I watched 30m of a Peterson ‘lecture’ a co-worker recommended to me. It kind of opened my eyes. Peterson is basically a ‘motivational speaker’ that presents himself as an academic well enough to fool people that only understand academic aesthetics. He doesn’t even try to back up his claims or references, he just makes wildly abstract and generalized claims about human civilization and draws analogies that sound like they support that perspective. They sound right enough to people that want to believe that there is an expression of their culture that is inherently ‘good’ and all of civilization’s problems are based on corruptions of that culture. But in the minds of his fans he’s offering ‘proof’ of this perspective by appearing academic, even though he offers none.
he’s a TED talk basically.
most TED talks are like that. sophisticated sounding gibberish that has no real world merit, but sounds really cool and interesting.
It really has become so easy to make yourself seem smart and credible these days. The fact that people thought Trump was a “good businessman” is absurd
Give millions of people across the US the same money, connections, and opportunity and they would all be just as successful if not more.
This shines brightly in his “debate” with Slavoj Zizek
https://piped.video/watch?v=qsHJ3LvUWTs
Also love that Peterson is glued to his laptop while Zizek fucking slams shit down with nothing but paper notes.
I felt like Zizek understood that debating Peterson directly wouldn’t benefit him, and instead took his case to the audience, sort of bypassing Peterson himself and focusing on the ideas he wanted to share.
However, I don’t disagree. I wanted to see more of Zizek shaking is head in his “my god” disbelief at the bullshit Peterson was peddling.
As far as I’m concerned Zizek went the right amount of hard, considering how effortlessly, utterly, and thoroughly he dunked on Peterson without Peterson ever having any idea what had happened.
In no way was that fair play. That was the rudest thing I’ve ever seen done to a person where I yet personally applauded the maneuver. I love Zizek.
Peterson left that debate believing discourse had happened and that’s just hilarious.
He’s just a glorified self-help guy who’s gotten way more attention than he deserves by saying mildly offensive things. He should never have been allowed to become a target for outrage. Once that happened, he figured out how to monetize it and it was off to the races. It’s like a feedback loop.
I highly recommend watching his debates with Sam Harris
It really shines a light on what a fake sophist charlatan Peterson is. Harris is so clear and plainspoken in comparison. His ideas are sophisticated, but explained simply.
People don’t actually like the smart and capable. They like bombastic, big mouth bullies who deliver sound bites and agree with them, or worse yet just a guy they recognize.
Everyone complains about how we only have old guys running for President, when we had several other options in the last primaries. We just picked the worst ones because the others seemed “boring” or people didn’t know them
There’s a little known Aesop Fable called “The Clown and the Countryman” that illustrates something close to this
https://www.infoplease.com/primary-sources/fables-fairytales/aesops-fables/aesops-fables-30
Well, before we can say that Peterson is fooling people by only aesthetically presenting as an academic first we need to define fooling, then we need to define academic and then we need to define presenting. Without that shared substrate we can’t make any value judgements about him because if we don’t have that, we don’t have anything.
As someone who used to be obsessed with Jordan Peterson and had a similar 180 transformation, this is super familiar to me. I remember speaking up at work against critical race theory in a meeting. I look back on that now with huge embarrassment of who I used to be. I was actively working against the things that I stand for now. I’m super grateful to breadtube creators for pulling me out. I still have friends in my life who are like this and I can’t seem to break them out. All I can do is try to be a better example
Contrapoints got me on the right track, but I could also imagine Vaush and his edginess being a good foot in the door for some.
That’s how it worked for me.
When I started college, I thought Steven Crowder was a smart guy (only because I was a complete idiot back then.) I would watch his debates and think he was so clever debating unprepared college students. Which led to debates with Vaush and Destiny in them. Which then led into deeper breadtube.
Now I’m more leftist than Destiny or Vaush from watching Noah Samson and the like. Noah is my favorite breadtuber right now.
Contra would be really good if she didn’t suffer from chronic foot-in-mouth disease.
Initially the most significant was Richard Wolff. His video popped up on my homepage and I actually only clicked it because I wanted to laugh at how dumb this “Marxist professor” must be. That did not happen. Instead he absolutely blew my mind. After doing some research, I discovered that Jordan Peterson had actually mentioned him. He said Richard Wolff had refused to debate him, but once I looked into Wolffs side of the story, I discovered that was a lie. And no wonder, it was obvious Wolff knew his stuff and would have been able to destroy Peterson in a debate.
