The critical narrative

It’s a good thing Man has moved beyond thinking in narrative, unlike the human race before the Sixteenth Century, or one might suspect that the collection of Jordanologists at Steve Sailer’s place are guilty of doing so. Of course, this little collection doesn’t even begin to address the many comments at YouTube insisting that I am only criticizing Jordanetics because I am, and one really has to quote one particular gentleman in order to fully appreciate the sentiment, “jelly”.

I’m fascinated by the fact that Jordan Peterson has caused Vox Day to to go completely off the rails. I don’t get it, honestly. Can’t a man have many things to say that you find interesting and worthwhile, and others you disagree with without it causing you to condemn him unreservedly?

Vox Day is sort of a professional egotist. I suspect that Vox really hates Peterson because he thinks that he deserves Peterson’s large fanbase, salary and media attention.

It doesn’t surprise me in the least that Vox Day is loosing his cheese-wizz over this. As I said in other words in another post still awaiting moderation: Peterson may be the single greatest existential threat to the alt-right – and the Alt-right understands that. I think the Maoist left understands him as a enemy they are programmed to try to destroy at all costs, but they probably don’t understand that if he succeeds, he’s their death too, as much so as that of the Alt-right.

People like Vox Day are coming down with PDS (Peterson Derangement Syndrome). It’s most likely because they narcissistically think of themselves as more deserving of delivering the masses from evil.

Vox Day is an amateur troll who’s obviously chaffing at the reality of Jordan Peterson’s popularity and impact, while he toils away in obscurity, egged on only by his amen chorus of commenters who can’t tolerate even the mildest criticism. His latest Dorkstream is a rambling, incoherent assemblage of ad-homenims, such as saying Peterson is an “intellectual fraud”, whatever that means. Peterson is also claimed to have some five-degrees-of-separation link to John Podesta and George Soros. Yeah, whatever.

Vox has developed a strange obsession with Peterson, and at this point it’s rather pathetic. Vox is obviously a bright guy, but he has torn into Peterson with the fury of a scorned lover. He has convinced himself that Peterson is a minion of the Anti Christ, and Vox’s fanboys have gone all in with this supposed takedown. Not that Peterson cares, or even knows, who Vox is. Vox is sperging on Peterson and I think there is some serious projection going on.

Vox Day was never on the rails. Regardless of his ideology it’s pretty clear from his writing style that he’s a psycho.

I agree with your take on Auster and Vox Day, but Vox is in no way as intelligent as Auster was. Not even in the same league. Vox Day is an angry crank who babbles on and on about his 150+ IQ. If his IQ was above 110 I would be shocked.

You are right that Poz Day has lost his mind about this. Jealousy? Did JP bag Space Cunny?

The Vox Day vs. Jordan Peterson/Lawrence Auster vs. Mark Steyn thing is a sufficiently common phenomenon that it’s got a name: “the narcissism of small differences.” Back in the day, I was thoroughly dismayed by Auster’s constant attacks on Steyn, which seemed to surpass in vitriol anything he ever said about genuinely bad actors like, say, David Frum. And Day’s scorched earth tactics against Peterson are, if anything, still more “off the rails” – as you aptly put it. The word “narcissism” is particularly apropos in Day’s case – is there anybody on the internet so quick to toot his own horn – and to toot is so loudly?

it really is weird. i think VD is a very good ideas man and enjoy reading his thoughts on just about every topic (save sci-fi), but it seems like 15+ posts on JP in the last 3 days means jp is in his head like a blood clot.

I like Vox, but his reaction to Peterson is a bit cringey, he seems to be disagreeing with him on a different plane than Peterson intends to operate. He’s a shrink, not an Aristotelian philosopher – and he never claims to be. Vox’s reaction to Peterson’s sympathizers is also striking in that it feels unhinged.

