is wrong is just an arbitrary, subjective opinion no better or worse than Foucault's arbitrary, subjective opinion that it's right. Who am I to say, and on what grounds can I possibly prove, that any sexual desire - or, really, who am I to say, and on what grounds can I possibly prove, that anything - is wrong? Since it's all just a power game, my position that philia is wrong is really just my desire to arbitrarily oppress the righteous philes (ignore the fact that, in the absence of concepts of right and wrong, Foucault still thinks he's right), and if I were a halfway decent person, then I'd make the "institution of knowledge and power" that is "solemnly" trying to stop, just for the sake of "pettiness," the "inconsequential bucolic pleasures" of kids jerking off hobos stop oppressing those poor upstanding citizens and let them be free.



My professor has two small children, so I'd like to think that he finds Foucault's philia shit suitably horrifying - though I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't even aware that Foucault, along with a number of other members of the French intellectual "elite" of the era like Sartre and Althusser, signed a petition in 1977 to get rid of consent and statutory rape laws - but nobody knows how to respond to simple shit like this. It's easy to talk the postmodernist/poststructuralist talk, but when confronted with the kind of world they'd actually be living in/are helping to bring into existence, there's always silence as the gears of denial start to go into overdrive the second it comes time for them to walk the walk.

When people like Peterson talk about how this shit isn't just "academic" in the sense of being trivial and having no bearing outside of pretentious classrooms, this is what he's talking about. Ideas can have practical effects and consequences that FAR exceed what the ideologically possessed have ever fathomed/are capable of fathoming, and it's so often the case that, if anybody was even half paying attention to what their ideological leaders were saying - and, even more importantly, why they were saying it - then they'd run for the fucking hills.

Have you ever heard of Sir Roger Scruton? He does an excellent job of exposing intellectual charlatans like Foucault and Derrida.

 

[Cirris]

Last post on the subject, Rex Murphy has a way with words:

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex...o-dares-to-play-peterson-clip-from-the-agenda

Was not The Agenda clip in question exposing fragile university students to 1½ minutes of Jordan Peterson’s rather considered thoughts on language and politics? It was, Rambukkana said, like showing a speech of Adolph Hitler neutrally! (My underline: it needs one.)

This is where, so to speak, I’d like to stop the tape.

However old you are, I’d like to ask this question: Have you ever, from the very day you were born, thought our sweet country would reach a point where playing a clip from Steve Paikin’s calm, serene, progressive The Agenda would have a professor at a serious university, seriously asserting, it was equivalent to blasting Adolph Hitler in full frothing rage at a Nuremberg rally—neutrally or otherwise? I’d add a slightly less incredible question. Is there not something “off” about a professor at one Ontario university denominating another tenured professor at the U of T as Hitler-like, or Hitler-toxic?

"Peterson on Pronouns is a crimson cape to a charging bull for the social justice warrior class. They view him as Atilla the Grammarian."

Ha, good ole Rex. He has such an active imagination in his euphemisms.

 

[Bullitt68]

Many people's ideologies are motivated by their personal desires, be they sexual or what not, but in Foucalt's work, this desire spills over to influence him to such an over-whelming extent that it is difficult to take him seriously, as anything more than an intellectual pervert.

I like this formulation, though I'd add that, when it comes to poststructuralists in particular, I've noticed that their desires often stem from weaknesses of character which they try to rationalize or explain away. In one of his appearances on Dave Rubin's show, Peterson remarked how poststructuralism/postmodernism "appeals to the most hypocritical, deceitful, and responsibility-shedding element" of human beings.

Right on the fucking money.

Have you ever heard of Sir Roger Scruton? He does an excellent job of exposing intellectual charlatans like Foucault and Derrida.

I've read and thoroughly enjoyed his primer A Short History on Modern Philosophy and I have a few other PDFs of his books, but I wasn't aware of that book. My shock at never having heard of it evaporated upon reading his Introduction to the 2015 edition and learning what happened to him upon the publication of the first edition. It's nice to have found another academic who sees through the nonsense. And I'm extremely eager to read what he has to say about Deleuze, who I can't fucking stand and who's fucking taken over my world of film studies.

Thanks for the recommendation.

