Tag: Jordan Peterson

Victor Davis Hanson/Jordan Peterson

Hershblogger4 Comments

Following you will find a couple of snippets from a difficult and foreboding conversation. I haven’t figured out how to set an end time since Google changed that API, so they’ll keep going unless you stop them. I’ve included duration info for the bits I’m highlighting.

The whole thing is highly recommended. An hour and 45 minutes.

The title is inadequate. It’s about far more than the degeneration of Ivy League trust funds masquerading as institutions of higher learning.

Higher education, momentarily led by the Ivy League, does have big problems. Admittance criteria exemplify the political attack on meritocracy, the quality of education is in steep decline, the number of administrators is an obscene waste of resources, the treatment of adjunct professors is abominable greed, and – in collusion with the General Government – student debt makes unwary credentialists into wage slaves.

It is infuriating and ironic that civilizational rot should have started in the Education Departments of universities with mottos such as “Veritas” (Truth) “Dei sub numine viget” (Under God’s Power, She Flourishes), “Lux et Veritas” (Light and Truth), “In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen” (In Thy light shall we see light), and especially “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

VDH and JBP spend a quarter to a third of the conversation on higher ed (and there’s a commercial for Hillsdale College in there). But if it were just the Ivy League, Western Civilzation in general and the United States in particular would not be under assault by solipsistic identitarians.

One example, this clip is Peterson talking about the damage to our military from pronoun training, for example. About 2 minutes 20 seconds.

Second example. Hanson is not speaking of mere Ivy League institutions here, he’s speaking about almost all our institutions – public and private. I would quibble with his use of “the state”, because distrust of state institutions is part of everything they’d talked about. Were he editing it, I think he might substitute “cultural heritage,” or refer back to the responsibility of citizenship they touched on before. About 20 seconds.
“Once you lose confidence in these institutions, and once they’re no longer meritocratic, and once people’s primary allegiance is not any longer to the state everything we’ve talked about this morning … the end result is an implosion – very quickly.”

You should watch the whole thing. Just skip back to the beginning from one of those clips.

Erewhon

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Forcible modification of basic human behavior is the Utopian’s dream and necessity. It’s what the attack on free speech is about. If you can’t say something without fear of punishment, self censorship will eventually disable your ability to even think about it.

In a debate with a Utopian, you might cite the failure of previous attempts to establish heaven on earth – in WWII Germany, China during Mao’s “Cultural Revolution,” Cambodia under Pol Pot, Venezuela under Maduro, Cuba under Castro, Ukraine under Stalin, etc. etc..

It will avail you not. The fall back response is that the right people weren’t in charge. Utopia’s never really been tried.

The people currently volunteering to try their hand at being the right people run the World Economic Forum.

The WEF is an NGO apparently operating under the delusion that ‘the problem’ can be solved by instituting tyranny in multiple countries simultaneously:

World Economic Forum (WEF) head Klaus Schwab wrote back in June, “the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”

John Kerry’s on board, if you were wondering how stupidly bad this idea is.

If you weren’t wondering, maybe Milton Friedman can help you overcome Schwab and Kerry’s assumption that if things aren’t perfect, we can only fix them by forcibly changing human behavior to accord with the utopian visions of elite collectivists.

Take that as a 2 minute introduction to the longer conversation below. That conversation examines the results of WEF policy implementation.

Objections to the WEF agenda are often described as “conspiracy theories.” My understanding of conspiracy theories is that they describe secret plans of which only the theorists are aware.

The WEF makes no secret of its plans. Fortunately, discussions of these plans are not yet banned by YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Such a ban would also be an open conspiracy. And not a theory.

Jordan Peterson and Micheal Yon are still allowed to discuss Dutch farmer’s protests against WEF inspired ideas which would destroy farming in the Netherlands. This is an hour and 20+. It is not going to enhance your optimism. It is quite worth watching.

I leave you with one takeaway in case you do not spend the time on the video: Tiny Netherlands is the world’s second largest exporter of food. Dutch farmers arguably constitute the most efficient agricultural system in the world. Even as they are distracted by keeping their fingers in the dikes.

