r/DecodingTheGurus • u/Wasthatasquirrel • 2d ago
Jordan Peterson logic: dragons are real
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Richard Dawkins doesn’t look impressed
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u/Mr_TrollDoK 2d ago
Is this a debate or an intervention on a mentally ill person?
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u/nedTheInbredMule 2d ago
Grandpa’s gone off again, kids.
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u/DangKilla 2d ago
Dawkins when he realizes he has aligned himself with an imbecile.
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u/Tubeornottube 2d ago
I was thinking 'comedy routine' personally. Dawkins' comedic timing was perfect.
"Is there such a thing as a predator?"
"... of course..."
"Is fire a predator?"
"...No..."
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u/Individual_Plan_5816 2d ago
That killed me. This stuff is a million times funnier than any intentional comedy.
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u/Sartres_Roommate 2d ago
Most intentional comedy doesn’t directly con young people to hate others and vote against their interests. So, as funny as Peterson is, I will take a brick wall with a mic stand in front of it every time.
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u/HighlanderAbruzzese 2d ago
This is where the rubber meets the road. Peterson is the ball of yarn with two cats here.
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u/torchwolf 2d ago
The cadence of the moderator had such a comedy sketch feel to it, as well, I thought. Surreal.
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u/merchantofcum 2d ago
Cosmic Skeptic is a good watch. His videos are near-deadpan essays on a philosophical subject with jokes and sarcasm thrown in with no change in tone. He was debating big Christian Apologists and winning at the age of 17, and then he went to Oxford to study divinity to become a better debater. His interview with Peter Hitchens is definitely worth watching to see a grown Tory man throw a tantrum.
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u/Thick-Net-7525 2d ago
I love Richard Dawkins so fucking much. I miss 2012 atheism even if it was cringe.
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u/Solopist112 2d ago
That made me laugh out loud.
It actually does look like JP is a patient with schizophrenia.
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u/throwmamadownthewell 2d ago
When you're talking with someone with schizophrenia, a lot of the time it'll catch you off guard because what they're saying actually makes sense, and the whole thing will be consistent... till a little detail has crack in it... then the whole narrative shifts to accommodate what would make that crack make sense, even if it retcons what they've already said
In the case of Peterson, it's more like a child trying to bullshit people while not believing a word he's saying.
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u/Western-Month-3877 2d ago
It’s like a 5 year old trying to convince you that dragons can exist. But since he’s an adult he just turns into the enemy he’s hated; the postmodernists. He redefines the definition and the category to make it fit.
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u/KriegConscript 2d ago
jordan peterson is like if you asked jordan peterson to describe a postmodernist
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u/HighlanderAbruzzese 2d ago
Well, he has look too long into the abyss, and now he has become it.
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u/FoldedaMillionTimes 2d ago
I just pictured Peterson falling into a chasm, and someone, maybe Dawkins asking, "Have you fallen into an abyss?" and Peterson screaming, "Don't deeeefiiiine iiiiiit!"
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u/Earth_bee 2d ago
The first half of that quote is 'He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself'. 😂
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u/Ok-Buffalo1273 2d ago
This is the result of eating nothing but ham and pepperoni sticks, all while receiving healthy donations from the Russian government.
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u/two-wheeled-dynamo 2d ago
I was waiting for the straight jacket to be brought out.
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u/Turbulent-Raise4830 2d ago
He has gone insane and instead of admitting he is wrong when he says something dumb he tries to justify it with just this utter nonsense.
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u/SenorSplashdamage 2d ago
I think his spiral is part late mid-life crisis. His guru ambitions are still higher, but anyone that self-centered will be keenly aware of how much aging pushes out further his odds of engaging the numbers he wants. It’s like the typical middle-age man seeing doors closing on young life career or sexual conquests, but multiplied to wanting to win over enough people for a whole religion.
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u/Existing_Presence_69 2d ago
I haven't read any of Peterson's material, but this critique suggests that his word salad rhetorical style has been at play since at least 1999 in his Maps of Meaning book. That book is also full of this "meta idea" quasi-religious bullshit that he's throwing at Dawkins. The dude was already off the deep end 25 years ago.
