More Jordan Peterson and his 12 Rules for Life
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Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative
The end of in the beginning
I went out shopping for a book that would answer to the following description: Bible Stories for Children. I came across a couple but none that really did what I hoped, tell the stories from the Bible in a way that reflected their serious purpose and moral significance while also being told well enough so that the stories would be remembered. Where any child educated only within our school system would have the slightest chance of coming across the names Cain and Abel today, to choose only one example, is an unknown. Even the phrase, “In the Beginning…” would be unknown to almost any child brought up in the West today. Are the Ten Commandments taught anywhere at all outside of a religious school? It has become virtually impossible to teach almost anything about the moral and cultural roots of our civilisation.
On the other hand, getting a copy of Where Did I Come From? and other such explorations of the reproductive side of life are easy enough to find.
If you are interested in the decadence of the times in which we live, #MeToo Division, this might help to give you a clue.
Jordan Peterson asking what are the rules that govern sexual interaction in the workplace?
The interviewer is so out of his depth. Peterson is trying to talk some sense into someone who cannot think outside of modern presupposition. “What are the rules of that govern sexual interaction between men and women in the workplace?” From Instapundit.
JORDAN PETERSON TAKES ON VICE NEWS (Video):
It’s fascinating watching his interviewer interrogator, Jay Caspian Kang, alternate between full-on Cathy Newmanisms (to the point where near the interview, Kang utters something like “I’ve really tried not to be like Cathy Newman here”) and acting incredibly naïve regarding Hollywood, despite writing for a Website named, err, Vice.
Since much of the segment is devoted to topic of workplace relations, here’s a flashback to a December New York Timesarticle headlined, “At Vice, Cutting-Edge Media and Allegations of Old-School Sexual Harassment: A media company built on subversion and outlandishness was unable to create ‘a safe and inclusive workplace’ for women, two of its founders acknowledge:”
People worked long hours and partied together afterward. And that’s where the lines often blurred. Multiple women said that after a night of drinking, they wound up fending off touching, kissing and other advances from their superiors.
The name of the Website they decided to work for might have been their first clue.
Peterson is just playing with him. The interviewer cannot even understand the point, never mind being able to reply.
The collapse of the blue church consensus
A new web-based insurgency that is taking down the media/left. Delusional non-thinking is the new norm. Jordan Peterson’s interviewer on BBC4 was a “crack in the matrix”. The BBC interviewer had “no capacity to see reality correctly.” She had only “pre-fab set of possible responses” to what Peterson was saying. She was thus “delusional” in that she represents moving from a fluid intelligence into a functional intelligence.
The notes to the video:
Jordan Greenhall wrote one of the most compelling and widely shared analyses of the political landscape in the wake of the Trump election – ‘Deep Code’ – about how the consensus mainstream media reality “Blue Church” was being disrupted by a new insurgent “Red Religion”. He believes the recent viral interview between Jordan Peterson and Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News was another example of the consensus reality breaking down – a “glitch in the matrix”. He talks to Rebel Wisdom’s David Fuller – who made the first documentary about Jordan Peterson AND used to work at Channel 4 News for many years.
Eventually, he says, “reality is reality” and will reassert itself. In a sense that’s true, but it can sometimes take a long long time. And why should the left not be the victor here since they have an enormous ability to shape the events that matter.
Jordan Peterson and his misunderstood lobster tale
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Jordan Peterson is coming to Australia and his lectures are sold out. He was asked if he would put on additional lectures but the note above has been sent out along with the picture below it.
If you understand the point of the lobster story in his 12 Rules for Life, it is that both humans and lobsters seek dominance due to both of our psychologies being pushed along by serotonin. You are always going to have alpha-male lobsters just as you do with human societies. So my guess is that the people who are organising his tour haven’t actually read his book.
Adultery and politics
You cannot choose your political sides by the personal moral failings of their leaders and members. There is not enough morality to go around, specially with the alpha male types who inhabit politics. We have here in Australia, represented by this story of the moment, a Deputy Prime Minister who has left his wife and four kids for someone else. This was the story, written tongue in cheek: Let’s recriminalise adultery. But one of the commenters did say this which said something worth saying.
How typical of you to mock marital fidelity; to mock marriage, in fact. But then, that was the whole point of SSM, wasn’t it? And how typical of you to be utterly, blithely, blindly unaware that there is anything wrong here.
I keep forgetting, though, that you suffer from libertarian autism. You can’t be expected to understand anything about non-autistic folks.
It is a hopeful sign that, quite apart from the unprincipled political opportunists, so many people do understand that there is something wrong here. An example just such as this was always the complete counter to the asinine you can’t help who you love slogan.
Meantime, in the US we have this: Trump’s Stormy Daniels problem gets worse. What’s the Stormy Daniels problem: only conservatives think adultery matters. And it does matter, but in the world as it is, unless we are dealing with circumstances well beyond the normal, it shouldn’t determine who you are going to vote for, since there is so much else at stake. But it is a point of vulnerability on the right, as the Roy Moore saga too clearly showed.
The first atom ever to have had its picture taken
My before bed reading the last few weeks has been Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura which is a philosophical tract written around 2000 years ago, whose arguments are based on the absolute assumption that everything in the universe is made up of atoms. Very radical in his time, and a belief that did not become part of our scientific understanding until the eighteenth century. FWIW my favourite book of the present century is The Swerve. No book has impressed on me, to speak in cliches, that everything changes and nothing lasts forever. Absolutely nothing about the world we are in and nothing we know about it will survive. And what The Swerve is about is how the last remaining copy of De Natura in the world was rediscovered in 1417. And then goes on to describe the world then in the context of the world when the Roman Empire was at its peak, and of course, with our world in the picture as well.
