Need a plate of generic, insipid platitudes with a giant helping of bad science and misogyny?
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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One of my favorite examples of Jordan Peterson stupidity is when he was lecturing about some ancient civilization artwork that showed two serpent creatures creating humanity. He said that because the snakes were drawn in a double helix that this ancient civilization knew about and wanted to represent DNA.
Snakes coil around one another in a double helix when they mate. The snake creatures in the art were just fucking.
Source is at 1:15:39 in this vid: https://youtu.be/hSNWkRw53Jo?si=MPWip62wkrMX_bP7
Stuff like this is why I will never understand people following him. Like, I get it. It's the bigotry. And when it comes to that, nothing else matters. I understand it on paper.
But at the same time... why? When he's constantly wrong, or when they have to constantly lie about the things he says, why keep listening to him? Why are they like this?
Because he 'sounds' smart, so they latch on to that as their plausible legitimacy as to why what he says must be true.
When he talks/writes, he says a lot of words that communicate nothing. You have no idea what his point is.
Which is a kind of superpower that makes him hard to criticize. Whenever he commits to a fact or something, that's easy to disprove, and people do it all the time. But, when he just says something about cultural marxism or whatever, it's so hard to unpack what he's actually saying that it's hard to prove he's wrong.
That lets his followers say that he's so smart that even the leftist intellectuals can't take him down. Obviously they don't understand what he's saying either, but that doesn't matter. It lets them adore him as some kind of intellectual hero.
Peterson's got the act of a public intellectual down pat. He's never seen without a suit or with a smile, he has a distinguished haircut and a trimmed beard. He shows no sense of humour and uses big sciencey-sounding words.
That lets him have a symbiotic relationship with incels. He makes money selling them things like books, they get to point to a "public intellectual" who's on their side.
He gish gallops word salads.
But not in an obvious way like say Ben Shapiro. He does it using words that sound plausibly scientificalish.
I just want someone to say to him "So, they say when you truly understand something, you can break it down so that other people can understand it. So, break down what 'cultural marxism' is so that one of these poor young men you worry so much about can understand what you mean".
I'm sure he'd try to deflect, try to gallop, try something. But, I would bet that a good interviewer, just keeping him focused on those two words, would show he has no idea what he's talking about.
Oh I know this one, it's called being "Not Even Wrong"
I don't think so. Not even wrong is for something where you can understand what they're saying, but what they're saying is so nonsensical that it's not even wrong. Peterson instead uses words that seem like they could belong together but that are borrowed from many different fields to end up with something that sounds like it could plausibly mean something if you could unpack the words he's using, for example, in a debate he said this: "We lose the metaphorical substrate of our ethos."
That's not "not even wrong", it's just words that have never been used in that order by anyone else, so they could essentially mean anything. Unless you can get him to explain what he means by those words, you can't say that he's wrong. But, he's using those words to deliberately obfuscate what he's saying, and if you ask him to explain what it means, he'll just drive the conversation somewhere else.
I can easily deduce from his inability to elaborate, that he has no idea what he means and likes those words together.
I think this is the case with most public “intellectuals”
A lot of young boys don't have positive role models and feel lost. I think that, in many ways, we are transitioning as a society and young boys are trying to figure out what it means to be a man.
That said, there are better role models than Peterson. He really seems to think that he has expertise in every area he touches on (and he can't help but touch everywhere).
Don't forget the time he wanted to quit benzos to show how masculine he was. His doctors wanted to taper him down so his brain didn't fry (benzo addiction alters brain chemistry and withdrawal can seriously screw you up or kill you if you stop), but trying to taper off over several years wasn't manly and powerful. So he flew to Russia and got a few potentially sketchy doctors to put him in a medical coma for a month, and that's part of why he's so fucked up now.
Oh, or the part where his daughter convinced him to only ever eat red meat, and literally nothing else.
Even though facing the road to recovery like a man is manlier than an easy band-aid fix where you go nap-nap for a little bit and wake up crazy, but unaddicted.
Thanks for connecting the dots for my dumb ass - it was on the tip of my frontal lobe but I just couldn't quite make it...
I can only assume he played a bit too much Assassin's Creed before coming up with that one.
Richard Dawkins has a pretty fun comment about that https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NvzMJqkZV74
I just want to note that Dawkins has almost certainly taken LSD.
That might be, but I think he at least claimed on that podcast that he hadn't.
It did make me raise an eyebrow when Rogan got him to admit he was afraid of the possibility of Heaven being real, due to it also being eternal.
Bruh, if you really don't believe in something, why fear it? Do you know how scared I am of the possibility that Jason Vorhees is real? Not at all! I'm also not scared of the idea that Outworld is real and will take over our realm if we lose another tournament..
So shouldn't the concept of Heaven be just as powerless to his sense of fear?
I'm not making a statement or trying to imply anything, I'm not sold on an afterlife of any kind (I think it's a lovely idea, but, I also think it literally raining chocolate is a lovely idea), I just found that confusing is all.
Praise the Basilisk, please don't kill me Basilisk
Because claiming you have all the knowledge is even dumber than believing in religion.
That's hilarious! I had no idea there was more to this. Thanks for sharing.
Now I gotta track down Rogan and Peterson talking about Dawkins.
If you're a fan of extreme cringe, Jordan Peterson's podcast episode with Richard Dawkins is the source for all that. But the double helix thing was probably the most entertaining one.
Here it is: https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/id1184022695?i=1000574664589
Holy crap, I just listened to it, it's a monologue by Peterson. He's just talking at Dawkins, it's incredible. Completely oblivious.
20 minutes of rambling builds up to Jordan Peterson saying he thinks people can comprehend DNA by moving their consciousness down to the micro level. Dawkins just repeats that back baffled. Then before he can even give a proper response, Peterson says: "I have have taken extremely high doses of psilocybin."
The best cringe.
How the fuck do you "move consciousness" and what is the "micro level",
I understand all of these words, but they are meaningless in this order!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/shorts/NvzMJqkZV74
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Lobster Peterson: "The way these snakes are drawn in resemblance to the structure of DNA, it is evident that ancient civilizations were familiar with the concept of DNA."
Bro, they fucking
Joke's on you. The crazy hair guy explained that ancient aliens taught Egyptians how to pyramid dna. Pwned!
It takes a super-advanced alien race to master the forbidden technology of triangles.
I love that channel. It's one of the best channels I've discovered all year. A perfect balance of entertainment with deep dives into current hot topics. It's like John Oliver but triple the length and even more sarcasm.
Cody's showdy is absolutely one of the best things. Even just on how he decided to do a bit where his outfit got more deranged as the world got more chaotic and I don't think he's straightened his tie since the 2010s
Really? He's on the "Ancient Super Humans were Super Geniuses!" pack? I expected him to have a higher level of research than fucking Spirit Science, but naw.
Hell even if they had ladder double helixes the most reasonable explanation would be a laborer did some psychedelics and either blew a priest’s mind with it or decided to incorporate the thing that blew their mind into some detailed work. It’s not difficult structure to imagine while tripping and ancient people sure did trip from time to time.
In general, assume ancient people were on drugs before you assume ancient people had knowledge of the complex structures they didn’t have the tools to observe.
Big Joe Rogan energy.