 

[Islam Imamate]

Quick story. So I've been doing the PhD thing in my department for three years now. On two separate occasions, in two completely different seminars, I've brought up the same example to challenge people (mainly my professor, who I like and respect and get along with very well but who is regrettably a hardcore poststructuralist and who loves Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault) and have been met with silence both times. The first seminar was devoted to Volume 1 of Foucault's The History of Sexuality and the second one was just a general seminar. In both instances, I was trying to demonstrate the dangerous consequences of doing away with the concept of objectivity in favor of ideas of "social constructs" and all that.

The example that I brought up was Foucault's position on philia. He addresses philia in The History of Sexuality and gives it the standard twist with the poor and oppressed phile who just wants to be free to express his honest-to-goodness sexuality. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. It's pages 31-32:

"One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called 'curdled milk.' So he was pointed out by the girl's parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration [...] This was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday bit of theater with their solemn discourse. So it was that our society - and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures - assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating."

This story never ceases to turn my stomach. You can see the equivocation, going from ignorant children playing a "game" to "alert children" who know exactly what's going on. But, putting that shit aside and focusing on the philosophical issue: If there is no such thing as objectivity, then you can't say that philia is objectively wrong and that people shouldn't be free to engage in sex with children.

First off, philia is just a social construct, and the concepts of "right" and "wrong" don't apply to mere constructs. But even if I were to be granted use of the concepts of right and wrong, if objectivity is out the window, then my thinking philia is wrong is just an arbitrary, subjective opinion no better or worse than Foucault's arbitrary, subjective opinion that it's right. Who am I to say, and on what grounds can I possibly prove, that any sexual desire - or, really, who am I to say, and on what grounds can I possibly prove, that anything - is wrong? Since it's all just a power game, my position that philia is wrong is really just my desire to arbitrarily oppress the righteous philes (ignore the fact that, in the absence of concepts of right and wrong, Foucault still thinks he's right), and if I were a halfway decent person, then I'd make the "institution of knowledge and power" that is "solemnly" trying to stop, just for the sake of "pettiness," the "inconsequential bucolic pleasures" of kids jerking off hobos stop oppressing those poor upstanding citizens and let them be free.



My professor has two small children, so I'd like to think that he finds Foucault's philia shit suitably horrifying - though I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't even aware that Foucault, along with a number of other members of the French intellectual "elite" of the era like Sartre and Althusser, signed a petition in 1977 to get rid of consent and statutory rape laws - but nobody knows how to respond to simple shit like this. It's easy to talk the postmodernist/poststructuralist talk, but when confronted with the kind of world they'd actually be living in/are helping to bring into existence, there's always silence as the gears of denial start to go into overdrive the second it comes time for them to walk the walk.

When people like Peterson talk about how this shit isn't just "academic" in the sense of being trivial and having no bearing outside of pretentious classrooms, this is what he's talking about. Ideas can have practical effects and consequences that FAR exceed what the ideologically possessed have ever fathomed/are capable of fathoming, and it's so often the case that, if anybody was even half paying attention to what their ideological leaders were saying - and, even more importantly, why they were saying it - then they'd run for the fucking hills.

I know I'm poking a hornet's nest when I say this but I think Foucault has a point here. The idea that its inherently harmful for a person that's a legal minor to have sex with a legal adult is silly. Most people realize this if confronted with a case of, say, an 18 year old charged with statutory rape for having sex with a 16 year old in a state where the age of consent is 18.

But personally I think its even more complicated than that. Children hundreds of years ago were expected to confront the responsibilities of an adult at a young age and most seem to have risen to challenge and that includes the responsibilities surrounding things like marriage and sex. Suddenly, in a few generations what was relatively normal for children became some sort of gravely traumatizing experience for them. Personally, I think adolescent sexuality is far more resilient and adaptive than people give it credit for and I think there are many young people who mature emotionally and sexually well before their peers.

Now, I don't agree with Foucault and the other French perverts who would do away with age of consent laws. Just as I said that there are early bloomers there are also late bloomers and its better to err on the side of caution and protect the latter than to enable the former. So I'm okay with our arbitrary age of consent laws. Everyone develops at a different place but you have to draw the line somewhere and better to be safe than sorry. I think more important than age difference is in determining harm is the presence of violence or any power dynamics though.

Note that I'm mainly talking about young adolescents here. A 5 year old is too young for sex in any era.

 

[Bullitt68]

I know I'm poking a hornet's nest when I say this but I think Foucault has a point here.

