“Communism bad”
“Why?”
200 year old tropes so ancient they were debunked by Marx himself
Of course, you go through the motions of explaining the most basic political concepts that could be grasped by skimming the cliff notes for literally any Marxist works
“Friedrich Engels? Is he like the president of Germany or something?”
It’s like a kindergartener trying to teach you calculus.
It’s clear he didn’t particularly understand it either. He took the manifesto as a call to make paradise on Earth. His opening statement was saying that paradise cannot exist on earth, because living as a human means existing within brutal, uncaring nature.
He brought up that the manifesto doesn’t mention nature like this, which is true, it’s a political manifesto for organizing factory workers. If he had read Capital he’d know Marx defines labor as transformation of natural resources through human ingenuity.
I don’t think Peterson ever cared about history or theory as much as vibes. I don’t think he even regards facts as important. He likes little anecdotes that signal things with metaphorical truths.
100% agree.
I don’t think he actually read the whole Manifesto through tbh and if he did, he was too busy coming up with his own personal objections to each sentence that he was clearly unable to see the forest for the trees.
I’m not saying that he would have come out of the reading as a freshly-minted Marxist but he was really grandiose and slimy about his refuting of the communist manifesto in a way that was obvious he thought he had this list of epic gotchas but it just showed that he didn’t go into reading it with the intent of understanding it or refuting it from its own internal logic.
I’d tolerate his approach to the manifesto better if he made asides to how it didn’t address this or that issue before proceeding to critique the actual content and arguments of the manifesto itself but to expect that someone would provide an account of human nature in a 30 page pamphlet while expounding upon their entire political philosophy is, frankly, ridiculous (and even moreso when you’re expecting Marx of all people to do that.)
Peterson is such a pseud.
I bring this up a lot and I’m sorry if people here have to read it over and over, but I’m always gonna bring it up since it’s central to who Peterson is. During that debate Zizek asked Peterson to specifically name any alleged Marxist professors. Peterson had no names, probably because he wanted to say Foucault or Marcuse, guys who’ve been dead for decades. Zizek offered the name David Harvey, the British scholar who’s an expert on Marx’s Capital. Peterson didn’t recognize the name.
I still can’t believe that this wasn’t the big “Emperor has no clothes” moment that, by rights, it should have been to the Peterson fanboys.
It was super funny how before the debate Jorp was all
”I’ve studied communism”, but during the debate he was more like 
”Oh shit oh fuck I haven’t done the reading and the teacher’s asking me questions”