That was when the wall came down for me. I became unsatiably curious about everything Marxist and anticapitalist, which led me to watching Second Thought, and then eventually leftist creators like Shaun, hbomherguy, some more news, and Hakim just to name a few. I was addicted and watched hours of this stuff everyday until my mind,attitudes and politics changed completely.
During the meeting my boss asked us our thoughts about a recent diversity/equality training session we just had. Everyone said it was fine and interesting but I took the opportunity to be insufferable and soapbox. Like I said, I’m entirely embarrassed about it now and glad they didn’t really listen to me
Okay but for further situations, “the training was great” is always an acceptable response. Maybe throw an “I can send you my feedback later through mail/hr survey”
I mean Jesus
I agree overall with the authors point, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out some solid media from the left side of things.
Some More News/Cody’s Showdy has been consistently great at firing back at alt-right figures like Peterson and Shapiro And related is the content put out by Robert Evans and Cool Zone Media. Behind the Bastards, The Woman’s War, It Could Happen Here are great. And they also did the collaboration in 2020 for Worst Year Ever which I really hope makes a return for 2024
Really most of the Cracked alum are great in this regard but those are the two sources I’ve got I’ve gotten the most enjoyment from
I just finished listening to the behind the bastards piece about Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert.
I was not expecting that
Smn did an extremely short and succinct piece on Peterson. A really quick watch.
There’s another new one that is really good called if books could kill. It isnt cracked ppl tho. Actually I remember that site before it got REALLY bad (I mean not sucked) and I remember a lot of commenters before they disabled comments complaining that the articles are too liberal lmao. Lots of “I come here for jokes not politics!!!”
I actually wrote a really long reply to the rest of your post on why it isn’t really possible for the left to have the same impact as the alt right media.
But then I accidentally lost it. I’m taking it as a sign that I would have bored everyone into a coma and not to try to recreate it lol
I feel like I’ve heard of that one and I’ll happily check it out so thanks for the rec. I love the cracked alum but I definitely want to diversify.
And I definitely remember the comments on old cracked articles being like that. But I do still hold a lot of the writers from that time in high regard.
Swaims video game podcast is good btw, I’d love Soren to start a show too
Please do! And I think it’s one of those podcasts where you can jump in anywhere that interests you, they don’t do any friendly rambling chat before either the whole runtime is dedicated just to discussing that book.
I’ve loved those cracked authors for so long, used to read daily for years and a big credit why I feel like I know so much random shit. I wish the site itself wasn’t now annoyingly unusable I’d like to browse and read some of the OG articles.
Hey! Just popping in to tell you that Soren and Daniel have a podcast together called Quick Question, and it’s really quite great.
Do you know why they stopped producing Worst Year Ever? Never seen a notice…
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve
I’ve never agreed with Peterson much, and this article was really eye opening. I think the expression “not even wrong” precisely nails it: he talks in such broad strokes and general terms that you cannot even start a debate before he swamps you with more generalizations.
The problem is, as OP experienced, that Peterson (although he would never admit as much) and his followers use this rhetoric to justify misogynistic, racist, sexist, and other “traditionalist” views, that are a real danger to the people on the receiving end.
I just had this with a user on here. Dude just went off the deep end with all this nonsense I couldn’t even begin to respond without dedicating the day to unwrapping his tangents. I made his note “a little silly goose” and moved on.
Because the right-wing saturation of platforms like YouTube was so central to my becoming a reactionary, I believe that creating a competing left-wing presence in online spaces should be a priority for the Left. Currently, conservatives enjoy a nearly unchallenged role in grabbing young men who may very well be supportive of progressive movements, but whose lack of community drives them away from collective politicking. This needs to change.
It’s really refreshing to see a suggestion for how to help solve the right-wing rabbit hole problem other than just blaming “education” and saying it needs to be fixed (not that I think fixing education isn’t the answer, I just don’t think that it is the only answer). Something I’ve been asking myself since the 2016 election is, what the hell are we going to do about what is happening to our society that is turning people towards hate, bigotry, selfishness and cruelty? Sure, we can try to educate people, but there will always be folks that turn away from public education. Additionally, here’s only a fraction of us who attend some form of higher education that might expose us to information that might bring some out of a selfish world view. Meanwhile, all that right wing content has flooded the internet, just waiting to enthrall folks who don’t have direction.
