I watched 30m of a Peterson 'lecture' a co-worker recommended to me. It kind of opened my eyes. Peterson is basically a 'motivational speaker' that presents himself as an academic well enough to fool people that only understand academic aesthetics. He doesn't even try to back up his claims or references, he just makes wildly abstract and generalized claims about human civilization and draws analogies that sound like they support that perspective. They sound right enough to people that want to believe that there is an expression of their culture that is inherently 'good' and all of civilization's problems are based on corruptions of that culture. But in the minds of his fans he's offering 'proof' of this perspective by appearing academic, even though he offers none.
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he's a TED talk basically.
most TED talks are like that. sophisticated sounding gibberish that has no real world merit, but sounds really cool and interesting.
Yeah. Every once in a while there’s a good one though.
This shines brightly in his "debate" with Slavoj Zizek
https://piped.video/watch?v=qsHJ3LvUWTs
Also love that Peterson is glued to his laptop while Zizek fucking slams shit down with nothing but paper notes.
I wish Zizek had went harder on that fool.
I felt like Zizek understood that debating Peterson directly wouldn't benefit him, and instead took his case to the audience, sort of bypassing Peterson himself and focusing on the ideas he wanted to share.
However, I don't disagree. I wanted to see more of Zizek shaking is head in his "my god" disbelief at the bullshit Peterson was peddling.
Zizek actually said as much in an interview some time before (or after?) the debate. He was well aware that debating Peterson directly would be extremely difficult due to the "techniques" he uses. So Zizek focused on getting a message to the audience.
The few times he did engage were hilarious smackdowns though ("where are all these 'postmodern marxists'???")
Oh I know. It’s just frustrating because I really wanted to see an intellectual destroy Peterson and I thought this was gonna be my chance to do it.
Like fuck man, I’D debate Peterson and am confident I would wreck him, and I’m just a fucking carpenter working in camps.
I like watching crowder get destroyed sometimes but he’s not smart enough for me to give a shit when it happens.
As far as I'm concerned Zizek went the right amount of hard, considering how effortlessly, utterly, and thoroughly he dunked on Peterson without Peterson ever having any idea what had happened.
In no way was that fair play. That was the rudest thing I've ever seen done to a person where I yet personally applauded the maneuver. I love Zizek.
Peterson left that debate believing discourse had happened and that's just hilarious.
He's basically a conman. It's impressive in a way, I've watched enough of it a few times to see how convincing he is. Anyone who doesn't want to believe it will sniff the bullshit after 3-5 minutes of him doing nothing but blow smoke and talk in self reinforcing circles with no facts.
If you want to agree with him, it's very easy to think he's informed and speaking the truth. Which is why he's so dangerous. He's like the gateway drug to right wing extremist views. He tells men all the things a lot of them want to believe. About how their inadequacy isn't their fault. How everything was stacked against them. Reinforces their sexism, their anger, directs it. Then they're listening to all the other even more blatant alt right voices and most of them never come back.
He's just a glorified self-help guy who's gotten way more attention than he deserves by saying mildly offensive things. He should never have been allowed to become a target for outrage. Once that happened, he figured out how to monetize it and it was off to the races. It's like a feedback loop.
I highly recommend watching his debates with Sam Harris
It really shines a light on what a fake sophist charlatan Peterson is. Harris is so clear and plainspoken in comparison. His ideas are sophisticated, but explained simply.
Well, before we can say that Peterson is fooling people by only aesthetically presenting as an academic first we need to define fooling, then we need to define academic and then we need to define presenting. Without that shared substrate we can't make any value judgements about him because if we don't have that, we don't have anything.
As someone who used to be obsessed with Jordan Peterson and had a similar 180 transformation, this is super familiar to me. I remember speaking up at work against critical race theory in a meeting. I look back on that now with huge embarrassment of who I used to be. I was actively working against the things that I stand for now. I'm super grateful to breadtube creators for pulling me out. I still have friends in my life who are like this and I can't seem to break them out. All I can do is try to be a better example
You should be proud of yourself. Thanks for being here, we need perspectives like yours to help us remain empathetic.
Your courage and honesty are commendable
Which breadtube creators helped you out?
Contrapoints got me on the right track, but I could also imagine Vaush and his edginess being a good foot in the door for some.
That's how it worked for me.
When I started college, I thought Steven Crowder was a smart guy (only because I was a complete idiot back then.) I would watch his debates and think he was so clever debating unprepared college students. Which led to debates with Vaush and Destiny in them. Which then led into deeper breadtube.
