Why Jordan Peterson is so popular

The hatred is really not that rational. The guy's pedantic. He says a lot of obvious things. He doesn't really pose much of a threat. I've watched a few of the videos and looked for the camera that I can look into to say "Is this for real?"

He stokes rage because he volleys back the more ridiculous parts of the left, and those parts have seized some of the center, and they're really pissed off all of the time, and...I mean, surely you must think there some areas of intersectionality where identity politics has gone overboard, yes? That at least some of it has faint echoes of Harrison Bergeron?

 

First time he made any news here was when he said he would not use pronouns other than he/she for transgendered students despite what the university was saying in their language guidelines.

I am amazed at the reaction he gets from people and do my best to avoid those who are way too in to him or way too critical.

 

Mmmm, what a garbled bucket of nonsense. It was meandering pretty soon after that solid lede, and then I got to "books are something that the left recognizes as drivers of culture." As if it's the first time a person people on the left took issue with had a book that sold a lot (even Michael Savage moved books).

From the way it sounds, Peterson is a pop psychologist/self-help guy. That alone can create popularity. Now it seems what he's good at is making people feel special, or at least in on something, and that makes them special to a degree. That in itself isn't so uncommon. Jason Whitlock used to do it with identity politics. Deadspin used to do it, implying only rubes liked Bill Simmons or ESPN or Darren Rovell, but you read there stuff and were too cool for them. Then Clay Travis turned that on Deadspin, throwing stones at them and ESPN and casting them all as a sinister left (his DBAP implies if you like him, you're not a pussy, and if you disagree you are, often to people who very much don't want to be considered that)

It seems like he says the things that make some folks uncomfortable are bad, couches it in high-minded philosophy and has a tone that makes folks (apparently boys and men who want to feel more secure about the world) feel better about what they happen to be feeling and feel they're standing against something. People like to feel that way, as if they're in a cool crowd standing up to something that's not good.

 

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Jordan Peterson

 

Jordan Peterson is a Grade A douchebag who has promulgated the dumb concept that the involuntarily celibate males of society can’t get laid because a few “high-status males” are somehow cornering the market of eligible women. In that, he’s a hero to losers who fail to understand that their toxic personalities are the reason they can’t get laid. The more of his pablum you read, the more obvious its stupidity.

In the case of the incels, the basic story is that since we live in a free market for sex, and men are encouraged to rack up as many partners as possible, it must be true that the most desirable men, the ones for whom there’s greatest demand, will soak up a disproportionate share of the supply. It turns out that, despite the anguished hand-wringing of the Ross Douthats of the world, American elites actually still really like monogamy. But to notice that, you’d have to look at what happens in real life—and once you do that, who knows how many other conservative myths might fall apart?

Applying the economism frame to the incel thing might seem like a stretch. After all, no one, not even Peterson (as far as I can tell) is actually proposing legally enforced monogamy or sexual redistribution. But the myth that men are being victimized by women’s freedom to choose their sexual partners—that Chad, the sexual monopolist, is crushing the little guy—is being used to advance a genuinely dangerous and very real attack on women’s hard-earned rights. Of course Jordan Peterson wants us to believe in witches. Like so many on the modern right, his whole worldview is a fairy tale.​

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/...s-crackpot-sex-theories-are-pure-reagonomics/

I’m not going to name board IDs, but I can think of three SJ members who probably idolize his bullshit.

 

I don't know much about this fellow, but what little I have read convinces me he is not worthy of listening to.

 

Again, I don't think much of Peterson. He's the professor at the end of the hall who says one interesting thing inside of two absurd things. (Which describes many professors, BTW, but you hire them for the interesting thing.) His popularity, to me, is driven by what he stands against, not what he stands for. Since what he stands for is so pedantic and obvious - of course some men have hyper-access to women...look at Trump! - it's that he stands against something people find equally ridiculous...that's where he finds his popularity!

The Flanagan piece isn't about Peterson, really. It's about the left.

Most of the posts on the thread are about how deplorable Peterson is. And yet he's popular.

The scary thing is the left might just figure he's popular because everyone who listens to him is deplorable.

 

Alas, the title of the thread is not about the left. And the article is mostly meandering nonsense.

It seems what you're aiming at is the left is too serious about things that might not matter and make lots of people feel weird and uncomfortable. And in the end that causes the left to trip over its own cis-gendered dick as it tries to reestablish, I dunno balance things out or take over politically or something. And when it does, it will be because of that, this weird culture war side of it.

The left will probably do that because that's what the left does. Will it be because is just didn't understand the popularity of the Canadian professor whose schtick is making people feel cool and standing up to an undefined cultural tide? I dunno. What if it is? Would you like us to admit to you he should be the canary in the coal mine that tells us people are uncomfortable with some of this?

 

Like "political correctness," the phrase "identity politics" is never really defined, and seems to be used most often by white, straight, Christian men afraid of losing their social advantage.

And Caitlin Flanagan has made a pretty good career at Atlantic as an"anti-feminist" contrarian.

That she'd take up with, or at least for, Peterson, is unsurprising.

 

It's not very well-defined in the piece, no.

It's been pretty well-defined before.

One diversity exercise, for example, is to list all the ways you define yourself. Then, the person conducting the exercise - because this is the point of the exercise - will often have the longest list, often much longer than some of the participants, because to reach into the depths of your identity is part of being woke; the longer that list is, the more real you are. What's more, the more inextricable that identity is to you, the more power and say you should have in a given discussion. This, then, is identity politics. I, as a ___, ___, ___, ___, have this experience and perspective, and it is my truth, and you, having not experienced it, cannot tell me it is not so.

White nationalists, despicable as they are, have embraced identity politics, too. The left's postmodern playbook has been used by the right. You want to tear down the patriarchy. They want to tear down the media.

Everyone has their own institutions they want to topple.

 

I've always assumed that identity politics means dividing people into narrow groups and trying to appeal to them separately as members of those groups rather than looking for what everyone has in common and emphasizing the common identity (e.g., American, or "people concerned about others" if you want to be a little less broad) rather than narrow ones. At a national political level, that would be the left adopting one policy to appeal to African-Americans, another to appeal to Hispanics, another to appeal to LGBTQ, another to appeal to college students, another to appeal to abortion proponents, etc., and implicitly saying "we see you as a member of a particular group rather than an individual American." I can see the counterpoint that many Republicans' definition of Americans marginalizes members of many of these groups, and I remember a line from Arthur Ashe's autobiography that on some days he could forget that he had AIDS but he never had a day where he wasn't reminded that he was African-American. One reason I liked Obama better than most other politicians was that he seemed to appeal to Americans as Americans, not as members of this group or that group - though his identity certainly influenced how many people reacted to him, positively as well as negatively.