Peterson is / was a drug addict that gives mediocre-at-best self-help advice, who also goes around whining about wokeness and saying hateful things, while somehow keeping a large audience and grifting them for millions of dollars. As far as public figures go, it's fairly typical for such a person to invite antipathy.
That is a very severe understatement. He was so badly addicted to benzos (for years) that he ended up going to Russia to have himself put into a weeks-long medically-induced coma to go cold-turkey, which resulted in brain damage. (He insisted on that course of action, which Western doctors refused to go along with, for obvious reasons).
That left him unable to walk or speak properly for months and he still hasn't and probably will never fully recover. Just watch videos of him from a few years ago and compare them to videos from recently.
I get that benzos is being studied as a potential treatment for depression, but he was doing massive quantities, and not as part of a pharmaceutical trial.
Edit: also, "slow well-publicized descent unto madness and suicide on a wave of intellectual dishonesty by public psychological expert and academic" or something using a combinatorial variation inclusive of all those words would be just peachy
https://newrepublic.com/article/156829/happened-jordan-peter...
Peterson was addicted to benzodiazepines, in specific he mentioned klonopin in his interview with New Republic.
Edit: also, does he say it was antidepressants? Anyone got the transcripts of podcast episodes where Jordan Peterson lies about being addicted to benzodiazepines/benzos and instead suggests they were antidepressants? I wish Klonopin was an anti-depressant yo, although im also glad thats absurd and truly not the case for my own sake
Edit: help your man Peterson out? Did you purposefully lie or understate the publicly known and available information regarding the nature of his addiction? Was he maybe cleaning his room so thoroughly to find lost drugs Junkie Jesus style? I wanna believe you but my brain can't just lay down its arms and allow this kinda explicit foolishness or deception.
I thought it addressed it fairly directly:
* gives mediocre-at-best self-help advice * goes around whining about wokenes * saying hateful things
I suppose we should add add that he claims to speak authoritatively about subjects well out of the areas of his expertise.
—Bible/"God"
This is incredibly wrong and convenient. He was addicted to benzos—not anti-depressants. Benzos are anti-anxiety drugs but it is more helpful to think about them as"alcohol in a pill". Peterson is, in a sense, not distinct from an alcoholic.
I'm not one to shit on drug addicts, hell, pot-kettle. But Peterson rubs me the wrong way because of his audacity in acting as if he is above the "usual" drug addict and that he can cheaply sell you the keys in the form of clichéd advice and can sell you better shit if you privately pay him to consult with him when he has to go all the way to fucking Russia to recieve "adequate treatment".
I just can't even with this guy. Like, Im not gonna say he has zero helpful ideas but they are tainted with the nonsense that helps nobody but himself.
Edit: i would like to find out the length of the supposef addiction as well. I just hate when people lie about this shit or polish it up when such stories should be unvarnished and relatively congruent with that which is known objectively or publiy particularly in such a public facing individual.
Edit: he also has the perfect justification so its interesting if his accounts depart from a more objective one in a way that is palpable
Edit: imma help you out here. If you wanna call out something I actually said, use the > and write it
Your comment makes no sense, I never spoke to that which you raise unpredictably and unanswerably so (if thats even a real word)?
"You should be a monster, an absolute monster, and then you should learn how to control it."
https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/17168812447500333...
Or you could just be a decent person. It's not that hard.
"The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence."
https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/17150743954154250...
Counterexamples: Trump, Elon Musk's tenure at Twitter, Boris Johnson. Clearly the current system is not purely a meritocracy. This is also a completely vague statement, so plenty of room for weasling. What exactly does "predicated on competence" mean? I once read that someone fairly famous wrote "Be precise In Your Speech". Oh yeah, that was Peterson.
Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful. And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption.
https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/17136892453603086...
Misogynistic crap. Women are not some undifferentiated glob. Some women don't even have any sexual interest in men!
Also retweeting climate change denial etc.
