These conversion & deconversion stories always go the same way:
"I’m an impressionable fuckwit who immediately gets on the first ride that looks appealing. But soon I realized I wanted to get off Mr. Bones Wild Ride, because it looked much cooler than it actually was. Whew what a relief when I got off. Let me tell you about my current ride, which is much better, the most important ride of the world and you should definitely get on it too. Everyone who doesn’t get on THIS ride (which is definitely the correct one to be on) is evil and dooming humanity!
I’m a reformed person."
Also perfectly fits religion.
This sounds like an example right out of “Mastering the subtle art of not giving a f*ck”
There was a great article the other day talking about young men being lost and adrift, and a great takeaway is that JP and his ilk are a symptom, not the cause of men feeling guideless. While sane people haven’t really discussed what good, healthy masculinity looks like, the alt right shlubs have been luring in people with no purpose by offering them toxic, reactionary masculinity.
The article went on to point out that the left needs to do better here. We need to provide a firm, healthy definition of masculinity. It isn’t about absolute traits or the male ideal. And it doesn’t have to be exclusionary from femininity. It can be both a masculine trait and a feminine trait to want to protect. To provide.
The best and only case against Jordan Peterson, is Jordan Peterson. If you can find rationality and logic in his rhetoric, you are not well and think poorly.
please help my coworker
I watched 30m of a Peterson ‘lecture’ a co-worker recommended to me. It kind of opened my eyes. Peterson is basically a ‘motivational speaker’ that presents himself as an academic well enough to fool people that only understand academic aesthetics. He doesn’t even try to back up his claims or references, he just makes wildly abstract and generalized claims about human civilization and draws analogies that sound like they support that perspective. They sound right enough to people that want to believe that there is an expression of their culture that is inherently ‘good’ and all of civilization’s problems are based on corruptions of that culture. But in the minds of his fans he’s offering ‘proof’ of this perspective by appearing academic, even though he offers none.
He’s basically a conman. It’s impressive in a way, I’ve watched enough of it a few times to see how convincing he is. Anyone who doesn’t want to believe it will sniff the bullshit after 3-5 minutes of him doing nothing but blow smoke and talk in self reinforcing circles with no facts.
If you want to agree with him, it’s very easy to think he’s informed and speaking the truth. Which is why he’s so dangerous. He’s like the gateway drug to right wing extremist views. He tells men all the things a lot of them want to believe. About how their inadequacy isn’t their fault. How everything was stacked against them. Reinforces their sexism, their anger, directs it. Then they’re listening to all the other even more blatant alt right voices and most of them never come back.
He’s just a glorified self-help guy who’s gotten way more attention than he deserves by saying mildly offensive things. He should never have been allowed to become a target for outrage. Once that happened, he figured out how to monetize it and it was off to the races. It’s like a feedback loop.
he’s a TED talk basically.
most TED talks are like that. sophisticated sounding gibberish that has no real world merit, but sounds really cool and interesting.
It really has become so easy to make yourself seem smart and credible these days. The fact that people thought Trump was a “good businessman” is absurd
Give millions of people across the US the same money, connections, and opportunity and they would all be just as successful if not more.
Well, before we can say that Peterson is fooling people by only aesthetically presenting as an academic first we need to define fooling, then we need to define academic and then we need to define presenting. Without that shared substrate we can’t make any value judgements about him because if we don’t have that, we don’t have anything.
Ribbit
It might be soon. The Ontario College of Psychiatrists reprimanded him, and recommended he take a refresher course on professional use of social media, citing a number of complaints of his unprofessional behavior. He’s suing them over it.
Assuming his lawsuit doesn’t have any effect, this feels like building a paper trail for a permanent suspension.
They’re working to do exactly that.
https://globalnews.ca/news/9386896/jordan-peterson-ontario-psychologists-college-public-statements/
So mocking young loser men is back firing because some clown alpha daddy thought leaders are able to fill “loser’s” needs for profit as “influencers” while spreading unfavorable ideology to the “left”
Who would have thought that running exclusionary and hostile rhetoric against a group of people would lead to them into opposition.
What type of sad snowflakes can’t handle a little mocking. They need to grow up and realize the world isn’t there safe space.
I agree overall with the authors point, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out some solid media from the left side of things.
Some More News/Cody’s Showdy has been consistently great at firing back at alt-right figures like Peterson and Shapiro And related is the content put out by Robert Evans and Cool Zone Media. Behind the Bastards, The Woman’s War, It Could Happen Here are great. And they also did the collaboration in 2020 for Worst Year Ever which I really hope makes a return for 2024
Really most of the Cracked alum are great in this regard but those are the two sources I’ve got I’ve gotten the most enjoyment from
Smn did an extremely short and succinct piece on Peterson. A really quick watch.