Now I'm more leftist than Destiny or Vaush from watching Noah Samson and the like. Noah is my favorite breadtuber right now.
Initially the most significant was Richard Wolff. His video popped up on my homepage and I actually only clicked it because I wanted to laugh at how dumb this "Marxist professor" must be. That did not happen. Instead he absolutely blew my mind. After doing some research, I discovered that Jordan Peterson had actually mentioned him. He said Richard Wolff had refused to debate him, but once I looked into Wolffs side of the story, I discovered that was a lie. And no wonder, it was obvious Wolff knew his stuff and would have been able to destroy Peterson in a debate.
That was when the wall came down for me. I became unsatiably curious about everything Marxist and anticapitalist, which led me to watching Second Thought, and then eventually leftist creators like Shaun, hbomherguy, some more news, and Hakim just to name a few. I was addicted and watched hours of this stuff everyday until my mind,attitudes and politics changed completely.
Is there a breadtube community on Lemmy?
EDIT: Nevermind, it's linked lower down this very thread.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve
I've never agreed with Peterson much, and this article was really eye opening. I think the expression "not even wrong" precisely nails it: he talks in such broad strokes and general terms that you cannot even start a debate before he swamps you with more generalizations.
The problem is, as OP experienced, that Peterson (although he would never admit as much) and his followers use this rhetoric to justify misogynistic, racist, sexist, and other "traditionalist" views, that are a real danger to the people on the receiving end.
I just had this with a user on here. Dude just went off the deep end with all this nonsense I couldn't even begin to respond without dedicating the day to unwrapping his tangents. I made his note "a little silly goose" and moved on.
Peterson is the idiotic man's intellectual
I agree overall with the authors point, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out some solid media from the left side of things.
Some More News/Cody’s Showdy has been consistently great at firing back at alt-right figures like Peterson and Shapiro And related is the content put out by Robert Evans and Cool Zone Media. Behind the Bastards, The Woman’s War, It Could Happen Here are great. And they also did the collaboration in 2020 for Worst Year Ever which I really hope makes a return for 2024
Really most of the Cracked alum are great in this regard but those are the two sources I’ve got I’ve gotten the most enjoyment from
There's another new one that is really good called if books could kill. It isnt cracked ppl tho. Actually I remember that site before it got REALLY bad (I mean not sucked) and I remember a lot of commenters before they disabled comments complaining that the articles are too liberal lmao. Lots of "I come here for jokes not politics!!!"
I actually wrote a really long reply to the rest of your post on why it isn't really possible for the left to have the same impact as the alt right media.
But then I accidentally lost it. I'm taking it as a sign that I would have bored everyone into a coma and not to try to recreate it lol
Smn did an extremely short and succinct piece on Peterson. A really quick watch.
Yeah it’s not very long, super easy, you can knock it out on a lunch break
I just finished listening to the behind the bastards piece about Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert.
I was not expecting that
Because the right-wing saturation of platforms like YouTube was so central to my becoming a reactionary, I believe that creating a competing left-wing presence in online spaces should be a priority for the Left. Currently, conservatives enjoy a nearly unchallenged role in grabbing young men who may very well be supportive of progressive movements, but whose lack of community drives them away from collective politicking. This needs to change.
It's really refreshing to see a suggestion for how to help solve the right-wing rabbit hole problem other than just blaming "education" and saying it needs to be fixed (not that I think fixing education isn't the answer, I just don't think that it is the only answer). Something I've been asking myself since the 2016 election is, what the hell are we going to do about what is happening to our society that is turning people towards hate, bigotry, selfishness and cruelty? Sure, we can try to educate people, but there will always be folks that turn away from public education. Additionally, here's only a fraction of us who attend some form of higher education that might expose us to information that might bring some out of a selfish world view. Meanwhile, all that right wing content has flooded the internet, just waiting to enthrall folks who don't have direction.
Fighting back by introducing an equal (or even greater?) amount of content that opposes hateful ideology is not a bad idea at all as a method to try and catch these folks before they fall into these dark rabbit holes.
This isn’t an actual fix, though. The reason left wingers don’t have the presence the right does on Facebook, YouTube, etc isn’t because of a lack of voices or audiences - it’s because of deliberate manipulation of what is put in front of people. There isn’t really a solution besides finally coming to terms with the fact that the right offers nothing useful and completely and utterly salting their ideology from the earth. And dismantling tech giants, ofc
The reason left wingers don’t have the presence the right does on Facebook, YouTube, etc isn’t because of a lack of voices or audiences - it’s because of deliberate manipulation of what is put in front of people.
