Enjoying the view from Limbo
Jordan Peterson has a school. — The most inflated ego and most compromised mind in today’s world of internet celebrity gurus imagines he is going to make oodles of money by pretending to offer people some sort of university equivalency certificate from an online teaching institute named (what else?) Peterson Academy. Of course, his “school” will star all the best educators, because who...
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the thug who leads Russia’s most effective military force — a private group of criminals nominally allied with the Kremlin — is now threatening the official Kremlin leadership with armed rebellion, and openly declaring the war in Ukraine to have been undertaken on false pretenses, with phony rationalizations based on fabricated nonsense about non-existent threats from Ukraine and NATO. In other...
Neil deGrasse Tyson.– I doubt you could find a recent interview or quasi-debate featuring this man in which he does not explicitly remind his interlocutor and audience, typically as a preface or premise to one shouted certitude or another, that he is a scientist, and that he is looking at the question at hand from the scientist’s perspective — the implication being, of...
Yet again, Jordan Peterson, the energetic academic psychologist cum profiteering alt-right blowhard, has put his mouth where he believes the money is. That is, since most of his paying audience — believe me, he has no interest in any audience that is not paying, and by god they certainly will pay — is comprised of young males who believe Donald Trump is infallible,...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 4, 2023 · Last modified January 5, 2023
You can make absolutely any factual claim you wish, supported with the boldest and most unflinching evidentiary assurances to back it up, by merely promising that this overwhelming supporting evidence will be made public very soon. How about not making any factual claim at all unless you are prepared to present the evidence at the same time you make the claim? But no,...
Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 25, 2022 · Last modified December 29, 2022
Jordan Peterson appeared on a program hosted by Piers Morgan to discuss Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. He insisted, among other things, that (a) Putin is in no significant way similar to Hitler or Stalin, i.e., not really a tyrant of global expansionist intentions at all, (b) there is no possible way that Ukraine can win the war, (c) even if Putin decides...
On the philosophers and the sophists– Heraclitus: “One man is worth ten thousand if he be the best.” Jordan Peterson: “Why be a rigorous teacher for three hundred university students when I could be a self-help guru for three million YouTube subscribers!” On self-government– The less centralized the state, the more localized the rule. The aim is to approximate as far as possible...
A few years back, Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto professor of psychology, shot from little-known academic to international celebrity intellectual, based largely on his strong remarks against politically correct language laws on an Ontario public television program. Watching Peterson’s rise to prominence, I recognized in his trajectory many of the same crossroads choices I had been dealing with myself as a writer,...
Jordan Peterson, Canadian professor of clinical psychology cum politically incorrect lightening rod cum global celebrity self-help guru, has, unfortunately, fallen prey to the demons of fame, self-importance, and the sense of irrational urgency — “it has to be me, it has to be now” — that attends the sudden explosion of unexpected praise and mass admiration in the life of a thoughtful but...
There is no point in trying to explain any of this, but perhaps by placing it all out there in some semblance of order, a coherent picture will emerge in someone’s mind — preferably not the picture that keeps trying to form in my mind as I look at all of it. Donald Trump summarily canceled sanctions his own administration had leveled against...
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