Yeah it’s not very long, super easy, you can knock it out on a lunch break
As someone who used to be obsessed with Jordan Peterson and had a similar 180 transformation, this is super familiar to me. I remember speaking up at work against critical race theory in a meeting. I look back on that now with huge embarrassment of who I used to be. I was actively working against the things that I stand for now. I’m super grateful to breadtube creators for pulling me out. I still have friends in my life who are like this and I can’t seem to break them out. All I can do is try to be a better example
Which breadtube creators helped you out?
Contrapoints got me on the right track, but I could also imagine Vaush and his edginess being a good foot in the door for some.
Contra would be really good if she didn’t suffer from chronic foot-in-mouth disease.
Absolutely. I don’t watch her very much anymore, but if nothing else she was a big contributing factor to getting me solidly left.
Why would you talk about that in a work meeting?!
During the meeting my boss asked us our thoughts about a recent diversity/equality training session we just had. Everyone said it was fine and interesting but I took the opportunity to be insufferable and soapbox. Like I said, I’m entirely embarrassed about it now and glad they didn’t really listen to me
Okay but for further situations, “the training was great” is always an acceptable response. Maybe throw an “I can send you my feedback later through mail/hr survey”
I mean Jesus
Give him a break, he is at least admitting his mistake and has reformed his opinions. I am sure it was a difficult journey, and he should be celebrated for making it out.
I think I can provide some insight. In the mind of an alt-right person/Peterson-fan, there exists to them a “silent majority” who believes the same things they do, but are too afraid to speak up. This is the delusion that I was under, as well as the OP in the linked article who spoke out in the middle of class to lambast a trans person. In both situations, they think that others secretly agree with them and will come out of the woodwork to support them. Of course there’s no reason to assume that people are being quiet because they’re afraid, rather than because they actually disagree with you.
Because the right-wing saturation of platforms like YouTube was so central to my becoming a reactionary, I believe that creating a competing left-wing presence in online spaces should be a priority for the Left. Currently, conservatives enjoy a nearly unchallenged role in grabbing young men who may very well be supportive of progressive movements, but whose lack of community drives them away from collective politicking. This needs to change.
It’s really refreshing to see a suggestion for how to help solve the right-wing rabbit hole problem other than just blaming “education” and saying it needs to be fixed (not that I think fixing education isn’t the answer, I just don’t think that it is the only answer). Something I’ve been asking myself since the 2016 election is, what the hell are we going to do about what is happening to our society that is turning people towards hate, bigotry, selfishness and cruelty? Sure, we can try to educate people, but there will always be folks that turn away from public education. Additionally, here’s only a fraction of us who attend some form of higher education that might expose us to information that might bring some out of a selfish world view. Meanwhile, all that right wing content has flooded the internet, just waiting to enthrall folks who don’t have direction.
Fighting back by introducing an equal (or even greater?) amount of content that opposes hateful ideology is not a bad idea at all as a method to try and catch these folks before they fall into these dark rabbit holes.
This isn’t an actual fix, though. The reason left wingers don’t have the presence the right does on Facebook, YouTube, etc isn’t because of a lack of voices or audiences - it’s because of deliberate manipulation of what is put in front of people. There isn’t really a solution besides finally coming to terms with the fact that the right offers nothing useful and completely and utterly salting their ideology from the earth. And dismantling tech giants, ofc
The YouTube algo is fucking insane. You click a video or two that you didn’t know was a rightwing nutjob because it had an interesting title and you basically have to delete your account and start over. That shit never ends, it’s just bizarre.
Like I’ve watched hundreds of leftwing videos, but YouTube just does not stop throwing conservative trash my way. I have to search for political videos I agree with. Ones I don’t are just in my face, always. I really don’t understand what they’re trying to do. It never suggests new videos from channels I’m subscribed to most of the time. But Nazi woman hating shit? I always need to see more angry Nazi shit.
I primarily watch Destiny 2, sim racing stuff, Nori Yaro and Juicebox Unboxed (drifting channels) and youtube recommends me so many channels which are Angry-Bald-White-Dude-With-A-Beard-Wearing-Oakleys-In-A-Pickup-That-Has-Never-Been-Used-For-Work-But-My-God-He-Is-Assmad-At-The-Latest-Thing-To-Be-Mad-At-And-He-Is-Very-Angry-And-Wants-To-Share-It-With-You-To-Save-Western-Democracy. What on earth does this have to do with any of my other video interests? Youtube is pushing people towards this shite, and it doesn’t matter how many times you tell them to not show this video, not interested in this content creator, not interested in this topic, they will keep on being recommended. I don’t think it’s appropriate to follow up a video about drifting Toyota’s around Ebisu Circuit with one about how based Marge Traitor Green is.
The reason left wingers don’t have the presence the right does on Facebook, YouTube, etc isn’t because of a lack of voices or audiences - it’s because of deliberate manipulation of what is put in front of people.
