jordan peterson

[zaphod]

chen posted a very good article that completely dismantles peterson's take on "post modernism". conveniently enough no one responded to it and instead people keep posting about nobody having a counterargument. peterson has not read most of the source materials written by the thinkers he's critical of. that's deeply dishonest for a so called intellectual to be doing. why anyone takes him seriously is beyond me.

[chenGOD]

RPS ( I think that’s who posted it, apologies if wrong, misspelled name) posted an even better article from the baffler. It was really well done.

[Alcofribas]

chen posted a very good article that completely dismantles peterson's take on "post modernism". conveniently enough no one responded to it and instead people keep posting about nobody having a counterargument. peterson has not read most of the source materials written by the thinkers he's critical of. that's deeply dishonest for a so called intellectual to be doing. why anyone takes him seriously is beyond me.

 

in light of the fact that it's rather easy to demonstrate not only his incorrect interpretations of the subject matter he endeavors to speak about but also his declarations of outright falsehoods on the matter, i think it's obvious his appeal has less to do with the integrity of his thinking as much as it does with the fact that he crudely tells people what they like to hear. people don't care that he gets all this shit wrong bc it makes them feel good that videos of him "owning" people can be trumped up as more substantive bc he's a "psychologist." the amusing irony is that his pronouncements about "insane," "crazy," "harpy sisters" or "avowed marxists" who are "suicidal their whole life" would be somewhat less ridiculous if he wasn't a "psychologist."

[Salvatorin]

This thread is great. It's helpful for watmm. It's proving extremely effective at identifying all the cute lil baby brain boys we got here. 

[Salvatorin]

It's so precious; we get to watch them grow, their budding little minds swell with new ideas, eased in by the soothing cooing of daddy peepee.

[Alcofribas]

i’d also like to point out that he doesn’t even represent the free speech debates accurately. for one thing, he entirely fails to acknowledge that a tactic such as “no platforming” is widely debated on the left and among literally avowed marxists (cultural and otherwise). even his opponent zizek has been writing about and against liberal pc culture since the early 90s. peterson is presented as some kind of courageous thinker telling the hard truths the left don’t want to hear, which simply isn’t true.

 

additionally, in the campus wars throughout the years it has been the left that has been targeted the most consistently and with the most extreme consequences. if one takes a look at the history of campus culture wars in various western nations from the 60s it’s impossible to ignore the ways in which leftists students and faculty have been targeted, policed, fired, expelled, etc. it seems to me that jp doesn’t make any effort to explain this legacy and the ways in which it persists in the 21st century.

 

we live in an era where people like bari weiss, who in her college years campaigned against the employment and presence of pro-Palestinians on campus, can write opeds in the nyt about how pc liberals want to destroy free speech. or alan dershowitz can be featured in a documentary presenting the same notion even after his disgusting legacy attempting to ban books and ultimately pressuring a university to ruin an academic’s career bc of a personal vendetta based on his books on israel-palestine.

 

it’s indeed curious that jp only seems capable of speaking truth to power in the form of falsehoods against the traditionally powerless.

[caze]

[auxien]

was gonna shop 'foucault' onto the boxing glove but thought that might be too much

[dr lopez]

still good oc

[chenGOD]

https://youtu.be/yvwhEIhv3N0

Sure they could write with a little less rhetorical flourish, but that doesn’t invalidate their ideas, as Searl repeatedly points out.

Also Bordieu is really not that tough to get. Foucault can be wordy but not terrible. Just takes a bit of time to connect the dots.

Actually he mentions Foucault’s Berkeley lectures, the ones on parrhesia would fit this topic to a T.

[dr lopez]

wait foucault is hard to understand? 

[caze]

Sure they could write with a little less rhetorical flourish, but that doesn’t invalidate their ideas, as Searl repeatedly points out.

Also Bordieu is really not that tough to get. Foucault can be wordy but not terrible. Just takes a bit of time to connect the dots.

Actually he mentions Foucault’s Berkeley lectures, the ones on parrhesia would fit this topic to a T.

Foucault isn't the worst offender, and Searle had time for Foucault in person, but not with his writing (though he thought his later work was less bad). Searle certainly wasn't a fan of their ideas either, he's only pointing out that at certain rare times it was possible to drag out some form of coherent argument out of them, not that he agreed with it. Searle's book on social construction is the only sensible thing I've read on the subject btw.

