Jordanetics confirmed

Of all the words of screen and pen
The most bitter: Vox was right again.

“Jordanetics confirmed. Vox Day was right.”
– Rollo Tomassi

A colleague with whom Jordan Peterson lived for months, whom Peterson himself describes as “Bernie Schiff, my good friend”, confirms that the man is an unethical lunatic with delusions of grandiosity:

I met Jordan Peterson when he came to the University of Toronto to be interviewed for an assistant professorship in the department of psychology. His CV was impeccable, with terrific references and a pedigree that included a PhD from McGill and a five-year stint at Harvard as an assistant professor.

We did not share research interests but it was clear that his work was solid. My colleagues on the search committee were skeptical — they felt he was too eccentric — but somehow I prevailed. (Several committee members now remind me that they agreed to hire him because they were “tired of hearing me shout over them.”) I pushed for him because he was a divergent thinker, self-educated in the humanities, intellectually flamboyant, bold, energetic and confident, bordering on arrogant. I thought he would bring a new excitement, along with new ideas, to our department.

He joined us in the summer of 1998. Because I liked him, and also because I had put myself on the line for him, I took him under my wing. I made sure he went up for promotion to associate professor the following year, as the hiring committee had promised, and I went to the dean to get him a raise when the department chairperson would not.

When he was renovating his house I invited his family to live with mine. For five months, they occupied the third floor of our large house. We had meals together in the evening and long, colourful conversations. There, away from campus, I saw a man who was devoted to his wife and his children, who were lovely and gentle and for whom I still feel affection. He was attentive and thoughtful, stern and kind, playful and warm. His wife, Tammy, appeared to be the keel, the ballast and the rudder, and Jordan ran the ship. I could not imagine him without her, and indeed I see that she is now with him wherever in the world he goes.

On campus, he was as interesting as I had expected him to be. His research on alcoholism, and then personality, was solid, but his consuming intellectual interests lay elsewhere. He had been an undergraduate in political science in Edmonton, where he had become obsessed with the Cold War. He switched to psychology in order to understand why some people would, as he once told me, destroy everything — their past, their present and their future — because of strong beliefs. That was the subject of his first book, Maps of Meaning, published in 1999, and the topic of his most popular undergraduate course.

He was, however, more eccentric than I had expected. He was a maverick. Even though there was nothing contentious about his research, he objected in principle to having it reviewed by the university research ethics committee, whose purpose is to protect the safety and well-being of experiment subjects.

He requested a meeting with the committee. I was not present but was told that he had questioned the authority and expertise of the committee members, had insisted that he alone was in a position to judge whether his research was ethical and that, in any case, he was fully capable of making such decisions himself. He was impervious to the fact that subjects in psychological research had been, on occasion, subjected to bad experiences, and also to the fact that both the Canadian and United States governments had made these reviews mandatory. What was he doing! I managed to make light of this to myself by attributing it to his unbridled energy and fierce independence, which were, in many other ways, virtues. That was a mistake.

Another thing to which I did not give sufficient concern was his teaching. As the undergraduate chair, I read all teaching reviews. His were, for the most part, excellent and included eyebrow-raising comments such as “This course has changed my life.” One student, however, hated the course because he did not like “delivered truths.” Curious, I attended many of Jordan’s lectures to see for myself.

Remarkably, the 50 students always showed up at 9 a.m. and were held in rapt attention for an hour. Jordan was a captivating lecturer — electric and eclectic — cherry-picking from neuroscience, mythology, psychology, philosophy, the Bible and popular culture. The class loved him. But, as reported by that one astute student, Jordan presented conjecture as statement of fact. I expressed my concern to him about this a number of times, and each time Jordan agreed. He acknowledged the danger of such practices, but then continued to do it again and again, as if he could not control himself.

The fact that Peterson’s colleague is a left-wing freakshow himself doesn’t mean that his observations about Peterson are unfounded. To the contrary, we should be concerned that even the freakshows are beginning to realize that the Crazy Christ is unhinged.

Remember, this guy not only carried water for Peterson, but materially helped him with his career.