As for atoms, we now assume their existence even though no one has seen one, at least not until now. We also assume“there are between 10^78 to 10^82 atoms in the known, observable universe. In layman’s terms, that works out to between ten quadrillion vigintillion and one-hundred thousand quadrillion vigintillion atoms.” Or to help with the numbers there are approximately 7 x 10^27 atoms in the average human body. And everyone of these was there at the Big Bang or maybe it was only the number of particles that were there, or whatever. But there they were. The mystery of existence will never be known.
And each of these atoms, as again I understand it, has a scale of size so that if we were inside St Peter’s in Rome, a speck of dust floating in the air would represent the size of the nucleus of an atom relative to the size of the atom represented by the cathedral. How is this possible?
So up above we have a picture of an atom taken just the other day: How a Student Photographed a Single Atom With a Store-Bought Camera. The entire picture is not, of course, the atom, but somewhere between those pointy metallic tubes and along the black line between them there is a tiny dot of a white speck. That is also not the atom, “it’s the light from an array of surrounding lasers being re-emitted by an atom”. Its not much, but out of the between ten quadrillion vigintillion and one-hundred thousand quadrillion vigintillion atoms in the universe, that is one of only a handful humans have ever been able to see. Impossible and incredible, not the first atom ever to have had its picture taken; for that, which the above story led me to find, see below, a picture taken in 2013.
Wanna be scared?
Forget about illegal migrants. Just think about where this is heading. You are looking at Terminator Mark One.
What’s so special about what Jordan Peterson says and how he says it?
This is from Instapundit discussing Jordan Peterson, the most articulate defender of our Western values found anywhere in the world. The question that really is of central interest is why he has become the phenomenon he is. I have my own views but am interested in yours.
AMADEUS SYNDROME: “As I say, [Peter] Hitchens at least feints towards what’s really bugging many of these people. It is the Amadeus syndrome. Many of [Jordan] Peterson’s haters on the right have been toiling in the fields these long years, equally worried about, writing about, the treatment of men, especially young men; about the erosion of freedoms, etc. Where, they are wondering, are their rewards? So they are bitter. It’s a feeling I’m familiar with,” Kathy Shaidle writes.
Read the whole thing.
As Dr. Helen noted earlier today, “Still at #1 on Amazon, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.”
And for a tiny sample of what he says and the approach he takes, here is a relatively uncharacteristic interview in that he is being interviewed by people who ought to understand what he’s on about but do not. These I went looking for to see what Peterson has said about Donald Trump. These were about the only things I could find, but there are probably others.
The hosts asking the questions are supposedly on the conservative side but are clearly open-ended critics of Trump. Peterson was much more careful and if he was critical, it was only about Trump’s timing in what he said and not what he said. The bozos interviewing cannot see the point. This is Peterson in my own rough but reasonably accurate transcription (from around 2:00 in):
“Truth is a tricky thing because you have to take the temporal context into account. There are white lies and black truths. Black truth is when you use the truth in a way that isn’t truthful. . . just like a white lie is a lie that isn’t harmful…
“What Trump did wrong … was he failed to specify the time and the space of the utterance. Because what he should have come out and done is said that I unequivocally denounce the white supremacist racism that emerged in Charlottesville, and then he should have shut up. And then two weeks later he could have said, well when we look at the political landscape as a whole that it’s pretty obvious there are reprehensible individuals acting out on both ends of the extreme. The Charlottesville week was not the week to make that point.”
And this is Peterson’s views on Trump’s intelligence.
He gets it, even if he is cautious about saying it. And then this, where he is being interviewed by Canada’s Cathy Newman, and if you don’t know about Cathy Newman’s interview with Jordan Peterson, you should seek it out at your earliest opportunity.
The left will get him if they can, the very thing he worries about himself.
TO WHICH MAY BE ADDED THIS: This is titled What It’s Like To Be A Conservative Talking To Progressives. Actually, it is only our dearest wish, but the link does have the original Cathy Newman interview of Jordan Peterson. It’s all there, including a proper level of ridicule for Newman. But as the author writes:
The point here is not what it’s like to be Jordan Peterson giving an interview, it’s that this same interview technique gets used on conservatives fairly often. Case in point, ex-Google engineer James Damore gave an interview to CNN Tech in which his views were repeatedly mischaracterized in much the same way. CNN Tech’s Laurie Segall brought up the alt-right twice, forcing Damore to denounce a group he had no connection to in the first place. The effort seemed less to understand than to throw him into a hole of insinuations from which he could not escape.
There are no friendly interviews from the left of the right, where the interest is merely to understand our point of view. Whether Peterson has shown the rest of us the way we will only know when someone else does what he did.
AND THIS FROM THE COMMENTS: Addresses the question, can men and women work together in the workplace? Says we don’t know since it has only been going on for the past forty years. Makes the suggestion that makeup should be banned from the work environment.
Baby boomers and millennials together in the person of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro
Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro join Dave Rubin for a live discussion about postmodernism, Trump, conservatism, free speech, and rules for life.
Well, they say it’s a live discussion but it is actually recorded, although I am sure that at the time it took place, it was really them talking to each other.
And now a bit more of the same.
Law of Markets 