I've seen a lot of your posts as I've been lurking the WR, but I think this is the first time we've interacted here, so I'm not going to assume that you can quote from Peterson's videos like they're Seinfeld episodes the way I can, but this is precisely why, across countless videos, he is constantly harping on the need to "give the Devil his due."

This is the cunning of poststructuralists like Foucault (Hegel famously described the "Cunning of Reason"; I'm tempted to call the cunning of poststructuralists the Cunning of Unreason). Peterson often refers to them as "tricksters." That's not an accident. Expert Jungian that he is, Peterson is intentionally invoking the trickster archetype. Here's how Joseph Campbell defined the trickster:

"There’s a very special property in the trickster: He always breaks in, just as the unconscious does, to trip up the rational situation [...] The trickster represents all those possibilities of life that your mind hasn’t decided it wants to deal with. The mind structures a lifestyle, and the fool or trickster represents another whole range of possibilities. He doesn’t respect the values that you’ve set up for yourself, and smashes them."

Hell, it's called poststructuralism for a reason: They're opposed to structures as such. Shout out to @Devout Pessimist for this one, but Roger Scruton hit the nail on the head:

"The liberation advocated by left-wing movements today does not mean simply freedom from political oppression or the right to go about one’s business undisturbed. It means emancipation from the ‘structures’: From the institutions, customs and conventions that shaped the ‘bourgeois’ order and which established a shared system of norms and values at the heart of Western society. Even those left-wingers who eschew the libertarianism of the 1960s regard liberty as a form of release from social constraints. Much of their literature is devoted to deconstructing such institutions as the family, the school, the law and the nation state through which the inheritance of Western civilization has been passed down to us. This literature, seen at its most fertile in the writings of Foucault, represents as ‘structures of domination’ what others see merely as the instruments of civil order."

So, in general, yes, all poststructuralists have a point. Peterson acknowledges this vis-à-vis the poststructuralist axiom that every "text" is "infinitely polysemous." Every poststructuralist can be seen to have a point. Because they have an agenda. And nobody with an agenda is going to risk being laughed out of court. So they have to at least appear to be operating on a rational basis, otherwise they won't even get their foot in the door.

From this perspective, Foucault is not wrong because he doesn't have a point. He's wrong because the conclusions that he reaches betray his irrational and immoral motivations. His goal is not to rework the law. He doesn't want to enter into a rational debate at the end of which both sides will hopefully come to a reasonable determination regarding how to proceed in the future. He wants to invalidate the structure of law as such. The structure of law is, to his mind, a structure of domination; domination is antithetical to freedom; hence, the law must be abandoned in the interest of freedom.

You are doing what countless people have done by conceding to a poststructuralist the position of Reason. But that is not the position from which poststructuralists speak. You and I could have a reasonable discussion about where to draw the line when it comes to consent laws and statutory rape; you and I could have debates about certain cases, e.g. your hypothetical case of the 18-year-old and the 16-year-old. But you could not do that with Foucault. To enter into a conversation with Foucault (or any poststructuralist) requires that you either check your Reason at the door or else eventually abandon it. The terms of the conversation are not the terms of logic, and the conversation to be had will not be had within the realm of Reason.

 

[21 Savage]

Yea I don't think he is, I've never seen or heard anything from him that would lead me to believe that. So laugh it up I guess.

saved by mod LOL

If you guys could stop derailing the thread and shitposting that'd be great.

>valid criticism
>"shitposting"

mfw

 

[Bullitt68]

saved by mod LOL

>valid criticism
>"shitposting"

mfw

An Xzibit emoji ≠ Valid Criticism.

Try stringing together a paragraph and contributing something of substance.

 

[HOLA]

TORONTO – Controversial U of T psychology professor Jordan Peterson once again ignited a public furor last night, refusing to refer to a popular Stephen King-based horror film by the gender-neutral pronoun “IT”, on the grounds that the titular character, Pennywise the clown, is obviously a “HIM.”

According to eyewitnesses, Peterson spent 12 minutes holding up the box office line at Toronto’s Varsity Cinema while he repeatedly requested VIP room tickets for “HIM”, to the confusion of numerous employees.

“I was called over to the box office because this guy wouldn’t stop going like, ‘I’m here for HIM, I want to see HIM,’” recalled assistant manager Toby Duncan. “When I eventually clued in and asked if he meant ‘IT’, he said he most certainly did NOT mean ‘IT’ and called me a radical postmodernist ideologue trying to punish him for not using the clown’s ‘compelled pronoun.’ “

Having gained international attention last year for his outspoken refusal to call students and faculty by gender-neutral pronouns, Peterson made it clear that Pennywise – a demonic embodiment of children’s fears – would also receive no quarter.