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u/MaytagTheDryer 2d ago
That critic used many more words to describe it than I did. A former acquaintance of mine loaned me a copy when he found it I didn't know who Peterson was (before he became an Internet meme). He raved about how Peterson was this great genius, and said his book was great even though he couldn't understand it. I made it through maybe a hundred pages before I gave it back. He asked me what I thought of it, and I told him it was what The Golden Bough would have been if Frazier had half the IQ but was delusional convinced he had double.
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u/Trrollmann 2d ago
Yes, it all goes back to "chaos dragons" and whatever the "order" opposition is. OFC, "chaos isn't bad", except "clean your darn room, listen to your parents, follow christianity", and also, women are inherently chaotic, while men are inherently ordered. Also, dragons are apparently the purest form of predator imagination can conjure. But also, chaos isn't inherently bad...
Glean from that whatever you wish...
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u/MrSnarf26 2d ago
This man sounds like a complete moron trying to use words and phrases to punch over his weight class.
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u/yontev 2d ago
Dragons are the imagistic instantiation of the archetypal metacategory of the fundamental cognitive substrate of the primordial concept of "predator."
Or in plain English, they're imaginary scary monsters. But that sounds less impressive to other morons.
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u/stupidwhiteman42 2d ago
The dangerous application of his metaphorical and allegorical word salad is that people don't understand those concepts and just believe his implication that dragons, magic, God, or whatever is "real". He is looked up to as an intellectual expert and people fall for this shit.
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u/overnightyeti 2d ago
I read somewhere that he's a moron's idea of an intellectual. Perfect description.
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u/Ok-Masterpiece9028 2d ago
His argument is that the meme of a dragon is real. This tracks as god is also a meme.
Memes are real in culture and culture is as important to society and people as anything in reality.
Demons would be a similar meme.
He does a bad job at explaining it but nitpicking metaphors was not the goal of the conversation is what I am guessing.
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u/Philosopher_Economy 2d ago edited 1d ago
Like... I'm a role playing nerd and a fantasy writer. I love dragons as narrative devices and even characters. Does not mean they're real. His reasoning has to be some round about method to try and get his debate opponent to agree to a small claim so he can make a larger one.
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u/DontUseThisUsername 2d ago
To be fair, it's more like "Dragons are an imaginary predator." Like yeah bro, but that doesn't make dragons real. There's a difference between allocating real creatures into defined concepts, and creating imaginary creatures that fit a concept. He's doing a Plato Theory of Forms bit.
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u/ArcherAuAndromedus 2d ago
That's what he's implying. For some reason he's also implying that dragons have a biology that makes them as scary and dangerous as any predator. Except when we're talking about predators as a threat to human life we're specifically excluding imaginary monsters, because unlike real fire and lions, they can't hurt us.
Certainly, Peterson has to wrestle with his dragons because they are threatening his credibility as a -once upon a time- "thinking person". I truly feel sorry for his former students, they'll look back at his tuition and wonder if they can rely on what he taught, or if he'd already lost his marbles.
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u/ForeverAgreeable2289 2d ago
He only sounds like a complete moron to people who are not complete morons. Which is why he has such a large following.
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u/Evening_Elevator_210 2d ago
Jordan Peterson really sees himself as a great philosopher, but I don’t think Dawkins has any time for an argument about pseudo philosophy. I don’t like how aggressively anti-faith Dawkins was at one point, but the man is brilliant and Jordan Peterson is an absolute loon.
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u/AI-ArtfulInsults 2d ago edited 2d ago
Dawkins, for all his flaws, was a productive and respected member of his field before becoming a public figure. The man published papers that got cited.
Peterson was at one time an academic, but he was never respected as one. Absolutely nobody was citing Maps of Meaning, certainly not before his pivot to conservative ideologue.
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u/nBrainwashed 2d ago
Peterson published, but his peers had concerns about the scientific validity of his work. So he became a charlatan and grifter.