You must withhold judgment

The Z-man reconsiders the God-Emperor in light of the recent Deep State revelations:

The bigger issue though, the thing now looming over his entire presidency, is the wide ranging conspiracy engineered by senior elements of the intelligence community. A few months ago it looked like a handful of radicalized mid-level bureaucrats. What’s becoming clear is this was a conspiracy hatched by the men at the top of the intelligence community, with help from the White House, to not only help Hillary Clinton, but engineer a coup after the election to get rid of Trump. This reality has to color any assessment of Trump.

Think about the stones it takes to face off against the intel community. They literally know all of your secrets. In the case of Trump, they have the secrets of his friends, family and business associates. Even if they can’t ruin him, they can ruin people he knows. It was 18 months ago that Chuck Schumer warned Trump about doing this. When Schumer said, “Intel officials ‘have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you’” he was not being flippant or rhetorical. We now know the intel community has been at this for a while.

It’s not just the fact that the intel community has the capacity to spy on everyone and appears to be spying on everyone. It’s that these are vicious, craven people lacking a moral compass. It’s ironic that James Comey was fond of accusing his people of lacking a moral compass, when it is now clear the guy is a sociopath incapable of knowing right from wrong. Clapper and Brennan have no scruples whatsoever. There’s also the fact that on the CIA side, they still have guys who kill people on behalf of the American deep state.

This is exactly right. That’s why I’ve been recommending cutting President Trump considerable slack from the start. You cannot reasonably judge a performance when you do not know the degree of difficulty involved.

Tommy Robinson arrested

The UK activist was arrested in Leeds, according to the Metro:

Tommy Robinson has been arrested outside a child grooming trial for allegedly breaching the peace. The co-founder of EDL livestreamed ‘reports’ from outside Leeds Crown Court for an hour this morning. He showed men entering the court on Facebook until he was approached by officers telling him to stop.

Robinson is already under a suspended sentence over contempt of court at gang rape trial in Canterbury last year. People or newspapers can be in ‘contempt of court’ when they create a ‘substantial risk’ of prejudicing on ongoing court case. It is a criminal offence that can land people in jail.

Some people have been reporting that he’s already been sentenced to 13 months, which suggests that the judge who ordered him arrested for contempt gave an order from the bench in lieu of a trial. It also tends to suggest that the UK authorities are increasingly desperate to keep the knowledge of the full extent of the immigrant rape gangs from reaching the English public.

What it looks like

In case you ever found it hard to understand what was meant by the 2-SD IQ gap that prevents effective communication, this comment on a recent Darkstream should help illuminate the concept for you.

I am trying my best to get to know you and figure you out.I am trying to be fair and listen to both sides. But for the life of me I am not getting it. Because what and when you are saying it is nonsense it is just a fruit salad. It just sounds like psycho babble to me to same way whatever Peterson is saying sounds like psycho babble to you. I am thinking this is one of those times it might be best I just close my eyes and ears before they are too polluted with your nonsense. From where I sit I am hearing Peterson is selling out all over the country and filling up venues with people that obviously understand and need his nonsense and will pay for it. And it is obvious to me that he might be doing something ok and right because people are trying to bring him down and stain him and ruin him for whatever nefarious reason they have. Whether it ruins or interferes with their narrative like the catholic church did back in the day when they destroyed everything that wasn’t in their book of ideas. So whether your cause is noble or not is yet to be scene and I can hear nor sense any real motive for me to be on your side to disparage the man. It just sounds like you are making things up as you go along the same way you are accusing him for doing… that’s what I am getting out of this… 

It’s a good poing. After all, how can Hitler possibly have been bad? He filled up venues all over Germany and a lot of people around the world went well out of their way to try to bring him down for whatever nefarious reason.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to legitimately be that stupid. Just the process of getting up, eating breakfast, and making the morning commute must feel like an awe-striking series of wondrous mysteries. It’s as if the guy can see the tree and see the acorn, but has no idea that they might be related somehow. And as for the crazy notion that squirrels eat trees and live in them, well, that’s clearly just psycho babble.

Jordan Peterson’s philosophy doesn’t sound like word salad to me because it is so intellectually advanced, it sounds like word salad because it is word salad.

That answers that question

In case you ever wondered what would happen if Yui and Moa mastered their guitars and started their own rock band.