“The objective biological reality is, Pennywise is a male monster, who is mostly a clown and sometimes a bug, but always a boy,” he explained to fellow moviegoers in the lobby. “I cannot be coerced into respecting his place in this ever-expanding community of the marginalized by calling the film ‘IT’. I will not use that clown-bug’s words.”

“And if I’m taken to jail for that, which I can only assume I’m about to be, then so be it,” he boldly declared, though by all accounts he was free to go.

In response to the persecution he’s faced at the hands of the movie theatre, Peterson has launched a crowdfunding campaign with a goal of $15,000, in order to buy a copy of the film when it comes out on Blu-ray.

 

[FIMN]

TORONTO – Controversial U of T psychology professor Jordan Peterson once again ignited a public furor last night, refusing to refer to a popular Stephen King-based horror film by the gender-neutral pronoun “IT”, on the grounds that the titular character, Pennywise the clown, is obviously a “HIM.”

According to eyewitnesses, Peterson spent 12 minutes holding up the box office line at Toronto’s Varsity Cinema while he repeatedly requested VIP room tickets for “HIM”, to the confusion of numerous employees.

“I was called over to the box office because this guy wouldn’t stop going like, ‘I’m here for HIM, I want to see HIM,’” recalled assistant manager Toby Duncan. “When I eventually clued in and asked if he meant ‘IT’, he said he most certainly did NOT mean ‘IT’ and called me a radical postmodernist ideologue trying to punish him for not using the clown’s ‘compelled pronoun.’ “

Having gained international attention last year for his outspoken refusal to call students and faculty by gender-neutral pronouns, Peterson made it clear that Pennywise – a demonic embodiment of children’s fears – would also receive no quarter.

“The objective biological reality is, Pennywise is a male monster, who is mostly a clown and sometimes a bug, but always a boy,” he explained to fellow moviegoers in the lobby. “I cannot be coerced into respecting his place in this ever-expanding community of the marginalized by calling the film ‘IT’. I will not use that clown-bug’s words.”

“And if I’m taken to jail for that, which I can only assume I’m about to be, then so be it,” he boldly declared, though by all accounts he was free to go.

In response to the persecution he’s faced at the hands of the movie theatre, Peterson has launched a crowdfunding campaign with a goal of $15,000, in order to buy a copy of the film when it comes out on Blu-ray.

Fuck this made me snort coffee out my nose.

Really enjoying this postnodernist debate in this thread by the way. Does anyone have an article or summary of the links between postmodernism and supposed neo Marxism? It's an area of history/philosophy that I've never really engaged with.

 

[trac209]

The it movie thing is really stupid and I can’t believe a man with his intelligence would pull that. If I was in line I would have told “him” to move his fucking ass

 

[HOLA]

Fuck this made me snort coffee out my nose.

Haha. It was great satire. I had never heard of The Beaverton before - apparently it's like a Canadian version of The Onion.

Really enjoying this postnodernist debate in this thread by the way. Does anyone have an article or summary of the links between postmodernism and supposed neo Marxism? It's an area of history/philosophy that I've never really engaged with.

I haven't read this thread in a while. But earlier almost nobody seemed to know what postmodernism actually is, which isn't surprising since Jordan Peterson doesn't even know or care what it is.

He was a middle of the road psych professor who gained fame for lying about trans people. JP now makes over $50,000 a month exploiting resentment on Patreon. Taking donations from people scared over the ubiquitous postmodern cultural Marxist SJW boogeyman he talks about. It's just confirming current bigotries by someone with a facade of respectability because he's a professor in an unrelated field.

With his "postmodernism" talks he's basically a YouTube pseudo-intellectual giving a Breitbart level explanation, who is considered about the lowest hanging fruit there is to make fun of in actual philosophy circles.

He's not accurate or honest about the goals, arguments or context of any postmodernist he mentions. They're also in contention with each other. Many people have made an equally influential analysis on postmodernism that have nothing to do with each other. The nightmare scenario he likes to portray, "postmodernists think all truths are equally valid!" Is just nonsense. Postmodernism is a term sometimes used to classify a changing cultural and intellectual landscape. It's not some school of thought to assault pronouns or whatever.