VD is a joke. I stumbled on his blog one time. I saw he was making a big deal of his so-called American Indian heritage for some reason, so I mocked him by calling him Big Chief Blogging Eagle. Then he responded by saying “look how racist these leftist SJWs are” even though I had said nothing that could be construed as leftist. All I had done was mock him, which in his mind automatically makes me an “SJW.”

I find it mildly ironic that Peterson’s defenders are defending an emotionally unstable, mentally ill individual who proclaims his dependence on mood-altering drugs using the narrative that I have lost my mind. The thing is, they are constantly attempting to set up a “I win, you lose” scenario, which is quite funny when you compare the critics of one Darkstream to the critics of a later one.

  1. How can you criticize him when you haven’t even watched his videos?
  2. Well, maybe you’ve watched a video or two, but how can you criticize him when you haven’t even read his book?
  3. He’s just a psychologist helping people, he’s not a philosopher! Wait, he said what?
  4. Well, just because he is trying to create a new philosophy doesn’t mean it’s a bad one!
  5. Just because you write a UN report doesn’t mean you agree with it!
  6. Just because you worked with John Podesta was on doesn’t mean you’re associated with him.
  7. Just because the media asks you to appear on all the shows and leaps to your defense whenever someone calls you names doesn’t mean you’re not the legitimate opposition to the media.
  8. Why is Vox so obsessed with this? Something must be wrong with him! He must be jealous. Or crazy!

They can’t seem to grasp that all I have been doing is systematically responding to their various defenses of the man, which keep popping up anew every time I knock one down. I don’t care about Peterson himself, his life is a living hell of insecurity and fear. How stupid would you have to be to envy a man who sincerely believes that life is suffering; apparently the man can’t even eat chocolate. It’s his philosophy and his defenders with which I have the problem.

Of course as one wiser commenter noted, I agree in your description of VD’s personality, yet you do not address any of the arguments he has made. Weak sauce, that. And the differences between VD and JP are not small. They are at the foundations of their respective philosophies. Understanding this would require, again, reading what they have written. 

As far as the idea that I am jealous of Peterson, to the contrary, what profit a man to top the bestseller lists at the price of his intellectual soul? If I was prone to envy, I’d envy NN Taleb, or perhaps the guy who wrote Who Moved My Cheese. Anyhow, at this point, I’ve said pretty much all I needed to say until the book comes out. If you still take the man seriously at this point, that’s on you now. The information is there.


Please to disavow

Sam Rocha would like to make it very, very clear that he does not approve of me, this blog, the Israeli government, or anything else that can possibly be described as Alt-Right.

PUBLIC NOTICE & STATEMENT:

I have been informed that the Alt-Right blog *Vox Populi* has a sympathetic post excerpting and linking to my critical review of Jordan B. Peterson that ran yesterday morning at Catholic News Service and listing my 12 rules parody thread.

I fully, completely, and totally reject any form of sympathetic association to this site and its ideology.

More than that, I see these people’s ideological platform as a grave evil. As a Mexican-American, I cannot assume if they take me to be “white” or not. So let me assure them that I am a racial mestizo and proud of it.

All intellectual debates aside, I want nothing to do with any person who advocates for anything approaching any form of political ethnonationalism, most of all that falsely conceived, racist ethnos called “white.”

I have been extremely critical of Rod Dreher and Jordan Peterson and others for not distancing themselves immediately from any form of alt-right sympathy. I hold myself to the same uncompromising and absolute standard. As soon as I found out, I posted this thread.

My Roman Catholic faith — and every other institution I am affiliated with — also condemns this ideology, but, tragically, it is the particularity of my race that is now the clearest bright line. All the same, I condemn the Alt-Right, totally.

Since we’re playing identity cards here, let me state that it is mildly amusing to me, the great-grandson of a Mexican revolutionary, to see a Catholic wildly waving his Mexican identity like a flag in defense of his desire to continue living as a mestizo invader in an Anglo-Saxon Protestant country. While my great-grandfather was of the revolutionary faction that more or less tolerated Catholics instead of slaughtering them out of hand, there is an irony there that will likely escape those who are insufficiently familiar with La Reforma, La Cristiada, and the Calles Law.