The WEF hegemony places them in its crosshairs. The WEF premise: Nitrogen in fertilizer is a catastrophic global warming threat. Dutch farmers use too much nitrogen. It must stop.

The Dutch government agrees. It intends to destroy its agricultural supremacy. In favor of what ecological improvement, exactly? Who will replace the world’s second largest food exporter with less environmental impact? Somalia? Bangladesh?

It won’t be Sri Lanka. Because Sri Lanka already tried implementing the same plan the Netherlands government is contemplating. It didn’t work out well. Sri Lankans are starving because food crops have been triple decimated. Fuel is not scarce, though. It is unavailable. Food exports were the major source of foreign currency to buy gasoline and diesel fuel.

This attack on farmers is not limited to the Netherlands. Canada is on the same track. Despite the horrific results in Sri Lanka.

And Canada’s plan to ruin farming is just one of their problems. If you’re up for more Peterson, this is a devastating look at Canada’s Sorry State. But, I digress.

The goal of The Great Reset is a drastic reduction in the human population through immiseration, starvation, and chaos. In Germany, for example, it’s manifesting as an energy shortage. The Germans closed down perfectly viable nuclear plants in favor of windmills, and solar panels, and Russian natural gas. They were burning more CO2 intensive coal to make up for energy shortfalls even before the Russians turned Nordstream off. Now Germans are gathering wood to burn for heat this winter.

“What did environmentalists use for lighting before candles? …Electricity.”

Warmth is marginally before food in the hierarchy of needs. You die more quickly from hypothermia than from starvation. Not a whole lot faster, but rioting warms you at least until you collapse from malnutrition.

It will get worse for the Germans when they can’t import food from the Netherlands and have lessened ability to grow their own because of fertilizer shortages. The major process for making fertilizer involves natural gas. Germany is already restricting hot water, and is very unlikely to have sufficient gas for home heating this winter, much less for fertilizer production going into next spring.

Mean Mad Man. Wicked Wrathful Woman.

Hershblogger2 Comments

Joy Reid is an angry, homophobic, MSNBC Progressive propagandist with a laser focus on race… whose show I’ve never seen. I’m aware of her from references I’ve read, though.

Before today’s topic, the latest mention to come to my attention involved her attack on Niki Minaj. Minaj is a popular rapper with 200 million Twitter followers. I looked it up.

Reid attacked Minaj over the latter’s objection to CCP virus vaccination. Plausibly, Reid did this to boost her ratings.
1. Attack someone with 170 times more Twitter followers than your anemic TV audience.
2. Get moar viewers?
3. Profit.

Reid, to Minaj, on The ReidOut (her TV show). Emphasis mine.:

“”For you to use your platform to encourage our community to not protect themselves and save their lives … my God sister, you could do better than that.

… For you to use your platform to put people in the position of dying from a disease they don’t have to die from, oh my God,” Reid continued. “As a fan, as a hip-hop fan and as somebody who is your fan, I am so sad that you did that, sister. Oh my God.”

“Our community” is code. Right?
For: “POC take the vaccination advice of black, female rappers far too seriously for their own good.“?

Minaj tweeted at Reid:

“This is what happens when you’re so thirsty to down another black woman (by the request of the white man), that you didn’t bother to read all my tweets. “My God SISTER do better” imagine getting ur dumb ass on tv a min after a tweet to spread a false narrative about a black woman https://t.co/4UviONyTHy” [can’t guarantee that Twitter link works, Twitter is blocked on my computer.]

Ah, the joys of internecine political warfare. Reid seems to have a propensity for attacking black people who stray off the plantation.

When I saw that Reid was attacking Winsome Sears – a black, legal immigrant, female, and first in all those categories to win office in a state-wide Virginia election – I initially wrote it off to standard operating procedure. But, it wasn’t Reid who drew my attention. That was her guest Michael Eric Dyson: Invited on Reid’s show to call Winsome Sears names, I thought.

I first ran into Dyson when he and Michelle Goldberg debated Jordan Peterson and Steven Fry in the May 2018 Munk Debate. These semi-annual debates are, according to PBS, “Canada’s preeminent forum to discuss the pressing issues of our time.” The debate topic: Be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress… They should have capitalized Progress.