 

[irish_thug]

Quick story. So I've been doing the PhD thing in my department for three years now. On two separate occasions, in two completely different seminars, I've brought up the same example to challenge people (mainly my professor, who I like and respect and get along with very well but who is regrettably a hardcore poststructuralist and who loves Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault) and have been met with silence both times. The first seminar was devoted to Volume 1 of Foucault's The History of Sexuality and the second one was just a general seminar. In both instances, I was trying to demonstrate the dangerous consequences of doing away with the concept of objectivity in favor of ideas of "social constructs" and all that.

The example that I brought up was Foucault's position on philia. He addresses philia in The History of Sexuality and gives it the standard twist with the poor and oppressed phile who just wants to be free to express his honest-to-goodness sexuality. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. It's pages 31-32:

"One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called 'curdled milk.' So he was pointed out by the girl's parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration [...] This was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday bit of theater with their solemn discourse. So it was that our society - and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures - assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating."

This story never ceases to turn my stomach. You can see the equivocation, going from ignorant children playing a "game" to "alert children" who know exactly what's going on. But, putting that shit aside and focusing on the philosophical issue: If there is no such thing as objectivity, then you can't say that philia is objectively wrong and that people shouldn't be free to engage in sex with children.

First off, philia is just a social construct, and the concepts of "right" and "wrong" don't apply to mere constructs. But even if I were to be granted use of the concepts of right and wrong, if objectivity is out the window, then my thinking philia is wrong is just an arbitrary, subjective opinion no better or worse than Foucault's arbitrary, subjective opinion that it's right. Who am I to say, and on what grounds can I possibly prove, that any sexual desire - or, really, who am I to say, and on what grounds can I possibly prove, that anything - is wrong? Since it's all just a power game, my position that philia is wrong is really just my desire to arbitrarily oppress the righteous philes (ignore the fact that, in the absence of concepts of right and wrong, Foucault still thinks he's right), and if I were a halfway decent person, then I'd make the "institution of knowledge and power" that is "solemnly" trying to stop, just for the sake of "pettiness," the "inconsequential bucolic pleasures" of kids jerking off hobos stop oppressing those poor upstanding citizens and let them be free.



My professor has two small children, so I'd like to think that he finds Foucault's philia shit suitably horrifying - though I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't even aware that Foucault, along with a number of other members of the French intellectual "elite" of the era like Sartre and Althusser, signed a petition in 1977 to get rid of consent and statutory rape laws - but nobody knows how to respond to simple shit like this. It's easy to talk the postmodernist/poststructuralist talk, but when confronted with the kind of world they'd actually be living in/are helping to bring into existence, there's always silence as the gears of denial start to go into overdrive the second it comes time for them to walk the walk.

When people like Peterson talk about how this shit isn't just "academic" in the sense of being trivial and having no bearing outside of pretentious classrooms, this is what he's talking about. Ideas can have practical effects and consequences that FAR exceed what the ideologically possessed have ever fathomed/are capable of fathoming, and it's so often the case that, if anybody was even half paying attention to what their ideological leaders were saying - and, even more importantly, why they were saying it - then they'd run for the fucking hills.

This post is why sherdog needs a super like button.

 

[Bald1]

Haha. It was great satire. I had never heard of The Beaverton before - apparently it's like a Canadian version of The Onion.


I haven't read this thread in a while. But earlier almost nobody seemed to know what postmodernism actually is, which isn't surprising since Jordan Peterson doesn't even know or care what it is.

He was a middle of the road psych professor who gained fame for lying about trans people. JP now makes over $50,000 a month exploiting resentment on Patreon. Taking donations from people scared over the ubiquitous postmodern cultural Marxist SJW boogeyman he talks about. It's just confirming current bigotries by someone with a facade of respectability because he's a professor in an unrelated field.

With his "postmodernism" talks he's basically a YouTube pseudo-intellectual giving a Breitbart level explanation, who is considered about the lowest hanging fruit there is to make fun of in actual philosophy circles.

He's not accurate or honest about the goals, arguments or context of any postmodernist he mentions. They're also in contention with each other. Many people have made an equally influential analysis on postmodernism that have nothing to do with each other. The nightmare scenario he likes to portray, "postmodernists think all truths are equally valid!" Is just nonsense. Postmodernism is a term sometimes used to classify a changing cultural and intellectual landscape. It's not some school of thought to assault pronouns or whatever.