Fighting back by introducing an equal (or even greater?) amount of content that opposes hateful ideology is not a bad idea at all as a method to try and catch these folks before they fall into these dark rabbit holes.
This isn’t an actual fix, though. The reason left wingers don’t have the presence the right does on Facebook, YouTube, etc isn’t because of a lack of voices or audiences - it’s because of deliberate manipulation of what is put in front of people. There isn’t really a solution besides finally coming to terms with the fact that the right offers nothing useful and completely and utterly salting their ideology from the earth. And dismantling tech giants, ofc
The reason left wingers don’t have the presence the right does on Facebook, YouTube, etc isn’t because of a lack of voices or audiences - it’s because of deliberate manipulation of what is put in front of people.
I recently have gotten into wasting tons of hours on YouTube shorts, and I was very surprised that after a grand total of maybe 12 hours of using the platform, Andrew Tate content was just shoehorned into the algorithm of shorts being presented to me. Up to this point in time I was watching cosmetics, baking cookies, comedy, cooking, just funny hot takes, but then completely out of the blue one day that guy’s ugly ass monkey face was on my phone, and even though it was so quick that I couldn’t even think of his name, my lizard braid already recognized that he is very dangerous to women, so I opened the menu to select the feature on YouTube that prevents those channels from being promoted to me ever again.
There is 0% chance that the content that I had previously been watching links up in the algorithm to Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, or Andrew Tate. This leads me to believe that YouTube intentionally carves out space for these content creators and makes promises about getting their content in front of everybody’s eyeballs, regardless of level of interest in that type of content.
Once an algorithm is understood it can be manipulated. Russia and the right-wing figured out how to tie Trump videos to other popular videos to recommend it to other unsuspecting users. I get recommended right-wing videos while watching unrelated videos. It’s algorithm manipulation. It’s an endless battle for Google.
When right wingers talk about social media suppressing them I’m always wondering what the actual fuck they’re talking about because it’s the most promoted ideology out there.
I watch a lot of YouTube content and almost none of it is political either way. Mostly it’s how-to videos, science videos, or music videos. I’ve noticed two things lately concerning alt-right recommendations - First is, I get alt-right videos recommended when I visit a creator who in addition to their “normal” content has one or more videos that espouse right wing commentary. I recently fell into a rabbit hole of watching reaction videos of people reacting to a band I like and watched a reaction from a channel called LFR Family. Unknown to me since I was just watching one video about a music reaction this channel is run by very pro-trump people and they have several political videos. After I finished the video and went back to the YT home page every other video was a right wing propaganda piece. The second way I’ve started to get the right wing recommendations is by watching several stand up comedy videos in a row.
The YouTube algo is fucking insane. You click a video or two that you didn’t know was a rightwing nutjob because it had an interesting title and you basically have to delete your account and start over. That shit never ends, it’s just bizarre.
Like I’ve watched hundreds of leftwing videos, but YouTube just does not stop throwing conservative trash my way. I have to search for political videos I agree with. Ones I don’t are just in my face, always. I really don’t understand what they’re trying to do. It never suggests new videos from channels I’m subscribed to most of the time. But Nazi woman hating shit? I always need to see more angry Nazi shit.
Yup, real solutions usually aren’t sexy and don’t make good sound bites. Lot’s of people are unhappy with life and the idea of being able to fix it themselves with direct action is a very appealing concept. Telling someone their problems are causes by a complex mixture of cultural factors and government policy doesn’t give people the instant gratification of hearing that it’s the “others” fault.
A guy in a lambo yelling about how women and jews are the real issue is always going to get more attention than a well constructed and reasonable argument on economic policy.
I originally heard this idea about why so many big start ups end with massive fraud but I think it applies here too. The start ups that create reasonable goals and timelines don’t get funding because someone else is willing to lie and promise more. By the time it’s clear they can’t deliver on the promised results, the honest company is out of business. Same in politics, one side is honest, the other side is willing to say whatever they think will win you over no matter if it’s true. Obviously one will be more appealing because it’s designed to be, but that doesn’t mean it has any merit.