My experience and history shows that women definitely tend to be more attracted to men who are competent and powerful. There is nothing misogynist about that statement. That statement does not imply that all women are the same, it's a description of a pattern that has a semblance of truth.
When he starts talking stupid, am I to defer to his "public intellectual" status and not only turn off my brain and logic and common sense and/or suspend judgment forever or would that still be ok and would you respond well to an invitation to join me in doing so?
Edit: how many stupid things or over how long a period of uninterrupted time does it take for you to at least reexamine your views? Like this advocacy is as illogical as it is manipulatively and fiercely incorrect on a factual and qualitative basis jointly :/
"Nothing you just said disputes any of what Peterson has said. ... try[ing] to discredit him without actually addressing or disputing anything he's said shows you just have an axe to grind with no substance."
Nothing there about his status as a public intellectual.
2. "Anybody can pick a few random quotes out of context and dispute them." These are tweets he sent on Twitter, not replies to other people. There is no more context. There is a high density of this crap on his twitter feed. At the time I looked, the quoted tweets were in position 4, 8, and 17 on his feed. I could have disputed more of them but those were the easiest to address.
3. There is a difference in between "women definitely tend to be more attracted" and "Women deeply want". If Peterson meant the former he should take his own advice and be more precise in his choice of words. Similarly if I've misinterpreted his other tweets, that's on him for not providing more context. He's not new to this game. (And this is, apparently, one of his rhetorical tactics. There is link in another comment to "bait and switch".)
Peterson Family Update June 2020 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzRbEMzr0k8
Peterson was taking doctor prescribed medication during a time when his wife was dying of cancer and like many in the US (opioid crisis) he got hooked on them.
He is now off of them. If anything this should be celebrated, not denigrated.
Like or dislike Peterson, it's important that we get our facts straight and avoid editorializing for the sake of manipulating readers.
What he does is say something designed to look like a dog whistle to get people upset. Then when challenged on it, he say something reasonable to pull in fans. Then he says something else which is designed to be misunderstood, and repeats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKwSDqJAum8&t=244s explains it, and shows an actual example of how Peterson does it. This example had Peterson using the phrase "enforced monogamy" without context, causing people to assume that he wanted laws to enforce monogamy. Then, when challenged, he said, "Oh, no, what I meant was SOCIALLY enforced monogamy. All that I'm saying is that monogamy is a good thing!" Score 1 for Peterson. And people left sore about it are now primed to react doubly at whatever piece of bait he presents next.
And the "dog whistle" thing you mentioned is conceptually that, accusing someone of saying something they didn't exactly say. I hate this concept. How would someone even proove that something they said wasn't a "dog whistle"?
But by the time you've built yourself a major brand based on doing this over and over again, your repeated protestations about "just being misunderstood" wear thin.
There is a legitimate grey area in the middle.
If you are arguing for A, and you are versed in basic argumentation (as anyone in Peterson's situation is), it is reasonable to expect that you understand the landscape of the argument. As such, if you know that this will be used to discredit your argument, it is incumbent on you to say, "I am arguing for A. I define A as such. With that definition, I am not arguing for D or that A implies D." ___
As for dog whistles, you avoid having that problem by explicitly condemning the groups that use the dog whistle (if you indeed believe that group is wrong -- e.g. explicitly denouncing white nationalists), and by adjusting your argument to avoid any semblance of dog whistles as you learn about them.
Yes, it's more work, but this is the landscape of public discourse. Consider that minorities like Muslims have had to do this to the point of absurdity. (E.g. someone does not support the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian hospitals and the withholding of substantial relief aid to Gaza, but that does not mean they support Hamas or its taking of hostages.)