Could you point out an instance of JP lying about trans people or exploiting resentment please. Thanks.

 

[Bullitt68]

He's not accurate or honest about the goals, arguments or context of any postmodernist he mentions [...] The nightmare scenario he likes to portray, "postmodernists think all truths are equally valid!" Is just nonsense.

The satire post has me hoping that this was also posted in jest. In the event that it wasn't, then I hope you're willing to actually back this stuff up with some examples of anything you think Peterson has said about the likes of Foucault and/or Derrida that you don't think actually captures the "logic" of their arguments and with what you consider to be (more) accurate explications, because I'd be very interested to see what you could come up with.

For starters:

Postmodernism is a term sometimes used to classify a changing cultural and intellectual landscape.

No. That's not what that term means and that's not how it's used. Two seconds on Wiki, dude.

"While encompassing a broad range of ideas, postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony or rejection toward grand narratives, ideologies and various tenets of universalism, including objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, moral universalism, absolute truth, and objective reality. Instead, it asserts to varying degrees that claims to knowledge and truth are products of social, historical or political discourses or interpretations, and are therefore contextual or socially constructed. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, irreverence and self-referentiality [...] Postmodernism includes skeptical critical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, linguistics, economics, architecture, fiction, feminist theory, and literary criticism. Postmodernism is often associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction and post-structuralism, as well as philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Frederic Jameson."

This post is why sherdog needs a super like button.

 

[HOLA]

The satire post has me hoping that this was also posted in jest. In the event that it wasn't, then I hope you're willing to actually back this stuff up with some examples of anything you think Peterson has said about the likes of Foucault and/or Derrida that you don't think actually captures the "logic" of their arguments and with what you consider to be (more) accurate explications, because I'd be very interested to see what you could come up with. The answer is

Everything. It's not something in particular, it's all of it. He has a very superficial take, not an in depth misinterpretation. It's insufficiently fleshed out, with a few key tenets repeated.

He created an enemy (postmodern cultural Marxists) and builds it into some comical apocalyptic threat. Because of him, Derrida has become, to Jordan Peterson fans, "reality is a social construct, blah blah blah (indecipherable) blah blah, how dare you make general statements about the real world, that's totalitarian oppression, blah blah!"

"Cultural Marxist" used to be a label used for individuals like Theodore Adorno, who would have been extremely opposed to the theories of someone like Derrida. It's all a confused mixture.

Talking like this to mostly very young, impressionable people is a very bad idea, and it's all pretty cultish. His fans seem to be the alienated, angry white guys, new to more brainy ideas, seriously impressed with Peterson because of his "non-PC" ideas they agree with, except Peterson comes in with big words to say them. He's eating up their biases and hatreds, then barfing it back out on them with an improved vocabulary.

Peterson is just being deliberately provocative and offensive for his own ends. He's a Patreon superstar. I mean - Pepe won the election for most of these people, right? Trying to put a cool and cerebral spin on what got you to the top isn't going to work.

For starters:



No. That's not what that term means and that's not how it's used. Two seconds on Wiki, dude.

"While encompassing a broad range of ideas, postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony or rejection toward grand narratives, ideologies and various tenets of universalism, including objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, moral universalism, absolute truth, and objective reality. Instead, it asserts to varying degrees that claims to knowledge and truth are products of social, historical or political discourses or interpretations, and are therefore contextual or socially constructed. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, irreverence and self-referentiality [...] Postmodernism includes skeptical critical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, linguistics, economics, architecture, fiction, feminist theory, and literary criticism. Postmodernism is often associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction and post-structuralism, as well as philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Frederic Jameson."

I don't think 2 minutes on wiki is a very good idea for this.

I think part of the problem with postmodernism is that it's really hard to come up with a succinct definition of what it actually is. That ambiguity leads to it being oversimplified, misunderstood, and intentionally misrepresented. It's fashionable now to use it to refer to some sort of spineless cultural relativism.

I think this: "postmodernity means the end of modernity, in the sense of those grand narratives of truth, reason, science, progress and universal emancipation which are taken to characterize modern thought from the Enlightenment onwards. For postmodernity, these fond hopes have not only been discredited; they were dangerous illusions from the outset, bundling the rich contingencies of history into a conceptual straitjacket."

Is just about as succinct a definition as you're going to get.