I recently have gotten into wasting tons of hours on YouTube shorts, and I was very surprised that after a grand total of maybe 12 hours of using the platform, Andrew Tate content was just shoehorned into the algorithm of shorts being presented to me. Up to this point in time I was watching cosmetics, baking cookies, comedy, cooking, just funny hot takes, but then completely out of the blue one day that guy’s ugly ass monkey face was on my phone, and even though it was so quick that I couldn’t even think of his name, my lizard braid already recognized that he is very dangerous to women, so I opened the menu to select the feature on YouTube that prevents those channels from being promoted to me ever again.
There is 0% chance that the content that I had previously been watching links up in the algorithm to Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, or Andrew Tate. This leads me to believe that YouTube intentionally carves out space for these content creators and makes promises about getting their content in front of everybody’s eyeballs, regardless of level of interest in that type of content.
When right wingers talk about social media suppressing them I’m always wondering what the actual fuck they’re talking about because it’s the most promoted ideology out there.
On reddit they’d cry “censorship” when people downvoted their posts or disagreed with them… meanwhile, the conservative subs would instantly permaban anyone who questioned what they said on there.
Yeah. I lost a lot of respect for Joe Rogan when he started parroting that nonsense. Now he’s full blown moron and it’s a damn shame.
Yup, real solutions usually aren’t sexy and don’t make good sound bites. Lot’s of people are unhappy with life and the idea of being able to fix it themselves with direct action is a very appealing concept. Telling someone their problems are causes by a complex mixture of cultural factors and government policy doesn’t give people the instant gratification of hearing that it’s the “others” fault.
A guy in a lambo yelling about how women and jews are the real issue is always going to get more attention than a well constructed and reasonable argument on economic policy.
I originally heard this idea about why so many big start ups end with massive fraud but I think it applies here too. The start ups that create reasonable goals and timelines don’t get funding because someone else is willing to lie and promise more. By the time it’s clear they can’t deliver on the promised results, the honest company is out of business. Same in politics, one side is honest, the other side is willing to say whatever they think will win you over no matter if it’s true. Obviously one will be more appealing because it’s designed to be, but that doesn’t mean it has any merit.
the left isn’t unified enough to ever do this.
i’m a progressive leftist type… and half the time i feel alienated from my own politics because so much of it is basically anti-male anti-white hate jerking where i am told that anything i may say is oppressive to those of ‘marginalized identities’.
i seriously don’t blame young guys for being so hopeless. nobody will give them any positive direction or reinforcement other than charlatans who are looking to exploit them. it’s fucking dark.
i’m so glad my wayward 20s were 20 years ago when social media was not a thing. i had to sort out my shit in person with friends, not on the internet with strangers.
but as a 40 something guy now, i can tell you that NOBODY wants me involved in anything anymore. even my own social groups have taken to being like ‘we have too many white men, they are bad, we need to attract more people of color and women and trans people because they are special and good by default and white men are bad by default’. it’s infuriating and depressing that i’m basically told to f off when I want to contribute to my community.
i should also say i’m working-class, and that is just like… insta banned/hated if that ever comes up from my leftist people. who are typically upper middle class people pretending to be working-class for fun.
We should all take this textbook example of sock puppetry to heart. I’m sorry, but there just aren’t “progressive leftist types” who are also “it’s the working class, straight, middle-aged white men who are the <real> oppressed minority” types. Like point me to one thing progressive about anything in this comment if that’s who you are. Point me to one thing you said other than “I’m a lib, promise!” that couldn’t have come straight out of Jordan Peterson’s or Scott Adam’s whiny ass mouths. Get outta here with that bad faith “I’m liberal but all the trans and black and female people are mean to me and don’t listen and don’t want me around” boohoo nonsense
Interesting to see where the author’s escape from the alt-right started; Frederick Douglass has been changing minds for a long time now.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve
I’ve never agreed with Peterson much, and this article was really eye opening. I think the expression “not even wrong” precisely nails it: he talks in such broad strokes and general terms that you cannot even start a debate before he swamps you with more generalizations.
The problem is, as OP experienced, that Peterson (although he would never admit as much) and his followers use this rhetoric to justify misogynistic, racist, sexist, and other “traditionalist” views, that are a real danger to the people on the receiving end.
Peterson is the idiotic man’s intellectual
I just had this with a user on here. Dude just went off the deep end with all this nonsense I couldn’t even begin to respond without dedicating the day to unwrapping his tangents. I made his note “a little silly goose” and moved on.
User notes are a thing? Nice to know.
It’s the only thing you can do. Some of these people have given up on reality and live in a really weird alt right bubble, so entrenched it’s impossible for them to leave. Don’t bother with 'em, waste of time, Block And Move On, or BAMO for short. Works every time!
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