Shermer devotes entire issue to lobster man
Oh lord – just what the world needs.
A hint of what is to come in the next issue of Skeptic magazine/eSkeptic: a special issue devoted to @jordanbpeterson
Join the Skeptics Society & subscribe to Skeptic (a physical magazine) here: https://t.co/2MzgXisUd3
eSkeptic is free here: https://t.co/f3j4b2UWv5 pic.twitter.com/stwPIW1hCJ
— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) August 15, 2018
Marsh – part of the brilliant team that organizes QED – remarks:
While US Skeptic mag dedicates an issue to a guy who teaches young men that “women are responsible for chaos”, I’m spending the evening giving a talk at a cake shop to a v.lovely skeptic group who, last time I was there, had a v.packed room with a female-majority audience.
— Michael Marshall @marsh@mastodon.world (@MrMMarsh) August 15, 2018
Ugh. Fucking Shermer.
Several years ago, Shermer wrote a letter in support of convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza, pleading for leniency because of D’Souza’s supposed contributions to public debate. I think even Shermer is embarrassed by that now, as he had to acknowledge recently how dishonest D’Souza is, though of course he couldn’t resist throwing in some “both sides do it” comments about “SJWs” and the “alt-left.”
Michael Marshall is incorrect. Peterson is not an evangelical Christian.
And to my knowledge Peterson has never said that “women are responsible for chaos.” He contends that in mythology, “chaos” is always represented by women (or female monsters.) That’s a different claim. It’s well worth discussing (I’d begin by defining “chaos”–the meaning it had for Homer is not the meaning commonly used today–and then challenging the Jungian notion that Archetypes and motifs have some deep ineffable Reality independent of human societies) but it’s not “women are responsible for disorder.” Not that I’ve heard.
Getting Peterson’s argument wrong doesn’t help our side.
Meanwhile, Shermer continues to be a joke.
I was just thinking about him yesterday–the common complaint from the “Dark Web” is that they (supposedly) don’t get media access to disseminate their ideas, yet this guy HAS HIS OWN FOOKIN MAGAZINE.
I thought Skeptic had stepped over the edge already when the women in Skeptic (Harriet Hall, Carol Tavris) wrote articles about why claims of rape by a drunk women were just morning after regret. He continues to sink.
Should that be “Shermer” had stepped?
Yeah, I suppose…but the women themselves stepped in it a bit, too, it seems to me. I used to love that magazine, when I was new to the skeptic movement (not to being a skeptic – from my mother’s stories, I think I started that about the age of 2), and it was an anchor for me. So I might be anchorless…not really, because I have B&W to be an anchor now.
Oh, never mind then, I just thought it might be a typo!
And proud to provide an anchor.
I think Skeptic’s still pretty good. Shermer may be in charge, and his voice certainly gets heard, but many other opinions get solid representation as well,
Devoting that much space to Jordan Peterson seems stupid, even though cover stories typically are less than 10% of the magazine. Maybe it’ll be more interesting than I’m imagining.
Jung and Rand. Now there’s some scientifical, reason-based thinky types for you.
Toss in an ocean of booze for Shermer, and you’se got a movement.
I’ve been fascinated by the Peterson phenomenon for a while now. And by “Peterson phenomenon” I mean the massive obsession the progressive journalists and bloggers seem to have with him. Can someone explain this? It’s true that his schtick is mostly a lot of reactionary tripe dressed up as Deep Thought, but he’s a self-help guru. The entire self-help literature is rife with atavistic wisdom that’s not much different from Peterson’s (remember Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus?). Why does he in particular provoke freak outs when other peddlers of this sort of thing don’t.
You could argue that it’s his popularity that forces people to talk about him, but that doesn’t explain anything because, as far as I can see, his fame is almost entirely due to the fact that left-ish opinion makers have spent over a year now unable to stop talking about him. He was just an obscure Canadian guy before the flood of “OMG Jordan Peterson!” think pieces started appearing.
I’m genuinely puzzled by the whole thing.
Well his fame is initially due to news coverage in Canada of his whole pronoun refusal thing, and it seems to have snowballed from there. He gets a lot of attention and oxygen-of-publicity from right-wingers, and I think the talking about him on the left is because of that more than about anything particular about him. I don’t think you’re right that the left itself has done all the fame-creating – it’s done some, certainly, but I don’t think all or most.
Sam Harris has talked him up, that ridiculous Pangburn guy organized those road trips, Shermer has talked him up, his many thousands of dudebro fans have talked him up.
Lady Mondgreen, you’re probably correct, but of course the big issue with Peterson is that it’s nigh-impossible to say what his argument actually is–he speaks and writes in almost nothing but airy platitudes rewritten with fifty-cent words to sound more erudite. Every once in awhile, he slips in a blatantly bogus claim (there was an interview where he claimed that a study had proven that there is ‘no’ wage gap at all, but the interviewer wasn’t sharp enough to pin him down on it at the time), but more often, whatever objectionable interpretation you might give to his words can be refuted with, “I didn’t mean that,” and “You need to understand the context,” and so forth. But the context is just more vapidity. So it’s impossible to pin down an actual argument he’s putting forward.
It serves two purposes.
1: It makes it very easy for him to appeal to the Angry Dudebro contingent of the internet, who love to apply their own misogyny, racism, etc to Peterson’s lofty-sounding words.
2: It lets him get away with saying that that isn’t what he actually meant whenever anyone calls him on it.
Freemage, I spent some years in Jungian therapy, reading Jungian books, and basically being a True Believer. I also know a bit–not a whole lot, but a fair-bit-for-a-layperson, about myth and folklore, the basic Western stuff anyway.
So I actually have a good idea of where he’s coming from when he talks about myth, Archetype, and story. tldr: some reference to folklore plus a bunch of quasi-mystical mumbo-jumbo.
Chaos is frequently represented as a female being (god, monster, whathaveyou) in myth. Neither Peterson nor Jung were the first to notice that.
He has noted that, but I’m not aware of him saying anything like “women are responsible for chaos”. They are not the same claim.
He makes a big deal about it, I think, because he thinks (following Jung) that Archetypes and folkloric motifs (think Joseph Campbell pontificating about The Hero’s Journey) have some metaphysical reality deep in the human psyche. If he’s followed Jung this far he believes they reside a deep level, “below” the personal Unconscious, called The Collective Unconscious.
(I assume that it is his belief in this stuff (along with his sexism) explains why he’s furious at the idea that a children’s movie (Frozen) might mix up the tropes, turn the supposed noble prince-figure into an opportunistic villain, and allow the female protagonists to rescue each other. If you stray from the story path, you’re obviously just engaging in feminist social engineering, but it won’t work, because the True Story resides deep down in each of us where the SJWs can’t reach:
http://time.com/5176537/jordan-peterson-frozen-movie-disney/)
Also should point out that “chaos” didn’t have the modern sense of “disorder” to the ancient Greeks. It refered to a sort of primordial void out of which things appeared. (And yes, it could be personified as male, too.)