Very few individuals will actually call themselves post-modernists. It is not some cohesive school of thought. It's something very diverse groups of people get lumped into, when they don't fit nicely into older traditions.

 

[Bullitt68]

Everything. It's not something in particular, it's all of it.

Well then, if everything he has ever said is wrong, then providing an example and correcting it should be so easy as to be virtually effortless.

Because of him, Derrida has become, to Jordan Peterson fans, "reality is a social construct, blah blah blah (indecipherable) blah blah, how dare you make general statements about the real world, that's totalitarian oppression, blah blah!"

It should also be easy for you to provide us with an explication of Derrida's primary philosophical theses that is superior to Peterson's.

"Cultural Marxist" used to be a label used for individuals like Theodore Adorno, who would have been extremely opposed to the theories of someone like Derrida.

I've watched a hell of a lot of Peterson's videos and I don't recall him ever using the term "Cultural Marxist." He tends to refer to "Postmodern Neo-Marxists." And that's an accurate label (though it misses the people who consider themselves "post-Marxists," but perhaps that's for the best, as referring to "Postmodern Post-Marxists" would give anybody a headache).

Peterson has also never referenced Adorno to my knowledge. And, once again, that's for good reason. Adorno's (idiotic) brand of cultural theory, particularly in the form of his and Horkheimer's "Dialectic of Enlightenment," was taken up in explicitly political philosophy in the form of Louis Althusser's Lacanianized Marxism. People like Derrida and Foucault - at least initially, and certainly in their most famous writings - were not explicitly political with their ideas but sought to construct arguments at the deeper, philosophical level. As that's the level which interests Peterson, he has no need to reference much less discuss the line of culture criticism and political theory that goes from Adorno through Althusser to someone like Žižek.

Peterson is just being deliberately provocative and offensive for his own ends. He's a Patreon superstar.

I'm a PhD student who studies this stuff. I've read more Derrida and Foucault than even Peterson. I'm critiquing this shit in the context of a PhD thesis that brings together ideas that I've been formulating across publications stretching back to 2012. I've developed arguments independently of Peterson - before I'd ever even heard of him - that match his critiques almost identically. And I'm not a Patreon superstar.

How would you dismiss that?

I think part of the problem with postmodernism is that it's really hard to come up with a succinct definition of what it actually is. That ambiguity leads to it being oversimplified, misunderstood, and intentionally misrepresented.

The Cunning of Unreason made manifest. If it's hard to define something, then it's hard to identify it; and, if it's hard to identify it, then it's hard to combat it. All the time we spend splitting hairs and trying to fit every component into a perfectly coherent category is time it's going unchallenged.

If you're not a fan of Peterson's, then I'd wager you find Ayn Rand even more objectionable, but she nailed this tendency:

"They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say, and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge – God is non-man, Heaven is non-Earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out."

Derrida was a big fan of this. You'll find thousands of claims from him about what deconstruction is not but try to find one where he tells you what it is.

It's fashionable now to use it to refer to some sort of spineless cultural relativism.

So what are you objecting to? Its characterization as relativistic or spinelessly relativistic? Because, to me...

I think this: "postmodernity means the end of modernity, in the sense of those grand narratives of truth, reason, science, progress and universal emancipation which are taken to characterize modern thought from the Enlightenment onwards. For postmodernity, these fond hopes have not only been discredited; they were dangerous illusions from the outset, bundling the rich contingencies of history into a conceptual straitjacket."

Is just about as succinct a definition as you're going to get.

...your definition sounds exactly the same as my two second Wiki definition. Is your problem the definitions given of postmodernism or the (lack of) value being ascribed to it?

Very few individuals will actually call themselves post-modernists.

You're clearly not an academic. In my neck of the woods, very few people don't call themselves postmodernists.

It is not some cohesive school of thought. It's something very diverse groups of people get lumped into, when they don't fit nicely into older traditions.

This is a function of categorization. It's useful as an ex post facto attempt to bring together diverse things under an umbrella that catches more than it misses. You know, like your preferred-but-indistinguishable-from-my categorization.

 

[HOLA]

@Bullitt68. It's everything. I'm not joking. He's not rigorous, doesn't operate in good faith. He created a vague philosophical boogeyman, which is out there taking over the minds of our youth. Like a summoned demon. It's not a philosophical position for him; it's a mysterious force.