 

Not sure why JP is picking on Foucault in particular rather than Derrida though (...or Lacan or Deleuze, to name a few), who was never anything other than impenetrable, maybe that's all he's actually read? Or maybe it's just because Foucault had more impact politically? I've tried to read some Derrida, complete waste of time. It's possible there's something lacking in the translation, but I doubt it (if there's anything of note there it should be able to survive translation), even reading Rorty's writings on him doesn't really highlight anything worthwhile in his thinking (so I'm not coming at him from a purely critical POV). Rorty isn't bad though himself, blending sensible American pragmatism with the French/German nutters; not that I agree with him on all that much, but at least he wrote in a sensible manner.

[cwmbrancity]

from perusing a few of his lectures, rather than certain podcast content, Capitalism & Schizophrenia by Deleuze isnt mentioned once, which is surreal given it would be a key target

 

Foucault & Judith Butler both support the notion that sex is biological & gender is cultural, which Peterson might've got some traction with especially when being interviewed by non-academics for larger audiences but still keeping things detailed when overdosing on differences between males/females

 

still, strange times made more strange by new media & a degradation in the standards of academic discourse of key ideas & concepts which a lot scholars Peterson derides contributed to, whether folks agree with them or not

[ignatius]

someone get jordan peterson a copy of renoise

[YO303]

chen posted a very good article that completely dismantles peterson's take on "post modernism". conveniently enough no one responded to it and instead people keep posting about nobody having a counterargument. peterson has not read most of the source materials written by the thinkers he's critical of. that's deeply dishonest for a so called intellectual to be doing. why anyone takes him seriously is beyond me.

 

Who benefits from doing away with objective truth?

[chenGOD]

 

Sure they could write with a little less rhetorical flourish, but that doesn’t invalidate their ideas, as Searl repeatedly points out.

Also Bordieu is really not that tough to get. Foucault can be wordy but not terrible. Just takes a bit of time to connect the dots.

Actually he mentions Foucault’s Berkeley lectures, the ones on parrhesia would fit this topic to a T.

Foucault isn't the worst offender, and Searle had time for Foucault in person, but not with his writing (though he thought his later work was less bad). Searle certainly wasn't a fan of their ideas either, he's only pointing out that at certain rare times it was possible to drag out some form of coherent argument out of them, not that he agreed with it. Searle's book on social construction is the only sensible thing I've read on the subject btw.

 

Not sure why JP is picking on Foucault in particular rather than Derrida though (...or Lacan or Deleuze, to name a few), who was never anything other than impenetrable, maybe that's all he's actually read? Or maybe it's just because Foucault had more impact politically? I've tried to read some Derrida, complete waste of time. It's possible there's something lacking in the translation, but I doubt it (if there's anything of note there it should be able to survive translation), even reading Rorty's writings on him doesn't really highlight anything worthwhile in his thinking (so I'm not coming at him from a purely critical POV). Rorty isn't bad though himself, blending sensible American pragmatism with the French/German nutters; not that I agree with him on all that much, but at least he wrote in a sensible manner.

At 54 seconds into the video you linked, Searle literally says “he wrote a lot of good stuff.” He being Foucault.

 

As for social construction, read Durkheim. Then read Berger and Luckmann.

Much better than Searle (objectively and subjectively).

wait foucault is hard to understand?

I mean, not to sling insults around, but for the average Peterson fanboi...

[caze]

 

Foucault isn't the worst offender, and Searle had time for Foucault in person, but not with his writing (though he thought his later work was less bad). Searle certainly wasn't a fan of their ideas either, he's only pointing out that at certain rare times it was possible to drag out some form of coherent argument out of them, not that he agreed with it. Searle's book on social construction is the only sensible thing I've read on the subject btw.

 

Not sure why JP is picking on Foucault in particular rather than Derrida though (...or Lacan or Deleuze, to name a few), who was never anything other than impenetrable, maybe that's all he's actually read? Or maybe it's just because Foucault had more impact politically? I've tried to read some Derrida, complete waste of time. It's possible there's something lacking in the translation, but I doubt it (if there's anything of note there it should be able to survive translation), even reading Rorty's writings on him doesn't really highlight anything worthwhile in his thinking (so I'm not coming at him from a purely critical POV). Rorty isn't bad though himself, blending sensible American pragmatism with the French/German nutters; not that I agree with him on all that much, but at least he wrote in a sensible manner.

At 54 seconds into the video you linked, Searle literally says “he wrote a lot of good stuff.” He being Foucault.

 

 

...and 19 words into the post you're replying to I literally wrote: "though he thought his later work was less bad" (that's what he's referring to about good stuff for the most part, and after that quote of yours he literally says 'but in general he just wrote badly').