I recently have gotten into wasting tons of hours on YouTube shorts, and I was very surprised that after a grand total of maybe 12 hours of using the platform, Andrew Tate content was just shoehorned into the algorithm of shorts being presented to me. Up to this point in time I was watching cosmetics, baking cookies, comedy, cooking, just funny hot takes, but then completely out of the blue one day that guy's ugly ass monkey face was on my phone, and even though it was so quick that I couldn't even think of his name, my lizard braid already recognized that he is very dangerous to women, so I opened the menu to select the feature on YouTube that prevents those channels from being promoted to me ever again.
There is 0% chance that the content that I had previously been watching links up in the algorithm to Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, or Andrew Tate. This leads me to believe that YouTube intentionally carves out space for these content creators and makes promises about getting their content in front of everybody's eyeballs, regardless of level of interest in that type of content.
Once an algorithm is understood it can be manipulated. Russia and the right-wing figured out how to tie Trump videos to other popular videos to recommend it to other unsuspecting users. I get recommended right-wing videos while watching unrelated videos. It's algorithm manipulation. It's an endless battle for Google.
When right wingers talk about social media suppressing them I’m always wondering what the actual fuck they’re talking about because it’s the most promoted ideology out there.
The YouTube algo is fucking insane. You click a video or two that you didn't know was a rightwing nutjob because it had an interesting title and you basically have to delete your account and start over. That shit never ends, it's just bizarre.
Like I've watched hundreds of leftwing videos, but YouTube just does not stop throwing conservative trash my way. I have to search for political videos I agree with. Ones I don't are just in my face, always. I really don't understand what they're trying to do. It never suggests new videos from channels I'm subscribed to most of the time. But Nazi woman hating shit? I always need to see more angry Nazi shit.
Yup, real solutions usually aren't sexy and don't make good sound bites. Lot's of people are unhappy with life and the idea of being able to fix it themselves with direct action is a very appealing concept. Telling someone their problems are causes by a complex mixture of cultural factors and government policy doesn't give people the instant gratification of hearing that it's the "others" fault.
A guy in a lambo yelling about how women and jews are the real issue is always going to get more attention than a well constructed and reasonable argument on economic policy.
I originally heard this idea about why so many big start ups end with massive fraud but I think it applies here too. The start ups that create reasonable goals and timelines don't get funding because someone else is willing to lie and promise more. By the time it's clear they can't deliver on the promised results, the honest company is out of business. Same in politics, one side is honest, the other side is willing to say whatever they think will win you over no matter if it's true. Obviously one will be more appealing because it's designed to be, but that doesn't mean it has any merit.
Interesting to see where the author's escape from the alt-right started; Frederick Douglass has been changing minds for a long time now.
These conversion & deconversion stories always go the same way:
"I'm an impressionable fuckwit who immediately gets on the first ride that looks appealing. But soon I realized I wanted to get off Mr. Bones Wild Ride, because it looked much cooler than it actually was. Whew what a relief when I got off. Let me tell you about my current ride, which is much better, the most important ride of the world and you should definitely get on it too. Everyone who doesn't get on THIS ride (which is definitely the correct one to be on) is evil and dooming humanity!
I'm a reformed person."
There was a great article the other day talking about young men being lost and adrift, and a great takeaway is that JP and his ilk are a symptom, not the cause of men feeling guideless. While sane people haven't really discussed what good, healthy masculinity looks like, the alt right shlubs have been luring in people with no purpose by offering them toxic, reactionary masculinity.
The article went on to point out that the left needs to do better here. We need to provide a firm, healthy definition of masculinity. It isn't about absolute traits or the male ideal. And it doesn't have to be exclusionary from femininity. It can be both a masculine trait and a feminine trait to want to protect. To provide.
I think he's right on making videos, the author sounds like a great guy to do it. Most if the people who see Peterson for what he is really don't have the experience to speak from.
I hope the author isn't too hard on himself, there's a reason they go after that age group. Also, everyone has fallen for some con or another in their life.
Imo the classic "left" leaning shows are all way too light on the conservative viewpoint. The old white (conservative) guy is always a loveable misguided goof. This is evidence to why having a platform similar to what the right wing produces isn't feasible. The left doesn't want to offend anyone (a noble intention) especially my showing the insipid, unspoken/easily denied truth, of the opposing side.
So mocking young loser men is back firing because some clown alpha daddy thought leaders are able to fill "loser's" needs for profit as "influencers" while spreading unfavorable ideology to the "left"
Who would have thought that running exclusionary and hostile rhetoric against a group of people would lead to them into opposition.