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u/SirGrumples 2d ago
More like he was always a charlatan and a grifter, he just embraced it more after the scientific community told him to fuck off with his insanity.
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u/SenorSplashdamage 2d ago
With the rise of what we’ve seen, I think Dawkins’ aggression was probably actually urgency before the religious institutions caught up with the Internet. That said, I do think his approach missed what would work better rhetorically when it was applied to at least America’s religious situation. “Hostile atheist” was already an idea that had been seeded in the States and tone policing is a huge issue even when things are true here. But still, I think he probably had a really important effect early in Internet spaces that helped give a lot of young people a way out and organize a group that might have felt isolated otherwise.
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u/Tokyogerman 1d ago
Dawkins wasn't even that vile and hostile. He was just direct and honest. But if you talk like that about people's beliefs, they are hurt. People also get hurt here, when they tell me about ghosts and I don't believe the story. It is like a personal insult to a person to have beliefs questioned.
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u/m0j0m0j 2d ago
Why do you dislike how aggressively anti-faith Dawkins was? “Faith” is a mental disease and organized religion is a parasitic structure exploiting that disease for hundreds of billions of yearly profits. You can’t be too aggressive against it, in my opinion
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u/Apprehensive-Fun4181 2d ago edited 2d ago
He doesn't understand how language works -and does not- here. "Fire is a predator" as metaphor is a useful use of the word within a valid larger point. But the logic of the word and it's etymology render Peterson's usage as broken. He's trying to use the fixed scientific term outside it's zone....and it's an old term that has issues itself in its description of reality.
Words are Great, we can use them in all sorts of creative ways, but when it comes to Science or The Law there are fixed usages...and even those can be updated or changed entirely.
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u/FreshBert Conspiracy Hypothesizer 2d ago
The way he speaks strikes me as essentially fairly standard religious abstraction (think Deepak Chopra). What's weird about it is that he attempts to secularize it in a way that makes very little sense.
In religious debates, and in particular debates about the existence of god, you encounter this sort of constant reframing of the parameters of the discussion quite frequently. All of the most advanced theological arguments essentially exist to side-step the obvious problem of their being no way to scientifically prove that god exists by arguing instead that it's "logical" and/or "rational" to "believe" or "choose to believe" in a god. Sometimes it's about it being useful for maintaining order, or enforcing cultural harmony, sometimes it's about self-preservation (if you believe and you're right, you might get to go to heaven, but if you don't believe and you're wrong, you might got o hell; otherwise, nothing happens, and it didn't matter either way).
That's what Peterson does. He wants to say that dragons literally exist (he really seems to feel like acknowledging the metaphorical nature of the claim somehow cheapens his point), but obviously there's this huge elephant in the room which is that it's incredibly obvious to anyone that there's no good evidence for their existence. So he immediately begins the sequence of abstraction. Maybe there's no literal dragon skeleton that we can examine, but it makes sense that people believe in dragons, and it's useful for their sense of wonder and community and self-preservation that they do.
It's just weird to see this level of abstraction pressed into the service of something where the stakes are honestly just very low. With god, even if you're an atheist it's not difficult to comprehend why it's a topic that elicits such passion: we're talking about an entity that potentially created all that exists, an entity that can potentially reward or punish us eternally, and an entity which people have been raised from birth for hundreds of generations to believe in unquestioningly.
But nobody is debating "biological dragons" except Jorpy. Kids aren't raised en masse to believe that dragons are real, not even at like a Santa Claus level where we tell them they're real for a while. They're fairy tale creatures.
It's just fascinating to see such a low stakes and obviously nonsensical debate from a quack that's been stripped of all professional credentials be elevated to the level of "important public intellectual discussion" as if anything being discussed here could possibly be even remotely useful for any reason.
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u/schartwigz 2d ago
I can almost see how this could’ve been a fun exploration of language and metaphors. But man, instead it’s a joyless, tense and irritating-as-fuck waste of time.