There are very strong proofs that a hospital was hit by a failed rocket launch of a gazan militia against Israel. Plus Hamas and other militias keep their weapons under schools hospitals and mosques. When ever Israel bomb these sites it first gives notice to evacuate. It's in no way indescriminate. As opposed to a surprise raid against civilians in they're homes butchering their families, mothers before children, babies beheaded before their mothers and children tied up and burnt alive. Perhaps that is why ppl decrying the bombing of gaza while not mentioning what Hamas did get such strong condemnations
The point of the argument is to say that someone who espouses A does not immediately support B, and used a contemporary example.
I could have as easily said, "someone who does not support the bombing and murder of 8,000 Gaza residents by Israel or the withholding of aid does not immediately support the hostage taking of 230 hostages by Hamas." Would that be a less controversial opinion for you?
This is a war, the first strike was the senseless butchery I described. The ideology that drew that strike calls for annihilation of all Jews. And yet, Israel doesn't indescriminatly murders civilians. Israel called all civilians to leave the bombarded area, Hamas called them to stay. you have no idea how many of those dead are combatants, So how is saying "murder of 8000" not controversial?
Israel has no obligation under any international law, or any moral obligation to give aid as long as the hostages are not released. Remember these hostages are as young as 9 MONTHS. Hamas have not let the red cross see them. A person who says what you wrote indirectly supports Hamas by spreading their morally corrupt narrative.
"Holy shit... what? What's... the 'right sort'?"
Get your panties out of a twist, liberals, I just mean I like to eat animal meat.
See? These liberals want to force us all to be vegans.
That's the basic dance going on.
To whit, Norse pagan iconography is a very common in white supremacist imagery. So while I find the Norse pagan imagery interesting and compelling, I can't just hang it on my wall without preparing to defend myself against accusations of being a neo-Nazi. Is it my fault? Is it the accusers fault? No, obviously, it's the Nazis fault; they're the ones that tied a neutral-by-way-of-antiquity symbol to ethnic cleansing.
Does Peterson see what he says as a dog whistle? Impossible to say, but also irrelevant: there are extremists who believe that what he says is in fact a dog whistle, and just like the Norse Pagan imagery, the awfulness of their beliefs taints Petersons beliefs by association. And it turns out that Peterson doesn't have much control over that usage, even if he had a problem with it: the dog whistle is in the promulgation of his ideas by others, not his expression of those ideas.
Just to be clear, I do think Peterson's observations (re: gender roles, amongst others) are just wrong on their face. But that's out of scope for this post.
I hope for better times when we can take what people say at face value and stop second-guessing what they supposedly mean.
And what's insidious about it is that to some extent, people do it just because they know it winds up liberals. Hell, there's a picture of 16-year old me making the sign that way, specifically because the photographer told us not to. That was 25 years ago, so I'm not sure if the symbol had been overloaded at that time. I certainly had no idea about that extra connotation.
Its never clear in isolation if a person using the symbol semi-covertly is doing so because they want to confuse liberals, or to advertise to neo-nazis. Its the same as wearing a red shoelaces in certain parts of Los Angeles. Are you doing it because you're a Blood? Or because you think it goes well with your outfit? What if its both? And if you're not in the context where that extra connotation matters, then no one assumes that there might be that extra connotation. You see the exact same sort of bonkers nitpicking from e.g. QAnon about how every little thing is just code for "this politician is involved in the child sex trade, and want others in the child sex trade to know". Sometimes the accusation of dog-whistling is just bonkers. But I have also seen neo-nazi militias advertising in neutral spaces, and the only reason I was tipped off is because they called themselves the 1488th Civil Defense Militia or some such. As the saying goes, if you know, YOU KNOW.
There are also more explicit dog-whistles, where the word people want to use is deemed politically incorrect. Think "urban" when somebody really means "black" in the late 80s into the 90s.
"In 1981, former Republican Party strategist Lee Atwater, when giving an anonymous interview discussing former president Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, speculated that terms like "states' rights" were used for dog-whistling"
It's the off-internet equivalent of 'I'm just trolling, bro, why do you haff to be mad ;)'
What confuses the matter further is that some of his advice is actually common-sense good-advice. He's not famous or controversial for giving that common-sense good-advice, though.