The whole debate is on C-SPAN, and is just short of 2 hours. It is worth watching the whole thing, but… For those unwilling to devote that much time, here’s a 12 minute clip wherein Dyson’s garrulous pretension is on full display. It’s worth a watch just to see how JBP handles being called a “mean, mad, white man”:

Dyson’s MSNBC performance was similar. To spare you watching the whole snake dance, here’s a representative snippet that’s only a 1 minute and 9 seconds:

If you are a follower of Joy Reid, or a masochist – a distinction without a difference AFAICT – the whole 8 minute race bashing festival is here:
Michael Eric Dyson: Winsome Sears Is “White Supremacy By Ventriloquist,” A Black Mouth With White Ideas

In case you’ve interest in others’ opinions of this spiteful man, here are short reviews of each performance from two different black men no longer on Michael Eric Dyson’s Christmas card list. Some interesting insights.

My Reaction: Jordan B Peterson Vs. Michael Eric Dyson MUNK Debate – 8 minutes.

Joy Reid Brings On WOKE Academic To Say Winsome Sears Has ‘Black Face With White Supremacist Tongue’ – 15 minutes

Update 11:58AM, Nov 7, Accidentally published a draft of this. Edited for clarity and flow.

Moral insolvency? Meet reputation.

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I am an admirer of Jordan Peterson since 2017, when he came to my attention as a free speech advocate. This will be the 38th time I’ve used the “Jordan Peterson” tag.

I have watched hundreds of hours of his videos, most of them recordings of his psychology lectures at the University of Toronto. These predate his notoriety by many years. Bona fides. Established.

I’ve watched many dozens of hours of interviews, both friendly and hostile.

I shook his hand during a 30 second encounter after he spoke in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I thanked him for his intellectual courage.

My judgment, then, is based on more than average exposure to his ideas:

[T]he more of him you see the more you will be convinced he is intelligent, articulate, polymathic, grounded, kind, thoughtful and humbly aware of his own exhaustively examined faults. It’s not possible to spend a little time listening to him and come to any other intellectually honest conclusion.

I followed, with sadness and hope, his wife’s lingering, very close brush with death. I am well aware of his resulting, life-threatening dependency struggles with (prescribed) benzodiazepine, and his simultaneous bout with the CCP virus.

These concurrent catastrophes would have been the undoing of a lesser man, especially if he did not have determined assistance. His daughter provided that assistance.

I know her severe juvenile rheumatoid arthritis cannot be gratuitously dismissed, as it was by a Prog-porn scribbler we’ll get to in a moment, as “according to her blog.” Easily available documentation refutes the imprecation. Including what Peterson wrote about it in his multi-million copy best seller.

Mikhaila Peterson’s dogged search for a cure for her own ailment made her eminently qualified to assist her father. As it turned out, quite obviously more qualified than most physicians in North America.

All this pain is used in an extended, snide, mendacious, drive-by kneecapping of Peterson and his daughter in a recent article written in the UK.

It occurs to me that the volume of historical video from both Peterson and his daughter is at least partially protective. Lesser beings would be de-platformed, cancelled… ruined. Instead, the millions who have seen their videos can easily identify the lies.

More people know the truth than have ever heard of the author of this latest dishonorable screed. I will not supply a link to it. I’ll mention neither the name of the author nor of the editor. That information is available in the links below, but the perps do not deserve any traffic from me.

Crucifying Jordan Peterson provides a comprehensive look at the UK article. It includes this quote:

“If anyone were in any doubt why people nowadays go to longform podcasts for intelligent reflection on contemporary issues rather than to the legacy media, where they know to expect only conventional platitudes, disinformation and lies, then a comparison of this article with the unedited audio interview now available on Mikhaila Peterson’s YouTube channel would be a good place to start.”

Why, you might ask, would Peterson agree to an interview knowing from experience the Maim Scream Media™ wants his head on a pike?

Peterson is asking that of himself.

The set up letter from the “commissioning editor” is included in Peterson’s self-examination, and is useful in understanding the true depth and stench of the pit in which these “journalists” marinate in their own excretions. Peterson was savvy enough to record the entire interview on which the article is purportedly based. We can hope, under the defamation law of the UK, that some legal action may thus be possible.