 

As for social construction, read Durkheim. Then read Berger and Luckmann.

Much better than Searle (objectively and subjectively).

 

I have. You can't really say Durkheim is better than Searle, they're not really dealing with the same stuff for the most part. Searle's work on social construction was tackling it primarily from an epistemological standpoint, Durkheim is more pragmatic in general and has a wider focus and his epistemology is basically pretty similar to Searle's anyway, if a bit more old-fashioned (much like his ethics).

 

Berger and Luckmann's book on the other hand was not at all any good, like pretty much anything in the phenomenological tradition, and not really in line with Durkheim (there's an influence there, but it's not foundational) so not sure why you link them together. Searle's book is basically an antidote to theirs. 

[caze]

Searle's work on social construction was tackling it primarily from an epistemological standpoint, Durkheim is more pragmatic in general and has a wider focus and his epistemology is basically pretty similar to Searle's anyway, if a bit more old-fashioned (much like his ethics).

 

This was a typo, I meant to say: 

 

Searle's work on social construction was tackling it primarily from an ontological standpoint, Durkheim is more pragmatic in general and has a wider focus and his epistemology is basically pretty similar to Searle's anyway, if a bit more old-fashioned (much like his ethics).

 

Durkheim wasn't a philosopher, and so the ontological position he was putting forth wasn't being presented in a very precise manner, and I think it was quite different from what Searle was explicitly doing (and was probably one area in which Durkheim was closer in line with Berger and Luckmann), but in terms of what they had to say about social facts (regardless of what these are exactly), I think they were pretty much on the same page.

[eugene]

 

chen posted a very good article that completely dismantles peterson's take on "post modernism". conveniently enough no one responded to it and instead people keep posting about nobody having a counterargument. peterson has not read most of the source materials written by the thinkers he's critical of. that's deeply dishonest for a so called intellectual to be doing. why anyone takes him seriously is beyond me.

 

Who benefits from doing away with objective truth?

 

doing away? when did such thing even exist to begin with?

[chenGOD]

 

Searle's work on social construction was tackling it primarily from an epistemological standpoint, Durkheim is more pragmatic in general and has a wider focus and his epistemology is basically pretty similar to Searle's anyway, if a bit more old-fashioned (much like his ethics).

 

This was a typo, I meant to say: 

 

Searle's work on social construction was tackling it primarily from an ontological standpoint, Durkheim is more pragmatic in general and has a wider focus and his epistemology is basically pretty similar to Searle's anyway, if a bit more old-fashioned (much like his ethics).

 

Durkheim wasn't a philosopher, and so the ontological position he was putting forth wasn't being presented in a very precise manner, and I think it was quite different from what Searle was explicitly doing (and was probably one area in which Durkheim was closer in line with Berger and Luckmann), but in terms of what they had to say about social facts (regardless of what these are exactly), I think they were pretty much on the same page.

 

 

Searle basically wrote exactly what Durkheim did without realizing it, because he had never read much Durkheim.

 

Berger and Luckmann write in the introduction to their book that their view in greatly indebted to Durkheim, so it's pretty obvious that yes, Durkheim was foundational to their work.

So one of the reasons I recommended the book is because of the direct influence that Durkheim had on their book, and the other of course is that Berger and Luckmann's book is widely recognized as being one of the most important sociological books of the last century. It also introduced the term Social Construction into the social sciences. So I can either assume that you never read it, or you didn't understand it.

 

As to Searle's comments on Foucault's writing: the sentence "He wrote a lot of good stuff, but in general he just wrote badly" can be interpreted pretty easily to mean that Searle believed Foucault had a lot of good ideas, but he expressed them badly. Searle never had major issues with Foucault, he had a major disagreement with Derrida (who was a terrible writer, but had really good ideas).

 

To bring this back to J Pizzle, for everyone else - what I've been getting at is that Peterson truly doesn't understand social construction, nor has he read much (if any) postmodernism. If he had, he would never make the claims that he had, as Alco has very succinctly described.

 

/saunters.

[roasty]

flol

[Reinehr]

lol

[usagi]

we must defend the purity of our fluids against this encroaching madness

 

 

[Salvatorin]

everything is so gay and shit these days

 

edit: shit and gay

[Salvatorin]

 

suddenly, by simply being an obnoxious pedant or a nuisance to our neighbors, we can fancy ourselves freedom fighters against encroaching totalitarianism.