I primarily watch Destiny 2, sim racing stuff, Nori Yaro and Juicebox Unboxed (drifting channels) and youtube recommends me so many channels which are Angry-Bald-White-Dude-With-A-Beard-Wearing-Oakleys-In-A-Pickup-That-Has-Never-Been-Used-For-Work-But-My-God-He-Is-Assmad-At-The-Latest-Thing-To-Be-Mad-At-And-He-Is-Very-Angry-And-Wants-To-Share-It-With-You-To-Save-Western-Democracy. What on earth does this have to do with any of my other video interests? Youtube is pushing people towards this shite, and it doesn’t matter how many times you tell them to not show this video, not interested in this content creator, not interested in this topic, they will keep on being recommended. I don’t think it’s appropriate to follow up a video about drifting Toyota’s around Ebisu Circuit with one about how based Marge Traitor Green is.
It won’t work. The left-wing tried it with on-air radio and failed. The right-wing has the financial pool from billionaires to fund all their right-wing grifters while the left media personalities have to rely on grassroots support. There are other factors as well, but money is the biggest issue.
the left isn’t unified enough to ever do this.
i’m a progressive leftist type… and half the time i feel alienated from my own politics because so much of it is basically anti-male anti-white hate jerking where i am told that anything i may say is oppressive to those of ‘marginalized identities’.
i seriously don’t blame young guys for being so hopeless. nobody will give them any positive direction or reinforcement other than charlatans who are looking to exploit them. it’s fucking dark.
i’m so glad my wayward 20s were 20 years ago when social media was not a thing. i had to sort out my shit in person with friends, not on the internet with strangers.
but as a 40 something guy now, i can tell you that NOBODY wants me involved in anything anymore. even my own social groups have taken to being like ‘we have too many white men, they are bad, we need to attract more people of color and women and trans people because they are special and good by default and white men are bad by default’. it’s infuriating and depressing that i’m basically told to f off when I want to contribute to my community.
i should also say i’m working-class, and that is just like… insta banned/hated if that ever comes up from my leftist people. who are typically upper middle class people pretending to be working-class for fun.
i can tell you that NOBODY wants me involved in anything anymore. even my own social groups have taken to being like ‘we have too many white men, they are bad, we need to attract more people of color and women and trans people because they are special and good by default and white men are bad by default’. it’s infuriating and depressing that i’m basically told to f off when I want to contribute to my community.
I don’t doubt that you find the left’s current politic alienating in and of itself (lord knows it can be bewildering), but I have SERIOUS doubts that reality is anything like what you’re describing here. I’m a gun-toting, outdoor-type leftist whose predominantly queer/non-white friends (I live in a big city) always find me more of a novelty than a threat. They look at me like through the walls of a fishbowl, unable to understand a lot of what I believe but also appreciative that I’m an ally on core issues that matter to them. Not once has anyone ever looked at me or any of my other cis white male friends and told them to fuck off unless it’s someone coming in with a chip on their shoulder who feels like they need to prove something by being a confrontational asshole. I suggest you reflect less on what you feel like people believe about you when you’re not around and more on how they treat you when you are. They’re not nearly as threatened or upset by you as you think.
and that is just like… insta banned/hated if that ever comes up from my leftist people. who are typically upper middle class people pretending to be working-class for fun.
The way you phrase this tells me you’re gleaning many of your conclusions from online spaces, rather than face-to-face real life. That’s probably why you feel the way you do. I actually have serious doubts that you have any meaningful personal relationships with leftists who aren’t cartoons or provocateurs. Perhaps the way you’re received online has to do with the fact that your stories are so over-the-top and on-the-nose as to seem deliberately hyperbolic.
Not sure if that comment is genuine or not but you are essentially calling commenter a bad actor, which was literally his complaint to start with lol
We should all take this textbook example of sock puppetry to heart. I’m sorry, but there just aren’t “progressive leftist types” who are also “it’s the working class, straight, middle-aged white men who are the <real> oppressed minority” types. Like point me to one thing progressive about anything in this comment if that’s who you are. Point me to one thing you said other than “I’m a lib, promise!” that couldn’t have come straight out of Jordan Peterson’s or Scott Adam’s whiny ass mouths. Get outta here with that bad faith “I’m liberal but all the trans and black and female people are mean to me and don’t listen and don’t want me around” boohoo nonsense
