Jordan Peterson

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Some Schmo
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by Some Schmo »

huckelberry wrote:
Tue Mar 14, 2023 5:52 pm
Some Schmo wrote:
Tue Mar 14, 2023 5:31 pm
"Freak out" in this context is a euphemism for "not handling it well."
Some Schmo, of course that is what freak out would refer to. I am still wondering why you would have this image the opposite of mine. I realize that it could be completely a result of the fact I am thinking of debates and conflicts some four years ago. I understand he has been unwell in past couple years. What sort of freak out are you speaking of? Four years ago he could keep his cool under all sorts of bad weather.
I've seen him in Q&A's where people challenge him with legitimate criticisms and he has a tendency to insult the question (a proxy to the questioner) rather than address the criticism. He has done this more calmly at times than others, but any time he does it, it communicates to me that he doesn't like being called out or admitting mistakes. He wants everyone to think of him as superior intellectually, and ironically enough, it's a knock against his intellect.

But honestly, he strikes me as emotionally unstable. I don't know, obviously. I'm not a therapist and I don't know him personally, but from what I've seen, he appears to be a very unhappy narcissist. Maybe he's a phenomenal actor.
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by huckelberry »

Alphus and Omegus wrote:
Mon Mar 13, 2023 10:42 pm
Peterson is a mediocre intellect who realized you can make tens of millions of dollars telling fundamentalist Christians that they're smart.

No integrity. He doesn't even believe the nonsense he spouts.
I noted that I am somewhat puzzled by Peterson. I am more puzzled by the extreme range of reactions people have to him. There have been some very rigid leftists who see him as nothing but the enemy. Has that become a set up for peoples reactions to him?

Alpus and Omegus,I am puzzled by your characterization. Peterson is not a fundamentalist Christian and I had not seen that they were a target audience for him. He does not hide the distance between his borderline agnostic views and fundamentalism.

How is it that you see him as not believing what he says?
Vēritās
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Re: Jordan Peterson

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huckelberry wrote:
Tue Mar 14, 2023 6:22 pm
Alphus and Omegus wrote:
Mon Mar 13, 2023 10:42 pm
Peterson is a mediocre intellect who realized you can make tens of millions of dollars telling fundamentalist Christians that they're smart.

No integrity. He doesn't even believe the nonsense he spouts.
I noted that I am somewhat puzzled by Peterson. I am more puzzled by the extreme range of reactions people have to him. There have been some very rigid leftists who see him as nothing but the enemy. Has that become a set up for peoples reactions to him?

Alpus and Omegus,I am puzzled by your characterization. Peterson is not a fundamentalist Christian and I had not seen that they were a target audience for him. He does not hide the distance between his borderline agnostic views and fundamentalism.

How is it that you see him as not believing what he says?
He does strike me as a fundamentalist when I hear him debating against atheism, claiming atheism produces murderers because no belief in God means no reason to not kill. Kinda sophomoric and ridiculous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmrpiCsuv6w

Or his debates over scriptural slavery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iAQ6dA5gJI
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by Alphus and Omegus »

Vēritās wrote:
Tue Mar 14, 2023 6:26 pm
huckelberry wrote:
Tue Mar 14, 2023 6:22 pm
I noted that I am somewhat puzzled by Peterson. I am more puzzled by the extreme range of reactions people have to him. There have been some very rigid leftists who see him as nothing but the enemy. Has that become a set up for peoples reactions to him?

Alpus and Omegus,I am puzzled by your characterization. Peterson is not a fundamentalist Christian and I had not seen that they were a target audience for him. He does not hide the distance between his borderline agnostic views and fundamentalism.

How is it that you see him as not believing what he says?
He does strike me as a fundamentalist when I hear him debating against atheism, claiming atheism produces murderers because no belief in God means no reason to not kill. Kinda sophomoric and ridiculous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmrpiCsuv6w

Or his debates over scriptural slavery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iAQ6dA5gJI
Peterson works for the Daily Wire, which is a website whose audience is overwhelmingly evangelicals. So he tells them what they want to hear.

In the past, he has claimed not to believe in religions, but lately, he's been saying that the Bible is "way more true than just true" because some people believe it is. It's useless sophistry that he's concocted to trick his gullible audience into thinking that he shares their fundamentalism.

https://premierchristian.news/us/news/a ... -just-true

His remarks seen in the link above are objectively false since the Bible was not the first book by any stretch of the imagination. Nor is the Bible the foundation of Western civil society, considering how much of the legal system was based directly on Roman law or the discipline of philosophy on ancient Greeks and Romans.