This vicious, deceitful, personal abuse speaks to the perpetrators’ arrogant ignorance; as Kate notes at Small Dead Anmials: Dear S_____ T____;

The question ending that letter to the editor is likely to remain unanswered by the perps, but I’ll try – “Business as usual.”

Movie review

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BUMPED. Update at the end.

The Rise Of Jordan Peterson

I bought this because of my interest in Jordan Peterson and because it received some good reviews as a dispassionate presentation of how a University of Toronto psychology professor suddenly became a world famous, polarizing “public intellectual.”

I was disappointed. I found it superficial and unenlightening. There are a lot of interleaved, ten second soundbites: Pro/con, “He is the ultimate father figure.”/“So, you’re anti-justice. Are you a Batman villain?” There’s a “what” to this documentary, but we are left to wonder why anyone holds such opinions.

This film doesn’t help in understanding the virality of a intellectual cultural phenom whose dozens of 2.5 hour University lectures attract ~5 million views each on YouTube. Or why an assistant professor of sociology will grade any paper mentioning Peterson with an “F;” seeming to confirm one of Peterson’s criticisms of the modern University.

Strictly as a documentary, it very nearly does manage to take no position. As an examination of Peterson’s ‘rise’ it is short on context or background.

Peterson’s objections to Bill C-16 gave him a viral blip when he publicly objected to compelled use of whimsical, invented pronouns: His corpus of prior work made him a phenomenon.

In fact, it’s the hundreds of hours of video he already had published that protected him from the SJW mob (and, until the Bill C-16 blip, was the motivation for the filmmakers to create this movie). There is no sign in this history of the patriarchal, sexist, transphobic, authoritarian, fascist thinking with which he is charged. A point which is not made evident in the film, despite a few truncated clips of his earlier work.

There’s much, much, much more explanation of Peterson’s rise in the video record preceding his tussle with the Canadian nanny-state. Peterson’s rise was propelled by the fact that he is a charismatic speaker and a powerful teacher.

The filmmakers’ attempt at even-handedness may be sincere, but the overall impression is more that Peterson promoted a free speech controversy as a way to enrich himself, not that he was risking his career. For an American audience, without a sense that freedom of speech in Canada is clinging to a cliff by one hand, the film is simply puzzling.

Supposed allies are shown expressing trepidation about Peterson’s outspokenness. This objection is to be expected from most Canadians, whose government has an uneasy relationship with freedom of speech and who are congenitally uncomfortable with controversy. See Mark Steyn, Lindsay Shepherd, etc..

And there are unanswered, factually incorrect slurs. A former supporter turned critic finds evidence of authoritarian impulses in Peterson’s collection of Soviet-era art (prominent in the movie). The reasons for this art are precisely the opposite of what is implied. If Peterson was asked for a response, it’s on the cutting room floor. Here is that response from an interview of Peterson:

[Tyler] COWEN: Let me start with a very lateral question. Why do you collect old Communist memorabilia and propaganda?

PETERSON: Well, part of it is dark comedy. Really, I spent quite a bit of time on eBay for a number of years. And I had read this article by a psychologist named James Pennebaker. He said that the past turned into history at 15 years. That’s when you start to see people commemorate events in the past. At that point, it was 2004, and I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting. It’s 15 years since the Soviet Union collapsed. Maybe I can go online and see what historical memorabilia is left over.”

So I went on eBay, looking up Soviet artifacts, and I thought that was so comical because there isn’t anything more capitalistic than eBay, right? Seriously, that was completely unrestrained capitalism. And then all this Soviet-era stuff was for sale. I thought it was absolutely comical that I could buy paintings of Karl Marx discounted on the world’s most intense capitalist platform…

Some of it is intensely propagandistic, and I’m interested in that because I’m interested in propaganda… So it was interesting to surround myself with these works that were battlegrounds between art and propaganda.

Here’s a vastly better look at Jordan Peterson from the Claremont Review of Books: The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon and it takes less time to read than it takes to watch the movie.

