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Comment by sprafa | Hacker News Reader

Peterson lost a lot of credibility for me when he took a group selfie with some guys with a big Pepe The Frog flag. I mean it’s kind of funny but 90% of the Pepe memes are actually racist and horrible (from what I’ve seen). After that I couldn’t take his alt-right denialism very seriously.

It’s a shame because I actually think some of his talks are quite good.

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So you disregard a person's all opinions only because he took a selfie with bunch of people and a cartoon character and the 90% of the said cartoon character's memes you have seen are racist and horrible.

Ah well if you see the selfie you might change your mind.

But yes.

The main thing for me was I rarely if ever see Peterson smile. And in this photo he’s grinning ear to ear.

>The main thing for me was I rarely if ever see Peterson smile.

Where do you usually look for his smile? In footage of high-pressure media interviews and public debates? In the photos carefully selected by the editors of whichever news sites you browse?

Could be he just likes meeting fans, and is amused by a goofy cartoon frog. See also: Hong Kong protestors’ use of Pepe, and prevalence of the meme among less politically-afflicted but still sad and disaffected young men on the Internet. Also mainstream on Twitch.

It’s sad to see people fall for guilt by association. In most interviews that Jordan Peterson has when he talks about meeting his fans is when he sounds the happiest.

This really is what Scott Adams talks about with two movies and one screen. The interpretation of events speaks more about the interpreters rather than the actual events now.

This is not guilt by association. He didn’t happen to be around when they took the photo, he’s clearly enjoying having the Pepe flag in it.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vkSEmNoqhZY/maxresdefault.jpg

I wasn’t going to mention it because sometimes I think it’s just 4chan trying to have a laugh by making everything appear controversial, but the guy on the left is doing a pseudo white nationalist symbol (even though again, I’ve heard it’s not, but sometimes yes? I don’t know everything is confusing now.)

I judge people by their actions as much as their words. And this, to me, is a very strange photo.

> the guy on the left is doing a pseudo white nationalist symbol (even though again, I’ve heard it’s not, but sometimes yes?

No, it's not now, and never was. It's always been the "OK" symbol, and always will be (as in, "Everything's okay over here!"). That was just some pathetic campaign from the left to get someone in trouble that merely disagreed with the "agenda".

It even has it's own emoji and wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_gesture

Relevant article. The plausible deniability of the gesture seems to be part of its appeal to 4chan and Proud Boy trolls.

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/18/ok-sign-white...

Pretty sure the appeal is the outrage it triggers.

Ok so us normies out here who use the ok gesture and have no idea about the stupid 4 chan meme are going to be considered white nationalists now? Seems like a good way to make a problem where there isn't one.

“Normies” don’t use the word “normie”, and the label of harm applied by the SPLC isn’t prescriptivist, your beef is with the white nationalist Internet kids.

This is a Pepe flag, MAGA hat plus the “OK” sign with three fingers up.

Again I like Peterson. But keep saying this is a coincidence or innocent photo... I don’t know, I wouldn’t be caught dead in this photo.

It is funny how this can be clearly observed about the OK gesture deal. I would say most people see that as your regular OK gestures, while some see it as final proof of subscription to a particular ethnic related ideology.

So lets disregard the hundreds of hours of in depth explanation and analysis of his actual opinion, and condemn him for a decision made in a handful of seconds in a context we don't fully know. Because clearly the worst thing we can find on anyone, interpreted as uncharitably as possible, is the only thing about them that matters.

I hope you hold yourself to the same standard.

This is absurd. Where on earth are these "racist and horrible" Pepe memes coming from? In reality, 90% of uses of the Pepe character (which is now a fading meme) are as an avatar or highlight of a post's emotion. Seriously, the majority of all Pepes ever posted have been either a sad frog, a smug frog, or a happy frog. People use the meme to help express themselves along with their text, and then people spazz out worse than a bored housewife hearing about D&D in 1985 or NWA in 1995.

Peterson may not even be able to see the flag in the photo, but he has known about Pepe for a while, and even mentioned the meme in his livestreams as "interesting", possibly because as a Jungian psychologist he sees some association with Abraxas, which is a kind of "god of nature" / good+evil archetype in some of Jung's writing.

One of the most insidious effects of internet news in general and social media in particular is that we latch to information bubbles where people spread material painting "the other" in the worst possible view. It is entirely possible that u/sprafa news feed is a place where 90% of Pepe-related content does consist of "look at what those evil racists are peddling all day long" outrage based like-bait.

The sad part is the u/sprafa may well be unable to reconcile the perspective of what he saw with his own eyes with the perspective of others, in which Pepe is merely an avatar of one's own benign emotion.

You have a point. I’ve only ever seen Pepe in r/The_Donald where it is a vile object

Appreciate the courage. Can't speak for Jordan Peterson, but there are some of us that don't have a lot of time for or interest in browsing reddit in general and political subreddits in particular. We very rarely see a Pepe meme.

He probably takes pictures with hundreds of fans after each talk. Taking a picture with a random fan having a frog flag is not an endorsement of nazism.

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