The Jordan Peterson Thread

The TL/DW is he doesn’t interrupt himself every 5 seconds to remind people that Hitler was bad, so he must be saying Hitler was good.

My thoughts on JP are known to everyone following this thread, but I firmly agree that the video is full of cheap shots. (Oh and for the record I don’t like Hitler or Nazis either.)

The plagiarism charge is downright false. The gist of it is, Hitler spoke of natural selection (i.e. Darwinism), and JP speaks of it too. There’s bound to be some overlap, along with everyone else who’s ever spoken of it at length, but the quotations never match the way you would expect in a plagiarism case.

The one quotation that does match is JP’s supposed plagiarism of Crowley: every man for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost. Yes, it’s verbatim, but it’s also a centuries old proverb.

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42 posts were split to a new topic: Canadian civil rights law and related issues

Funnily enough JP is on video saying almost exactly that sentence. But of course that just proves he’s a Nazi. Hey, wait, that must mean you’re a Nazi too!

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Only a true Nazi denies his Nazism.

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Peterson update:

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I didn’t watch the whole thing, but hope he’s kicked his drug habit.

Oh. :no_mouth: I hadn’t heard that he was also on ketamine. I hadn’t even heard that it had been approved for use as an antidepressant, which according to Wikiland it hasn’t. Maybe he meant esketamine, though that’s also a pretty controversial one.

There’s no explanation behind this. I mean yes, he talks about the origins of his anxiety and depression (being told by multiple doctors that his wife was going to die, the trouble with prescription benzodiazepine…), but there’s no explanation of why (or how!) he got into ketamine – just I was depressed ergo I had to take ketamine, more or less. It’s about 10 minutes in.

Other highlights:

  • He doesn’t seem to like Serbia (where they recorded the podcast), or Moscow (at least in the winter).

  • Around 21:00 he talks about a hallucination of a gang of “Florida tree people” whose leader was going to kidnap and kill him to impress his girlfriend.

  • The “Soviet-esque” clinic in Moscow was pretty surprised to see him, even saying to Mikahila you’ve taken him here to die.

  • He believes the benzodiazepine epidemic is “probably worse than the opiate epidemic, and that’s really saying something” (about 29:40).

  • He recognizes the irony of being a person who gives advice and still mucks up his own life. His answer: “If you’re going to wait to learn from people who don’t make mistakes or don’t have tragedy enter their life, you’re going to spend a long time waiting to learn something.” (about 29:50) Plus, “In my lectures and my writings, I’ve never suggested that I was anything other than one of the people who also needed to learn these lessons, so I included myself in the population of people who needed some moral improvement.”

  • Oh wait, okay. Around 41:30 Mikhaila says it was the first psychiatrist he saw in North America (out of at least five) who told him to take ketamine. That still leaves me with some questions.

  • The rest of it is basically talking about how bad benzodiazepine is. It’s not your friend, or if it is, it’s not your friend for very long. He even says the withdrawal is “worse than death”.

  • It all started (they believe) with an allergic reaction to sodium metabisulphite.

It could be. People stay on them for years and function quite well. And it’s almost socially acceptable to be on some sort of benzos. I took them for a while every night for maybe 8 months for sleep and anxiety. It was hell getting off them. The physical symptoms lasted maybe 2 weeks. But the mental ones lasted months and came and went. It wasn’t totally linear in improvement, which seems to be the case for withdrawals.

This was all prescribed with a doctor as well. Imagine people that abuse them on their own.

IMO; benzos are useful short term. They do a lot of damage long term and they don’t wreck your life up as fast as opiates so people stay on them forever. I still take them once in a while for when I travel and have to sleep from jet lag. But never again daily.

Seems like his speech has been impaired. Getting a bit more religious?

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Yikes…he seems like he really went through the ringer, like he’s constantly on the verge of breaking down. Hopefully he’ll have some interesting insights from the whole experience.

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It seems like he has the same clarity of thought, if that makes sense, so maybe over time he’ll recover more.

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“Thank you very much. And. Well. Thank you very much is probably sufficient.”

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He put himself through all this over pronouns. Imagine if he’d taken on adjectives?

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Pronouns cause cancer now? Geez, no wonder there’s so much controversy. :cactus:

No, that would be silly.

Well, I recall a case in Taiwan in which someone claimed damages for cancer caused by defamation.

The case didn’t succed, but I suppose it’s possible for anything to cause cancer if it’s stressful enough. :idunno:

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I have to admit I haven’t watched the video. I find him really tedious, to be honest, but I’ll watch it after class. Has he got cancer as well?

The big burnout was caused by the medication he took for anxiety due to his wife having cancer. There isn’t really much in the video, but that bit at the end where he hesitates (the part I quoted) – I think Tempo is right. :pray: :innocent:

He was drugged up before that. I’ve seen videos of him teaching. Addicts find excuses.