Need a plate of generic, insipid platitudes with a giant helping of bad science and misogyny?

  • skyler@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    One of my favorite examples of Jordan Peterson stupidity is when he was lecturing about some ancient civilization artwork that showed two serpent creatures creating humanity. He said that because the snakes were drawn in a double helix that this ancient civilization knew about and wanted to represent DNA.

    Snakes coil around one another in a double helix when they mate. The snake creatures in the art were just fucking.

    Source is at 1:15:39 in this vid: https://youtu.be/hSNWkRw53Jo?si=MPWip62wkrMX_bP7

    • HipHoboHarold@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Stuff like this is why I will never understand people following him. Like, I get it. It’s the bigotry. And when it comes to that, nothing else matters. I understand it on paper.

      But at the same time… why? When he’s constantly wrong, or when they have to constantly lie about the things he says, why keep listening to him? Why are they like this?

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
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            2 years ago

            Which is a kind of superpower that makes him hard to criticize. Whenever he commits to a fact or something, that’s easy to disprove, and people do it all the time. But, when he just says something about cultural marxism or whatever, it’s so hard to unpack what he’s actually saying that it’s hard to prove he’s wrong.

            That lets his followers say that he’s so smart that even the leftist intellectuals can’t take him down. Obviously they don’t understand what he’s saying either, but that doesn’t matter. It lets them adore him as some kind of intellectual hero.

            Peterson’s got the act of a public intellectual down pat. He’s never seen without a suit or with a smile, he has a distinguished haircut and a trimmed beard. He shows no sense of humour and uses big sciencey-sounding words.

            That lets him have a symbiotic relationship with incels. He makes money selling them things like books, they get to point to a “public intellectual” who’s on their side.

              • merc@sh.itjust.works
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                2 years ago

                But not in an obvious way like say Ben Shapiro. He does it using words that sound plausibly scientificalish.

                I just want someone to say to him “So, they say when you truly understand something, you can break it down so that other people can understand it. So, break down what ‘cultural marxism’ is so that one of these poor young men you worry so much about can understand what you mean”.

                I’m sure he’d try to deflect, try to gallop, try something. But, I would bet that a good interviewer, just keeping him focused on those two words, would show he has no idea what he’s talking about.

              • merc@sh.itjust.works
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                2 years ago

                I don’t think so. Not even wrong is for something where you can understand what they’re saying, but what they’re saying is so nonsensical that it’s not even wrong. Peterson instead uses words that seem like they could belong together but that are borrowed from many different fields to end up with something that sounds like it could plausibly mean something if you could unpack the words he’s using, for example, in a debate he said this: “We lose the metaphorical substrate of our ethos.”

                That’s not “not even wrong”, it’s just words that have never been used in that order by anyone else, so they could essentially mean anything. Unless you can get him to explain what he means by those words, you can’t say that he’s wrong. But, he’s using those words to deliberately obfuscate what he’s saying, and if you ask him to explain what it means, he’ll just drive the conversation somewhere else.

                • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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                  2 years ago

                  I can easily deduce from his inability to elaborate, that he has no idea what he means and likes those words together.

    • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Don’t forget the time he wanted to quit benzos to show how masculine he was. His doctors wanted to taper him down so his brain didn’t fry (benzo addiction alters brain chemistry and withdrawal can seriously screw you up or kill you if you stop), but trying to taper off over several years wasn’t manly and powerful. So he flew to Russia and got a few potentially sketchy doctors to put him in a medical coma for a month, and that’s part of why he’s so fucked up now.

      Oh, or the part where his daughter convinced him to only ever eat red meat, and literally nothing else.

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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        2 years ago

        Even though facing the road to recovery like a man is manlier than an easy band-aid fix where you go nap-nap for a little bit and wake up crazy, but unaddicted.

    • This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Lobster Peterson: “The way these snakes are drawn in resemblance to the structure of DNA, it is evident that ancient civilizations were familiar with the concept of DNA.”

      Bro, they fucking

    • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      I love that channel. It’s one of the best channels I’ve discovered all year. A perfect balance of entertainment with deep dives into current hot topics. It’s like John Oliver but triple the length and even more sarcasm.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Hell even if they had ladder double helixes the most reasonable explanation would be a laborer did some psychedelics and either blew a priest’s mind with it or decided to incorporate the thing that blew their mind into some detailed work. It’s not difficult structure to imagine while tripping and ancient people sure did trip from time to time.

      In general, assume ancient people were on drugs before you assume ancient people had knowledge of the complex structures they didn’t have the tools to observe.

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      Really? He’s on the “Ancient Super Humans were Super Geniuses!” pack? I expected him to have a higher level of research than fucking Spirit Science, but naw.