It's been very effective. The American right might be anti-intellectual, but Jordan Peterson shows they have a craving for intellectuals they can call their own. Not to instruct them. But to validate.

If you need some very specific example about him and Derrida, Take his Why You Have to Fight Postmodernism. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/v...rson_why_you_have_to_fight_postmodernism.html

See the postmodernists completely reject the structure of Western civilization. And I mean completely, so I can give you an example, in one term -- Jacques Derrida. He is head trickster for the postmodernist movement, and he regarded Western culture -- let's call it the patriarchy -- as phallogocentric. Phallo comes from phallus, and so that's the insistence that what you see in Western culture is the consequence of the male-dominated oppressive self-serving society.

Derrida never called West Civ "phallogocentric." It's just wrong.

The two definitions we offered were not synonymous. Postmodernism, in general, rejects all-encompassing meta narratives on society. Not objective truths, really. Many were pretty explicit in their views of objective truth. If not, btw, that would seemingly be in conflict with Marxism, which gives a framework to understand the world.

Anyway, maybe his self-help/life coach stuff helps people. In general, I don't really like him at all. He talks about freedom of speech, and freedom in academia, then talks about blacklisting courses he doesn't like and defunding them. It's all silly.

Denouncing Peterson is a job that can't be finished. Just random claims, casual dismissals I don't want to entertain. But I think people would benefit from easing up on the deification. I've seen some weird tangential side effects. One guy was freaking out because his literature course was teaching "postmodern literature" like The Crying Of Lot 49. Which is hilarious. And he'll never find Tristero now.

 

[Bullitt68]

It's everything. I'm not joking.

Fair enough. If you're not joking, then you're just wrong.

He's not rigorous, doesn't operate in good faith.

A lot could be said about Peterson, I'm sure, but saying that he's "not rigorous"?

<{cruzshake}>

And, FWIW, I'd counter your claim that he doesn't operate in good faith with two claims of my own. First, that operating on faith is antithetical to logic, so "good faith" is a contradiction in terms. Second, I think your problem here is similar to what I posited as the problem with @Kafir-kun: You have faith in postmodernism as a rational intellectual movement. You're conceding to them the position of Reason.

Rand termed this "the sanction of the victim." You're sanctioning their nonsense by not calling it out for what it is: Nonsense.

He created a vague philosophical boogeyman

No, he identified a very real philosophical boogeyman.

The American right might be anti-intellectual

The right isn't anti-intellectual. Neither is the left, for that matter. The far right and the far left, however, now that's another story.

Derrida never called West Civ "phallogocentric." It's just wrong.

Derrida from an interview originally published in Le Monde de l'Education:

“I speak mostly, and have for a long time, about sexual differences, rather than about one difference only - twofold and oppositional - which is indeed, with phallocentrism, with what I also nickname ‘phallogocentrism,’ a structural feature of philosophical discourse that will have prevailed in the tradition. Deconstruction goes down that road in the first place. Everything comes back that way. Before any feminist politicalization (and, although I’ve often associated myself with it, on certain conditions), it is important to recognize this strong phallogocentric underpinning that conditions just about all of our cultural heritage.”

I know my Derrida well enough to assure you that Peterson knows what he's talking about. I also know my Derrida well enough to know that you don't know what you're talking about. You're taking this shit on faith and assuming there's no way that what Peterson is saying could possibly be true because it's beyond your comprehension how anybody could have said anything as stupid as what Peterson is attributing to people like Derrida. Believe me, it took me a long time to wrap my head around the stupidity myself, but, sooner or later, you're going to have to wake up to the fact that this isn't cherrypicking, this isn't fearmongering, and this isn't Patreon whoring. It's just the sad, terrifying truth of what passes - and has passed for more than half a century now - for philosophy and some Canadian dude deciding to call bullshit.

Postmodernism, in general, rejects all-encompassing meta narratives on society. Not objective truths, really. Many were pretty explicit in their views of objective truth. If not, btw, that would seemingly be in conflict with Marxism, which gives a framework to understand the world.

You see? Because postmodernism as Peterson explicates it would contradict any Marxist project - thereby making "Postmodern Neo-Marxism" as described by Peterson contradictory and self-negating - you assume he has to be wrong about it because you have faith that nobody would be so stupid as to hold two mutually exclusive positions at the same time and try to pass off such idiocy as intellectually and politically sophisticated and progressive...EXCEPT THAT THEY ARE!!!!!!!!