But Mr. Rocha need not worry. I can assure him that I have zero sympathy for him or his Bronze Catholic pride in La Raza Cósmica. I merely found it both interesting and informative that even people as ideologically divergent as we happen to be can find common ground with regards to the observation that Jordan Peterson is an intellectual charlatan.


Pushback to the Peterson expose

Caffeine & Philosophy has written me an open letter to me, which I will quote in part:

I enjoy reading your work. But it is a different kind of amusement I experience than normal, reading your criticisms of Dr. Jordan Peterson. It’s not that your criticisms are inept, or even completely wrong, but they convey a misunderstanding that is tragically mirrored in the misunderstanding I see in my friends and family members to whom I try to explain your ideas.

I think the problem lies in communication style. You are, first and foremost, a dialectician. You may play the rhetorician, and you do it well, but anyone who has read both your debate books about The Existence of Gods and On the Question of Free Trade after having read your rhetorical works like SJWs Always Lie and Cuckservative can see that your heart is in the syllogism. I know this based on your minimal to absent tolerance for non-syllogistic thinking, in commenters or in virtually anyone else. You literally have to convert ordinary debate into pseudo-syllogisms (the enthymeme) to find it tolerable. This is not a criticism. Your subsequent precision is one of the reasons I enjoy your work so much.

Unfortunately, it’s also a reason why you are often misunderstood, dismissed as an asshole, or as ridiculous. It may also be why you have a hard time with intellectuals (or humans generally) who are not dialecticians.

Jordan B Peterson is not a syllogistic thinker. This, too, is not a criticism, and I suspect it is why you have a difficult time taking him seriously.

To the contrary, I take Jordan Peterson very seriously indeed. Yes, he is dishonest, incoherent, and hopelessly illogical, and but there is method and intent underlying the madness of Jordanetics. Still, Caffeine & Philosophy simply finds it hard to believe that Jordan Peterson is Approved Opposition, if not worse.

Jordan Peterson is being pushed by mainstream media as a “right-wing” intellectual so that he can gate-keep the Alt-Right.

Peterson never claimed to be of the right. He has sympathies for some right-wing positions (like respect for tradition as a starting place), but he has always claimed to be a classical liberal. This makes his opposition to the Alt-Right entirely normal.

But just because someone is being pushed by the mainstream doesn’t mean that they are necessarily serving their interests. When Hillary’s campaign information came out, we learned that she had donated to Trump’s primary campaign. Obviously, she had thought she could divide the candidates and hurt Cruz, thus increasing her chances of winning the general. But it didn’t turn out that way.

The mainstream outlets that are now pushing Peterson haven’t the faintest idea what it is they’re even supporting. To them, he’s just a popular guy with some edgy ideas. But he is telling people that the school system is corrupt and that the modern left is pathological. He’s telling men to be prepared to fight. It’s possible that the short-term effects of his advice will harm the Alt-Right, but because the identitarian position is the natural one for healthy and self-confident people, his practical advice for being assertive, combative, taking responsibility, and getting your own life in order will ultimately help the Alt-Right in the long-run.

 Yeah, so, about that.

Interestingly enough, the picture of Peterson in the mask at home in front of his Lenin portrait to which I linked yesterday has been disappeared. Meanwhile, even as the evidence of Peterson being the Mouth of Soros grows, a member of the ELoE group on Idka correctly notes that it doesn’t matter whether the globalist minions are card-carrying party members, constructs, or mere fellow travelers.