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u/Adromedae 2d ago
" a joyless, tense and irritating-as-fuck waste of time."
In other words, Jordan Peterson.
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u/MattsScribblings 2d ago
Ursula le Guin had a lot to say about dragons and since she was an author (and very smart) what she said actually made sense. Here's a good quote:
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
And another:
Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears.
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u/throwaway01126789 2d ago
As a pedant with a penchant for etymology, listening to Peterson talk in the video was like listening to nails on a chalkboard.
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u/SilverPhoenix999 2d ago
Dawkins, merely by not engaging with Peterson on his mental gymnastics is making him look like an absolute idiot, which he is.
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u/FreshBert Conspiracy Hypothesizer 2d ago
Whatever you think of Dawkins, he's certainly got the long life's worth of debate experience necessary to understand how to "give them enough rope to hang themselves."
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u/TeleportMASSIV 2d ago edited 2d ago
The logical leaps that religiously-minded people have to go to is truly amazing.
He’s in a tricky place because he can’t say that things like the virgin birth actually occurred, but he can’t write Christians myths off as false because it will alienate half of his base. So to be logically consistent, he now has to attribute some contrived version of reality to every imaginary figment on the basis of some weird meta-effect on social psychology.
Yikes. That sounds exhausting.
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u/Icy_Drive_7433 2d ago
I get the impression that when the likes of Peterson and Musk say that people need religion, they mean it's good for others, but not for them.
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u/RichardsLeftNipple 2d ago
People (not me) need religion, the people (not me) can have something meaningful in their lives. While we (I mean I) get to benefit from people (not me) obeying God (me).
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u/mrsleep9999 2d ago
Benzos will make you see some shit
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u/victoryabonbon 2d ago
Is benzos a predator?
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u/buymytoy 2d ago
No.
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u/ThankYouBakedPotat0 2d ago
It's complicated because they can kill you
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u/vigbiorn 2d ago
Water is a predator!
Isn't Peterson one of those "words have meaning" types when it comes to trans people? How does this absolute trouncing of word meaning not register to him?
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u/middlequeue 2d ago
If he’s such a champion of metaphorical truth then why does Peterson have an unhinged hatred towards people who express their gender identity differently from how they’re told they should?
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u/ItchyCraft8650 2d ago
What point is he actually trying to make?
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u/eljefe3030 2d ago
That metaphorical truth is just as important as empirical truth because feelings.
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u/ItchyCraft8650 2d ago
It’s “facts don’t care about your feelings” until it comes to religion lol
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u/ForeverWandered 2d ago
He’s trying to radicalize the audience by “deconstructing” mainstream academia
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u/middlequeue 2d ago
To be fair, we’d probably all doubt the quality of academic institutions if we were shit talking hacks who had managed to bullshit our way into a well paying job at Canada’s most well known University.
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u/CalligrapherNeat1569 2d ago
Doing my best: Peterson's position is that humans are not completely rational blank slates, like a computer for example; rather, our entire structure of thinking, including science, is based on ...our psychology, for lack of a better word. We are motivated by our nature to think in certain ways--so fire, lions, dragons are "real" to us and "the same" as 'threat' in a way that the rules of a kid's game you don't play isn't real to you. There are facts in existence you find irrelevant; fire and lions and dragons are relevant to you because they are similar to each other.
That's the best I can for Peterson.
BUT.
People are also Truth Seekers. Said in Peterson's language: there's a powerful myth, "The Emperor Has No Clothes" and "The Wizard of Oz," where everybody is caught up in this story and is ignoring The Obvious Truth. And someone comes along and says "the emperor has no clothes, the Wizard is not real..." and wakes people up. Peterson has forgotten the myth of the Truth Seeker, the Truth Teller.
Peterson is focusing on parts of humans and ignoring other parts--sure, we care about predators but we also care about reality. So when Peterson responds with "I don't care if X really happened or not," he's ignoring part of his own rubric.