The remarkable thing is the way these young women, intentionally or not, are utterly destroying so many Western feminist notions. There is a subversive element, of course – how could there not be – but they don’t have to make themselves ugly or emasculate men or destroy tradition in order to become successful or attract attention. And they’re each about one thousand times cooler than the Gothiest Goth-chick that ever dyed her hair or thought she was a witch.

The band’s founder, the rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist, Miku, is clearly a marketing genius. Observe the way in which she has surrounded herself with four musicians who are clearly much better than she is. And if you don’t think they are actually playing the instruments themselves, well, that’s plainly not the case.

They’re either becoming pretty good pop songwriters or they have assembled a solid songwriting crew that suits them nicely. Daydreaming is a well-written, wistful, 90’s rock-style song that is considerably better than anything Taylor Swift or Rihanna are putting out these days. Alone has a serious Lostprophets vibe to it, only without, you know, the pedophilia.

The Bullfeathers party

They’ve been roundly defeated by Donald Trump in the GOP and sent to the back of the bus in the Democratic Party. So, the NeverTrumpers, formerly the Neoconservatives, are now looking to create a third party. Since Israel First isn’t really appropriate for a party outside Israel, perhaps they could take a page from the American history that has absolutely nothing to do with them or their immigrant forebears and go with the Bullfeathers brand.

Bill Kristol has not given up on defeating Donald Trump.

He tried and failed once before to recruit an independent candidate to challenge Trump in 2016. Now, with 2020 on his mind, Kristol badly wants a Republican to primary the president. The conservative commentator has been traveling to Iowa and New Hampshire, running a campaign for a campaign, and evangelizing on behalf of a cause that’s less about policy and more, to him, about morals.

“I have a feeling,” Kristol said Wednesday at Politics & Eggs, a can’t-miss speaking engagement for White House prospects at Saint Anselm College, “that we are now entering … a turbulent era, when the character of both parties is up for grabs.”

He’s quick to note that challenges to sitting presidents had big consequences in other turbulent periods: In 1968, Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy chased then-president Lyndon Johnson from the race at the height of anti–Vietnam War sentiment; in 1976, Ronald Reagan nearly beat then-president Gerald Ford, a preview of the conservative Reagan Revolution to come; and in 1980, Ted Kennedy challenged then-president Jimmy Carter and helped define the liberal direction of the Democratic Party.

And so, armed with this history and fresh polling (Morning Consult and Politico found 38{434e4795edb8718426f2262f16bc350bda72304c69f2c22d1de5754882bdf177} of Republican voters want Trump to face a primary challenge), Kristol made his case this week to dozens of influential New Hampshire activists during a breakfast buffet beneath blown-up photos of past presidential candidates campaigning in the nation’s first primary state.

Many Republicans who voted for Trump in the general election last time around did so, Kristol asserts, out of concern over Supreme Court appointments and because they hated Hillary Clinton more.

I’m told Ben Shapiro is “wildly popular” with young conservatives. And he’ll be 35 by 2020. I hear he’s quite the fearsome debater too. It’s not like he’d be any less serious a presidential candidate than David French or Evan McMuffin was. Why not put him on the Bullfeathers ticket? And pair him with a woman of equal appeal to Left and Right, the whip-smart Jennifer Rubin, as Vice-President.

And who did Morning Consult and Politico poll anyhow, the National Review staff? Donald Trump is not only going to win reelection easily, he is going to wind up his second term more popular, and more lionized, than Ronald Reagan.

The historical revisionists

Ben Shapiro tries to speech police Pat Buchanan for telling the truth about American history:

In one of the more morally repugnant and historically egregious columns in recent memory, Pat Buchanan, godfather to the paleoconservative movement that forms a core piece of Trumpism, has now fully rejected the American credo: “All men are created equal.” Instead, he proposes that America embrace Western civilization’s history of white supremacism.

These anti-American liars always go running to Jefferson’s single rhetorical phrase and ignore literally everything about the Federalist Papers, the Preamble to the Constitution, and the 1790 Naturalization law… as well as the rest of the Declaration of Independence. It’s dishonest, it’s ahistorical, it’s transparent, and it’s pathetic.