The global elites do create, and we’re all very familiar with false flags, fake news, and puppets like Shapiro. But they also manipulate and shape organic developments to their ends. Peterson probably did start out posting lectures and resenting pronoun laws. The Weinsteins likely did emerge from the Evergreen debacle. An element of common sense may well have taken Rubin from SJWism to Liberalism. What matters is that all of them can be used to serve globalist ends. In the current climate, civic nationalism is indistinguishable from globalism. I don’t mean in some “theoretical” formation, but in terms of their overall faith in human perfectibility, the people they oppose, and the alliances they form. The only real “left-right” distinction is between a globalist, atheist tyranny crouching behind a fig leaf of civic nationalism and the empirical, Christian, nationalist West. Who cares about gradients of twentieth-century political taxonomy?


An eminent person

/pol/ is onto the Jordanetics fraud.

UPDATE: The 8chan thread already got nuked, so it has been reposted at 4chan, and has also been archived.

Jordan B. Peterson worked on the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Sustainable Development, editing a document that was released in 2013 entitled ‘A NEW GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP: ERADICATE POVERTY AND TRANSFORM ECONOMIES THROUGH SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT’. One of the panel members of this UN High Council was none other than skippy himself, John Podesta.

A NEW GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP:ERADICATE POVERTY AND TRANSFORM ECONOMIES THROUGH SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
The Report of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda

In July 2012, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced the 27 members of a High-level Panel to advise on the global development framework beyond 2015, the target date for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The Panel was part of the Secretary-General’s post-2015 initiative mandated by the 2010 MDG Summit. UN Member States have called for open, inclusive consultations involving civil society, the private sector, academia and research institutions from all regions, in addition to the UN system, to advance the development framework beyond 2015.

There is a global ethic for a globalised world, based on our common humanity, the Rio principles and the shared ethos of all traditions: “do as you would be done by.”  

Look what it says on page 18 under the heading ‘Global Impact by 2030’:

International Migration:

The universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of migrants must be respected. These migrants make a positive economic contribution to their host countries, by building up their labour force.

From the report: The  deliberations  of  the  Panel  were  informed  by  the  broad  consultative  process  conducted  by  the  United  Nations,  as  directed  by  the  Secretary-General  in  our  terms  of reference. This includes national and global thematic consultations under the aegis of the United Nations Development Group (UNDG), regional consultations undertaken by  the  Regional  Commissions,  consultations  with  businesses  around  the  world  under  the guidance of the UN Global Compact, and the views of the scientific and academic community as conveyed through the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. We are grateful for the perspective these extensive consultations provided.

Some initially doubted that Peterson was actually involved with this UN agenda, since he is not listed among the 27 members of the panel. However, in an interview with The Dark Room Podcast in October 2016, Peterson openly declared that he was not merely involved with the UN HLP report, but actually wrote the underlying narrative for it.

I’m a media whore, you know…. I’m a professor at the University of Toronto so far. I’m a clinical psychologist, I have a clinical practice, I’m a business consultant, I do executive coaching, mostly for senior partners of big law firms. I run a testing business for the world’s biggest early-stage technology incubator in California, called the Founder Institute. They’ve started 2,000 business in the past five years and I’ve screened all 30,000 of their entrants because I know how to predict entrepreneurial ability. I designed a program called Future Authoring that has helped more than 7,000 university students improve their grades by 25 percent and decrease their dropout by about the same amount. I worked on the UN Secretary-General’s High Panel for Sustainability Report that was delivered, I believe, in 2013, and rewrote the underlying narrative to strip out most of the ideological claptrap.

His involvement with the UN was also confirmed in his bio at Moses Znaimer’s conference, Ideacity:

Dr. Jordan Peterson has been a dishwasher, gas jockey, bartender, beekeeper, and railway line worker. He’s taught mythology to lawyers, doctors and businessmen, consulted for the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Sustainable Development, helped his clinical clients manage depression, OCD, anxiety, and schizophrenia, and lectured extensively internationally. Dr. Peterson has published more than 100 scientific papers, and revolutionized the psychology of religion with his book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. As a Harvard professor, he was nominated for the prestigious Levinson Teaching Prize. His YouTube channel’s videos have over 8,000,000 views, and his lectures on mythology were turned into a popular 13-part series on TVO. Dr. Peterson’s online self-help program, The Self Authoring Suite, has been featured in Oprah Magazine, CBC Radio and NPR, and has helped over 100,000 people resolve the problems of their past and radically improve their future.