I was quite disappointed, and it caused me to wonder if those cancel culturists pressing theaters to scrub scheduled showings (that link also has a positive review, for contrast) had any idea what was in it. They couldn’t have watched it. Maybe that was just a marketing ploy by the producers.

2 stars anyway, because I learned more about his parents and his family via of the access Peterson granted.

**************

Update: March 10th, 2020
I’ve watched a Q&A with the filmmakers arranged by Columbia University (the filmmakers have established a presence on thinkspot, Peterson’s Patreon replacement), wherein they explained how they approached the filming. And where they answered some of my objections. I was impressed with their commitment to truth. I withdraw my suspicion of ‘marketing ploy.’

I can be persuaded by speech to change my speech.

So. I re-read the favorable review at Quillette. I watched the film again. I’m changing my rating.

If your expectations are informed by some knowledge of Peterson: That the pronoun controversy only triggered ‘The Rise,’ and that that ‘Rise’ would have been a two-day wonder, and only in Canada, and flaming out in a dog-pile of SJW hatred except for the preexisting, deep background of his lectures – then the movie is well worth watching for the peek into his life and family.

I’ll give it 4 stars on that basis.

Jordan Peterson was always the guy who would calmly expose Cathy Newman. We just would never have known it but for Bill C-16.

Real empathy

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Ann Althouse is sarcastic about trans-female athletes:

Today, the pressure to be empathetic toward transgenders is so great that I believe women, known for our empathy and our desire to appear compassionate, will let go of competitive sports and return to the inclinations that dominated back in the days when I went to high school. It’s a trade-off, a trade-off between the potential for athletic victory and the feeling of being kind and inclusive. The latter is something quite valuable and within the reach of all women. The former is a dream, and it’s only a dream for an elite few among women.

I find her reasoning sarcastically oversubtle as well as specious.

True empathy would not involve women giving up on sports, just giving up on winning (which she does mention). More women should enter sports to ensure the transgenders can boost their self esteem and have a legal way to seriously injure real women in the MMA. That’s how women can be most empathetic, and such self-effacement is easily within the reach of even more women than currently play sports.

After all, without women, who are the female impersonators going to defeat?

Update: 3:20PM.

I finished this post and then read a few comments at Althouse, where she resists admitting sarcasm. If that is accurate, here’s exactly what Althouse supposes women will forgo, and that is very, very sad:

Update: Feb-18-20 3:43PM
Later visit to Althouse: She took quite a bit of flack in comments on her post; compelling a second post in defense of the first. She claims Glenn Reynolds’, “So, traditional-gender-roles folks, you have the trans crowd to thank for returning us to the 1950s!” correctly interprets her point.

To me that sounds like sarcasm was the point, but she refuses to entertain such interpretation. She goes to a lot of trouble to say she was simply making a neutral prediction that female empathy will overcome female competitive drive in sports: Because the majority of females in sports will prefer to abandon competition in favor of “compassion and empathy” for transgenders.

Right there you have evidence that transgender women aren’t women. Where’s the transgender empathy for real women?

Who needs some empathy? Female impersonators? Or real women denied success because the female impersonators got permission from cowed bureaucrats to deny their (the impersonators) biology?

Althouse isn’t, she says discreditably, taking a position on the question of transgender “women” competing with actual females, she is just predicting an outcome based on her estimation of actual female psyches. For a retired female law professor, she proposes a surprisingly dim, pinched, and patronizing view of actual females.

For a female law professor and less than obscure blogger: Eschewing any position on anti-scientific, misogynist aggression against females is, in fact, a position. That the aggression is transgender doesn’t dial the female empathy obligation up to 11.

To invoke one of her themes, I call it “civility bullshit.”

EUtopia Lost

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Well worth 50 minutes. (32 to Q&A, but worth watching those too.)

A ringing, hopeful, and needed defense of Enlightenment values. Brexit is but the framework. This speech at Hillsdale is cast in a defense of individual rights and free trade. Excellent and amusing speaker.

Peterson fans will find echoes of his themes of individual responsibility and meta-narratives tied to political events in ways he almost never mentions.

“Lessons from Brexit” – Daniel Hannan at Hillsdale.
70,500 views
Jun 11, 2017

If you enjoyed that, this is a worthwhile followup.