I'd say that right now, it's impossible to say what he believes and that's very deliberate on his part.
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by honorentheos »

He used to strike me as a pragmatist who didn't believe in the historical claims of Christianity but felt it had cultural truth. I could sympathize with that view in that our cultures are subject to evolutionary pressure at a rate far more compressed than our biology. So cultural artifacts that have proven success through memic evolution shouldn't be brushed off casually just because we can see they are flawed. It could be atheism is a losing cultural strategy that would do well to investigate what makes religious cultures successful to the point almost every human culture developed religion.

Back to Peterson, he's always been a bit of an ass going back to his emergence on the broader public stage due to his stance against Canadian university gender pronoun rules. Everything came down to Marxism and attacks on Western traditional values which more and more came to be synonymous with male-dominated society.

But I can't stress enough how likely it is he was affected by his addiction to prescription benzos and subsequent experimental treatment that included going to Russia to be put in an induced coma to avoid the withdrawal. I believe he came out of it needing therapy to regain motor and speech abilities. Wouldn't be surprised if he did something that permanently affected how he thinks.
huckelberry
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by huckelberry »

Vēritās wrote:
Tue Mar 14, 2023 6:26 pm
huckelberry wrote:
Tue Mar 14, 2023 6:22 pm
I noted that I am somewhat puzzled by Peterson. I am more puzzled by the extreme range of reactions people have to him. There have been some very rigid leftists who see him as nothing but the enemy. Has that become a set up for peoples reactions to him?

Alpus and Omegus,I am puzzled by your characterization. Peterson is not a fundamentalist Christian and I had not seen that they were a target audience for him. He does not hide the distance between his borderline agnostic views and fundamentalism.

How is it that you see him as not believing what he says?
He does strike me as a fundamentalist when I hear him debating against atheism, claiming atheism produces murderers because no belief in God means no reason to not kill. Kinda sophomoric and ridiculous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmrpiCsuv6w

Or his debates over scriptural slavery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iAQ6dA5gJI
So he thinks the Bible presents values which develop in time to views rejecting slavery though the text does not develop that idea and remains conventional to the time. That strikes me as a reasonable view though if you take a fundamentalist, inerrant text view he if fudging. He is not an inerrant scripture guy. Now the link here has a fragment of observations made by a variety of people. Many of those fragments are a bit deflective or concentrating on more positive aspects while ignoring negative.

Peterson's comments about atheism and the book Crime and Punishment are a redefinition of atheism fitting his definition of belief in God. (one that many people would identify with atheism). I guess it is not surprising that participants and viewers wishing to possess the term to describe themselves would reject his reformulating. His comments about no reason not to murder do not apply to you , but to a theoretical extreme.

Perhaps the sophomoric quality is a matter of his choosing a way to present his idea which is going to be offensive to people in the context of the presentation. There is a distinct possibility that he likes to stir up trouble by getting people upset and offended.
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Re: Jordan Peterson

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Alphus and Omegus wrote:
Mon Mar 13, 2023 10:42 pm
Peterson is a mediocre intellect who realized you can make tens of millions of dollars telling fundamentalist Christians that they're smart.

No integrity. He doesn't even believe the nonsense he spouts.
Peterson is a Jungian, so I am not sure why Christian Fundamentalists would be into him.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by Kishkumen »

huckelberry wrote:
Tue Mar 14, 2023 6:22 pm
I noted that I am somewhat puzzled by Peterson. I am more puzzled by the extreme range of reactions people have to him. There have been some very rigid leftists who see him as nothing but the enemy.
I agree with you, huckelberry. I am not a Peterson fan, but more often than not I think he just runs afoul of the current cultural orthodoxies that people feel they must pay lip service to. Ergo, Peterson bad.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by Alphus and Omegus »

Kishkumen wrote:
Sun Mar 19, 2023 4:11 am
Alphus and Omegus wrote:
Mon Mar 13, 2023 10:42 pm
Peterson is a mediocre intellect who realized you can make tens of millions of dollars telling fundamentalist Christians that they're smart.

No integrity. He doesn't even believe the nonsense he spouts.
Peterson is a Jungian, so I am not sure why Christian Fundamentalists would be into him.
Because he reinterpreted it in Christian nationalist terms. The collective is the Bible, there's no such thing as the Greeks or Romans.
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Re: Jordan Peterson

Post by drumdude »

In so many interviews, he claims that it is immensely stressful for him to choose his words carefully in order to avoid misinterpretation and attack. You can understand why when you see his interview with Cathy Newman.

Peterson’s big problem is that he has become self deluded into thinking that what he says is monumentally important. Like the weight of the world is carried upon his shoulders. He thinks this because he hears from thousands of young men who worship him and tell him that he turned their lives around.

But at the end of the day, he’s just another talking head. He needs to come back down to reality and stop taking himself so seriously. Dude constantly looks like he needs to have a drink and unwind.
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