As I previously wrote when dealing with yet another (((historical revisionist))), there is a conclusive preponderance of evidence that, like the U.S. Constitution, the Naturalization Act of 1790, the writings of John Jay, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and other Founding Fathers, and the Alt-Right nationalist position, the Declaration of Independence itself is directly opposed to the revisionist equalitarian interpretation, as the document also refers to:

  • the connection between [the United Colonies] and the State of Great Britain
  • the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages
  • large Armies of foreign Mercenaries
  • the present King of Great Britain
  • the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners
  • the free System of English Laws
  • our British brethren

To rely upon a single phrase of a document in contradiction to the central theme of the entire document, which is that the People of the United Colonies are an English people, unique and distinct from foreigners, Indians, and the English people loyal to the King of Britain, is an outrageous attempt at deceit that relies entirely upon the historical ignorance of the audience. To say that anyone can become an American because “all men are created equal” is a shameless lie. One might as legitimately cite it as evidence to claim it means anyone can become Chinese.

Buchanan pointing out the devastating failure of the equalitarian attack on Western and American identity is what appears to have most upset the Littlest Chickenhawk.

Nor is a belief in the superiority of one’s race, religion, tribe and culture unique to the West. What is unique, what is an experiment without precedent, is what we are about today. We have condemned and renounced the scarlet sins of the men who made America and embraced diversity, inclusivity and equality. … “All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?

You know who actually built that utopia on a supposed “sandpile of ideology and hope”? Our founding fathers. Abraham Lincoln. The great heroes of American history. That’s because “all men are created equal” isn’t a sandpile of hope at all: it’s a basic description of our common human value in the eyes of God and the law. It’s descriptive, not hopeful. Buchanan, like most other white supremacists, thinks “all men are created equal” refers to quality of human beings rather than innate value. But our founders never made that mistake. They just knew that human beings are all made from the same stuff, no matter our race and ethnicity. They knew that Western civilization can assimilate those who began as outsiders, and should do so.

That’s America.

No, Ben, that’s not America. And that’s absolutely not Western civilization. There is no us. The Founding Fathers of America are not the founding fathers of a third-generation immigrant infidel, no badly how much he might wish to be accepted for something he most certainly is not.

It’s always about “transformation” with these wormtongues. They always claim to be respecting tradition and relying upon history even as they seek to destroy both. They are shameless and unrepentant liars, and anyone who stands with any of them should not be taken seriously, as at the very least, they lack discernment.

Darkstream: the Free Speech Fake

From the recent transcript of my second successful attempt at livestreaming a Darkstream. If you want alerts for when I go live with them, subscribe to the voxday channel, which is distinct from the Voxiversity channel.

Here’s the thing: If Jordan Peterson is a genuine free speech advocate, then what is he doing on Patreon? Why is he supporting an SJW-converged organization that is actively and aggressively opposed to free speech? Has anyone asked him that?

You know, the thing that you have to understand is that in the same way that Ben Shapiro is a fake American conservative, Jordan Peterson is a fake free speech advocate. Now, I’m not saying that the free speech is the most vital thing in the world – I’m not a free speech advocate myself – but if you’re going to sell yourself as a free speech advocate, if you’re going to claim to be a free speech champion, if you’re going to run around the country, run around the world, lecturing people on how they they have to be individuals and they have to speak their own truth, then there is absolutely no way that you
should be working with a company like Patreon. There’s absolutely no way that you should be supporting any business that is as ruthlessly prone to speech policing as Patreon!

This led to an informative exchange in the comments when one commenter quite reasonably requested a clarification concerning my claim not to be a free speech advocate. For the record, I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be, a follower or admirer of Voltaire. I will absolutely not defend anyone’s absolute right to blaspheme or even be impolite, much less to the death. To the contrary, I have even pointed out how very wrong he was.

JustAintThatWay: “… I’m not a free speech advocate …” Say what?  Clarification requested. From any WesternCiv, let alone a book publisher.  “I may not agree w/  what you say, but will defend to the death, your right to say it”-style.