I can’t say I’m even a little bit surprised to learn that Peterson is NWO, given that one of his stated motives is to dissuade young men from opposing the neo-liberal world order. But Peterson’s involvement in writing that particular document is interesting in light of how, in Maps of Meaning, he explicitly observes that immigrating foreigners have been considered a source of chaos dating back to the classical era. That would put the imperative for the Hero to “slay the Dragon of Chaos” into a new perspective, would it not? In other words, there is now very good reason to believe that Peterson actually knows the extent of the philosophical evil he is advocating; he is not some sort of naive, accidental Pied Piper.

It is clear that Peterson is not, and never has been, what he presents himself as being. Once I finished the first chapter of Maps of Meaning, a thought struck me – which I will later explicate, as it is relevant to demonstrating what an intellectual fraud he is and how wholly ignorant of the Western canon – and I predicted to a companion that there would be less than FIVE references to Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Augustine in the entire 714-page book.

Then I did a search. There were two references to Aristotle. TWO! That was all. My companion was duly impressed, especially when I contrasted that lack of references with the vast number of references to Jung, Freud, and Plato. Now, here is the punchline: both references to Aristotle were contained in a single quotation by “the eminent theologist Reinhold Niebuhr”. Peterson never once refers to Aristotle himself, or any of the great philosopher’s many works.

I had been wondering how Peterson could produce some of the stupid and obviously false statements he had made about history, such as medieval people not being familiar with rhetoric, or the ancients not knowing how to think empirically. But apparently he really is that ignorant, because he’s never actually read most of the classics, he has only read about them, third- or even fourth-hand.

Forget his being buddy-buddy with Ben Shapiro. That’s bad enough, but this guy de-platformed Faith Goldy for her associations… and he’s connected to John freaking Podesta!


Stay away from the math, Jordan

My original meme about the man was spot on. Jordan Peterson reports that his quantitative IQ is between 108 and 123:

I don’t know what my IQ is. I had it tested at one point; it’s in excess of a hundred and fifty, but I don’t know exactly where it lands now. I should, I should, what, qualify that to some degree, you know, as your intelligence increases, the scatter between the different subtypes of intelligence such as there are, there are, increases, so you might say that there’s only one way to be stupid but there’s many ways to be intelligent, and so I’m not overwhelmingly intelligent from a quantitative perspective. You know, I think my GRE scores for on the quantitative end of things for about 70, 75th percentile, which isn’t too bad given that you know you’re competing against other people who are going into graduate school, but there’s a big difference between 75th percentile and 99th percentile, and I think that’s where it was verbally, something like that, so I can certainly see that I have gaps in my intelligence when when I’m discussing things with people who have real, who are really quantitatively brilliant.

You might want to keep this admission in mind when contemplating my original point of contention with the man. My verbal and math SAT scores were very similar, both in the 99th percentile, so while it is certainly not impossible for me to make a mathematical or statistical mistake, the fact that Jordan Peterson has demonstrated himself to be unable to grasp the way in which an excessively high mean on the part of one subset of the population absolutely necessitates an excessively low mean for the majority of the population given the known average for the entire population may be, at least in part, the result of the man being quantitatively challenged.

On the other hand, I would tend to think that even a quantitative IQ of 108 would be sufficient to grasp what is, after all, a very simple mathematical relationship that dictates an intrinsic tradeoff. But I wouldn’t know.


The Reluctant Messiah

Matt Welch of Reason notices that something is seriously off about Jordan Peterson:

There are three truly weird moments in 12 Rules for Life that have largely escaped notice, though they should have set off alarm bells among reviewer and author alike. The first comes in the introduction, where Peterson describes a dream he had while writing Maps of Meaning in which he was “suspended in mid-air, clinging to a chandelier, many stories above the ground, directly under the dome of a massive cathedral.” Messiah much? He keeps going: “My dream placed me at the centre of Being itself, and there was no escape. It took me months to understand what this meant.…The centre is marked by the cross, as X marks the spot. Existence at that cross is suffering and transformation—and that fact, above all, needs to be voluntarily accepted.”

