This is just awesome; and to think people pay to watch comedy like this

10/10; if he’d chosen stand-up he couldn’t have made it work, but play this off seriously and it’s hilarious

  • CliffordBigRedDog [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    13 hours ago

    this is the guy whos supposed to be the bulwark of enlightenment thought against the woke marxist anti-science dragon of darkness

    its goes Liebnitz Voltaire and then this guy

  • Barabas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    20 hours ago

    If he was faced with a guy who was less annoyingly pedantic than Dawkins he’d have fallen apart, but since Dawkins is such an unlikeable nerd we now have people running interference for Peterson. This is the same guy that took coiled snakes being depicted as evidence that there is an innate sense of DNA structure in the human mind.

    When you go through his words is just concepts stacked on concepts with no substance.

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    22 hours ago

    It is funny that he’s arguing that there is some kind of deep meaning and history behind mystic archetypes and its like yes …and? Now keep going. You found a question now look for answers? Do your job lol you can’t say “there must be a reason there’s a connection and it’s vague and there is no answer” without having tried and failed to find that answer.

    That’s like me going “hey isn’t funny that the word “bread” sounds like the Norwegian word for bread? Really makes you think huh? Maybe there’s a reason both words mean bread.”

    and then doing nothing else with that observation

    Which is really funny

    • The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      20 hours ago

      He isn’t wrong, but he means to use it to drive a wedge in “In this house we believe in science” liberalism for so called “Judeo-Christian/Western values” and knee-jerk “Don’t touch that social institution, it might be structural and society will collapse into cannibalism!” conservatism.

      • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        13 hours ago

        That’s definitely another thing worth knowing. In lieu of pursuing answers to the woo woo bullshit questions he raises he also offers a solution of “returning” to a traditionalist set of norms that is fundamentally impossible. Not only is the past of his imagination just that: imagined, but the ability to dial the clock back is impossible because the realities of the past were determined by the material conditions at that time. Since those material conditions do not match our current time any attempt to enforce the norms or expectations of the past will be an uphill confrontation against reality itself. That confrontation will be rhetorically, politically, and even physically violent. In short, it’s how you get fascism.

  • TheDoctor [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    21 hours ago

    I’m glad someone else consumes Peterson this way. The man is fascinating and silly even if he is a terrifying fascist. Lions are a type of dragon. Okay dude.

  • MF_COOM [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    23 hours ago

    Honestly I think JP is both a vile piece of shit and a complete fucking joke academically, so it’s fun to dunk on him but tbh it’s this kind of thing he talks about that I don’t dislike.

    Like ultimately he’s trying to argue there’s actual truth in our poetic, animalistic relation to the world, and that the reduction of our relation to the world to taxonomic categories misses something important about what it means to be true.

    In the most interesting chapter of Caliban and the Witch, Federici examines the idea that to create a disciplined proletariat required beating out of people all the weird, fantastic holistic worldviews that peasants had, that it was the only way to get people to show up to work on time.

    IDK I’m in a rush rn but I like that he’s refusing to cede all claims to truth to the scientific paradigm, and that’s coming from someone who has a background in hard science.

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      23 hours ago

      Like ultimately he’s trying to argue there’s actual truth in our poetic, animalistic relation to the world, and that the reduction of our relation to the world to taxonomic categories misses something important about what it means to be true.

      Nah, he’s bungling reciting an evopsych theory trying to validate eurocentric “all art about anything serpentine with a non-snake face is a dragon” bad anthropology. The whole “dragon means ur-scary thing and represents instinctual imprints of features of the most scary things of our distant ancestors’ lives” theory relies on “dragon” even being any sort of consistent archetype, which it’s not. European dragons might be villainous, predatory serpents aesthetically inspired by actual european/mediterranean animals or art/descriptions of said animals that their creators would have seen or at least heard about, but the things european explorers labeled as “dragons” from other cultures are not only radically different in aesthetics and sort of meta or narrative role (eg Chinese “dragons” being lucky, good things associated with divinity), but are also aesthetically inspired by local animals the creators of the art and stories would have seen and known.

      The whole thing is actually very silly and chauvinist. It would be like some otaku weirdo trying to use old Egyptian god artwork as evidence that “catgirl waifu” is an innate archetype.

  • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    23 hours ago

    It’s even funnier if you know the broader context of the argument he’s drawing on and just sort of bungling because he probably read an article about it in some magazine once and is riffing off his drug and coma addled memory: it’s basically this weird evopsych nonsense about “every culture independently invented dragons because they’re a sort of primal imprint of sources of danger” that’s basically trying to “explain” something that’s actually the result of dumbshit 19th century eurocentric anthropologists calling any sort of mythical creature that had representations that were anything even remotely like european dragon art “dragons.”

    Like it’s taking a premise that’s not even true to begin with, and then coming up with a dumbshit mystic explanation that makes it real instead of just chauvinist dipshittery, and then he’s also just completely bungling retelling this quack theory and presenting his own fractured understanding of someone else’s absolute nonsense as some sort of profound truth.

    • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      23 hours ago

      There’s a clip of him out there claiming that ancient societies knew about DNA because the double-helix shape shows up in some cultures. The guy is a joke, actually less coherent than someone who believes ancient aliens built the pyramids.

  • Sleepless One
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    23 hours ago

    Peterson is speaking (validly) about abstracted archetypal concepts. These are a part of human psychology, mythology and religion, although not necessarily in that order. The problem with materialists like Dawkins is their denial of the existence of anything other than the material and in order to do this they have to inhabit a dishonest duality that denies fundamental parts of their own selves, not least their own sentience. At least Peterson isn’t lying to himself at an existential level.

    🤓

  • Tomboymoder [she/her, pup/pup's]@hexbear.net
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    20 hours ago

    It’s weird that he is fixated on the dragon as this archetypical platonic ideal of a predator (I guess cause he is a jungian) , but doesn’t bring up at all it as a metaphor for a noble or something like that.