VD: Read more about the history of free speech. It’s nothing more than a philosophical attack on Western Civilization in general and Christianity in particular. JB Bury, a strong advocate, has written a very informative history that makes it clear that it was always about getting rid of the West’s blasphemy laws.

Joshua Coleman: I’d recommend you read the Supreme Court rulings in Reynolds vs United States, Commonwealth Vs Nesbit, and Lindenmuller Vs The People. They reaffirm that the First Amendment, and in particular the Religion clause, was not a free license to say anything you like. Specifically, anything that was considered “Subversive of good order” and “overt acts against peace” were not protected, and among those things was advocation of immorality. The Libertarian / Conservative / Liberal interpretation of ‘you can say anything’ is ahistorical. The First Amendment was to protect your right to express your Christianity without State interference, not to subvert Christian order and morality. You could be prosecuted for doing or advocating immorality such as bigamy, polygamy, parricide, infanticide, etc.

The sickness in science fiction

They should have listened to Moira Greyland:

Floyd “Huston” Huddleston – founder of the Hollywood Science Fiction Museum, has been arrested for the following child pornography charges (in the comments) – Seriously, we HAVE to get people like this OUT of the Entertainment industry.

The challenge is that if they get rid of all the criminal pervs from science fiction, Castalia House will be about all that is left.

The poverty of sex

I note, with some satisfaction, that I am now Bucknell University’s Greatest Living Novelist. Not that they are likely to brag about that fact any time soon or ask me to speak at graduation. The thing is, for all his much-ballyhooed and oft-awarded literary talent, Philip Roth was a boring and trivial novelist because he could never get his damned hands out of his own pants.

Roth’s enduring subject matter was the American male’s carnality in the age of the Sexual Revolution, and he was honest and pitiless and unsentimental about it. In his 2001 novel “The Human Stain” he railed against the neo-Puritanism that he said resulted in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, but his own work offers a horrifyingly bleak view of Americans liberated from puritanical attitudes that would warm the heart of any present-day Cotton Mather.

He began with sexuality denied. The title story of “Goodbye Columbus” concerns a couple of New Jersey kids in their early 20s — young, attractive, full of life — and how their relationship cannot survive her mother’s discovery that they are having sex. Though Roth was not a writer whose work ever delivered a message, “Goodbye Columbus” certainly makes you think that the social stricture against premarital sex was something not protective but corrosive.

Ten years later, in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” the title character pleasures himself with a piece of liver during his adolescence and goes on to a series of ruinous relationships with inappropriate women that land him (maybe for eternity) on a psychoanalyst’s couch.

Roth lays Portnoy’s complaint firmly at the feet of his simultaneously emasculating and stimulating monster of a mother. Surely a more enlightened kind of mother was emerging in 1969, when the book was published, a new kind of mother who wouldn’t distort her son in this way.

But how did this all turn out for Roth’s characters, most of whom are versions of Roth himself? Not well. His novels from “Portnoy” onward feature variegated portraits of crippled men for whom there is no liberation. The world of freer sex isn’t freeing for any of them. And like Roth himself, none of his male characters (with one exception) ever finds any real happiness or contentment in marriage or as a parent.

The novelist Nathan Zuckerman is felled by mysterious back pain that makes it impossible for him to write. This metaphor for impotence becomes literal in later books. In 1995’s “American Pastoral,” Zuckerman has become literally impotent after prostate surgery and even seems slightly relieved to have been taken out of the game.

In “The Human Stain,” published six years later, a professor in his 70s takes Viagra in a desperate effort to perform with his illiterate cleaning-lady girlfriend, barely out of her 20s.

The late novels “Exit Ghost,” “The Dying Animal” and “The Humbling” offer an unsparing and despairing view of a man no longer able to perform — a problem made especially acute by the fact that the Roth stand-ins here are alone and solitary with little to distract them but their failing bodies.

Only once, in “American Pastoral,” did Roth find the imaginative power to conjure up a person unlike himself who embraces bourgeois life and bourgeois domesticity.

The arc of Roth’s literary career should be shown to sex-obsessed schoolboys in order to demonstrate to them that there is vastly more to life than getting laid. Sex is natural and sex is good, but for the love of all that is beautiful, good, and true, it’s very, very far from the only interesting thing in life.