The point of a controversy bait-and-switch is to draw attention and followers based on how reasonable you are. I already explained how it works above.
A motte-and-bailey fallacy, for those who don't know, is that you have two statements that you equivocate between. The motte is very easy to defend. The bailey is an attack. When you are attacking you switch to the bailey. When you are defending you switch to the motte. And then you switch back by pretending that your defense of the motte actually advanced your bailey.
I see this as different because you actually DO intend to convince people of the bailey if you can. And while in the controversy bait and switch you make it clear when you flip between positions, in the mott-and-bailey you equivocate and attempt to leave people confused.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGEDjd_Nqb4&t=262s is a different video from the same person demonstrating Jordan Peterson using a mott-and-bailey fallacy to advance his position.
As it is now I have to go searching for the interview in question if I want to check for myself if he actually did a bait-and-switch, as only evidence for the switch part is actually presented.
If the video featured proper citations, one for the bait and one for the switch, I might've been able to form an opinion, but alas, for now it is not meant to be.
However, in my experience, Drew goes out of his way to fairly represent people's positions. Based on that I would trust that he's fairly representing his understanding of what other people actually did. Drew's mistakes are far more likely to be from honest error than malice.
I think the ragey criticisms are baited by him dancing around far right positions while otherwise talking pretty normal stuff. Anger based criticisms end up lying to make their point and then make Peterson more popular as a result.
A while back, when I was just beginning therapy, my therapist recommended I take an online personality test, which unbeknownst to me, was authored by Jordan Peterson. After I took the test, it gave 5-7 paragraphs explaining what each individual personality trait meant. Pretty boilerplate, but for some traits, when you got further down the explanations, it started feeling less and less like a personality test.
For example, for the "agreeableness" trait, it would talk about how it was testing how "compliant, nurturing, kind, naively trusting and conciliatory" the person is, and that it generally found women scored higher. Sure, I can believe you've found that during your surveys.
But then you scroll down a little more, and it starts saying things like "This difference in agreeableness between men and women is largest in countries such as Norway and Sweden, where the most has been done to ensure equality of outcome between the sexes. This provides strong evidence that biological factors rather than the environment and learning account for the dissimilarity."
Uh... Why are we talking about Norway and Sweden suddenly? Scroll down a little more, and it makes more sense: "Agreeable people, [...], are more likely to enter professions associated with people, such as teaching and nursing, which are dominated by women. This is true even in the Scandinavian countries, where attempts to produce gender-equal societies has reached a maximum."
Ah. So what we have here is, regardless of whether you agree it's true or not, a political agenda masquerading as a personality test. It's purpose is to argue Peterson's vocal political belief that the gender pay gap is not an issue, because women are biologically better at being nurses instead of engineers. His proof? Just look at those Scandinavians, they have completely solved sexism (citation needed) and still see this gap!
Peterson may have genuinely good self help books and lectures, but the issue is it's not for the purpose of actually helping people. It's to push people closer to his world view, to agreeing with his political agenda. If you truly gained something from reading his books or watching his lectures, don't let me take that away from you. But be mindful of when his self help veers towards political beliefs.
I'm not sure it's a political belief per se so much as a refutation of the implicit assumption that the gender pay gap is entirely the result of sexism and more likely the result of other factors, not least of which are the traits and proclivities of either sex.
I'm not prepared to debate whether or not his argument on the topic is legitimate, but it is something that he has elaborated on and supported with some data.
You can make that argument without having it bleed into situations that are expected to be apolitical.
When someone says 2+2=4 is that political?
Don Quixote and tilting at windmills comes to mind.
Is not a verifiable fact. It's just a political opinion, used in conjunction with a verifiable fact, to smuggle a political argument into a 'scientific' personality test.
He is providing, if not a counter-narrative, then at least a narrative orthogonal to those other people favor.