The second is another dream about halfway through the book, in which our hero was again in the air, this time with a view of massive glass pyramids, “all full of people striving to reach each pyramid’s very pinnacle.” Yet there was a further space above all that, “the privileged position of the eye that could or perhaps chose to soar freely about the fray; that chose not to dominate any specific group or cause but instead to somehow simultaneously transcend all.” Jesus.

The final eyebrow-raiser comes in the coda, where Peterson tells a symbolic story about being wowed by a friend’s night-lighted pen, asking for it as a gift, writing down on a piece of paper, What shall I do with my newfound pen of light? then waiting for revelatory response. Among the answers about life that tumbled forth: “Aim for Paradise, and concentrate on today” and “honour your wife as a Mother of God.” Among the questions, What shall I do with a fallen soul? and How shall I educate my people? The final couplet of this inspirational session: “What shall I do when the great crowd beckons? Stand tall and utter my broken truths.”

The only question is whether he’s the second coming or merely John the Baptist.

Neither. He’s not even a plausible antichrist figure, he’s simply a whack job desperately trying to hold his mind together. If Welch thought those three moments in 12 Rules for Life were truly weird, he’s going to be seriously freaked out by Peterson’s posturing in Maps of Meaning. From the preface, which is entitled DESCENSUS AD INFEROS, which means “The Descent into Hell.”

My parents lived in a standard ranch-style house, in a middle-class neighborhood, in a small town in northern Alberta. I was sitting in the darkened basement of this house, in the family room, watching TV, with my cousin Diane, who was in truth—in waking life—the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. A newscaster suddenly interrupted the program. The television picture and sound distorted, and static filled the screen. My cousin stood up and went behind the TV to check the electrical cord. She touched it, and started convulsing and frothing at the mouth, frozen upright by intense current.

A brilliant flash of light from a small window flooded the basement. I rushed upstairs. There was nothing left of the ground floor of the house. It had been completely and cleanly sheared away, leaving only the floor, which now served the basement as a roof. Red and orange flames filled the sky, from horizon to horizon. Nothing was left as far as I could see, except skeletal black ruins sticking up here and there: no houses, no trees, no signs of other human beings or of any life whatsoever. The entire town and everything that surrounded it on the flat prairie had been completely obliterated.

It started to rain mud, heavily. The mud blotted out everything, and left the earth brown, wet, flat and dull, and the sky leaden, even gray. A few distraught and shell-shocked people started to gather together. They were carrying unlabeled and dented cans of food, which contained nothing but mush and vegetables. They stood in the mud looking exhausted and disheveled. Some dogs emerged, out from under the basement stairs, where they had inexplicably taken residence. They were standing upright, on their hind legs. They were thin, like greyhounds, and had pointed noses. They looked like creatures of ritual—like Anubis, from the Egyptian tombs. They were carrying plates in front of them, which contained pieces of seared meat. They wanted to trade the meat for the cans. I took a plate. In the center of it was a circular slab of flesh four inches in diameter and one inch thick, foully cooked, oily, with a marrow bone in the center of it. Where did it come from?

I had a terrible thought. I rushed downstairs to my cousin. The dogs had butchered her, and were offering the meat to the survivors of the disaster.

I dreamed apocalyptic dreams of this intensity two or three times a week for a year or more….

The eye in the pyramid. The spirit writing. And now the cannibalism of the beautiful cousin. How much more evidence do you require? Do you still doubt my take on the man? Do you still doubt my opinion that following this lunatic’s philosophical, theological, or psychological lead is not going to lead anyone anywhere good? Maybe you still can’t smell the bullshit, but how can you fail to recognize the stink of sulfur?