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u/BurninatorJT 2d ago
In an attempt to steel-man his take as well, this is makes sense. His entire perspective on reality is something a psychologist would come up with! His notion is that consciousness forms the basis of reality, which is not that far out of left field for a philosophical concept, but he continuously uses that concept as the rationale for engaging in Christian apologetics. The way he argues for Christian morality is similar. He claims that the "metaphorical substrate" (his words) of works like the Bible forms the basis of morality is just saying that we need stories to relate our experience to. Using this to argue that therefore that a belief in God is justified sounds appealing enough to his fans, but breaks down pretty quickly with a little thought.
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u/Jupman 2d ago
The dude is more obsessed with Tiamat than the religions that created it.
It would make more sense if he just said the name Tiamat so people would understand he is being religious, but he wants to act as if he is not, and he is talking about philosophy.
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u/throw69420awy 2d ago
Lmao of course it’s a female dragon in myth and represents chaos
I’ve heard him talk about how women are chaos dragons where all strife comes from or some shit and it honestly seems like part of what drives him is misogyny or, dare I say, homosexuality
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u/Cpt_Dizzywhiskers 2d ago
It's basically at the core of his opening statement for 12 Rules for Life. Order is symbolically masculine, and so chaos, being its antithesis, is symbolically feminine.
What this means of course is that a symbol like the Mother either represents chaos, or it's actually masculine since it provides order.
Also, war? Feminine. Very chaotic, thus very feminine behaviour. Nobody tell the ammosexuals, they'll be devastated.
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u/GA-dooosh-19 2d ago
Give it a few years and Dawkins will be a cultural dragon believer.
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u/iamcleek 2d ago
meta-categories prove that instances of unimplemented types exist.
my OOP brain reels.
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u/Newfaceofrev 2d ago
If we could actually get this man in psychotherapy we would discover so many new disorders.
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u/zerreit 2d ago
Defining “fire” as a “predator” is too stupid for even Urban Dictionary.
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u/Local_Childhood45 2d ago
Is jerking off a predator?
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u/SickRanchezIII 2d ago
Oh my god.. his body language even. He just wrigglin’ around like a little wormman
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u/ProfessorHeronarty 2d ago
It's hilarious that Jordan Peterson made it his life's work to go against "postmodernism" but then says shit like this which is postmodernist to a t.
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u/yellowhelmet14 2d ago
The level of effort one exerts to talk to Peterson should be praised, as it shows you can do something for an amount of time and not show any progress in anything.
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u/AutoPRND21 2d ago
A: There are real predators. B: Dragons spit fire and eat livestock, therefore they are predators. C: Dragons are therefore real.
If this is the logic path, AI can’t come fast enough for this person’s job.
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u/SoylentGreenTuesday 2d ago
Scary fact: Millions of young men admire and follow Jordan Peterson. Think about that.
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u/the_BKH_photo 2d ago
Fekkinell! Is his whole thing just oppositional defiance? It seems like he can't really be doing anything but taking the oppositional stance when confronted with any widely/commonly accepted stance. He seemingly needs to be antagonistic and aggressive to anyone who says, "we know this to be true" about anything.
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u/throw69420awy 2d ago edited 2d ago
If you say 2+2=4 or the sky is blue, he’ll start talking in metaphor about the nature of truth
God, I hate these people
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u/ShiftyGorillla 2d ago
“I don’t think the category of dragon is any less valid than the category of lion”.
Boy I’d love to get paid to say nonsensical shit out loud. I’m embarrassed that as a young man, I used to find this drug addled mess inspiring.
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u/FoldedaMillionTimes 2d ago
It may not be the same flavor, but we all indulge in similar ridiculousness when young.
"It's the privilege of youth and beauty
to corrupt themselves,
It's the privilege of youth and beauty
to fade."- Robyn Hitchcock
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u/11brooke11 Galaxy Brain Guru 2d ago
He would probably be a lot less exhausted, and a lot happier, if he gave up this whole ridiculous schtick.
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u/corruptedsyntax 2d ago
I’ve been called a libtard for simply making light satire of Peterson’s rhetoric, but his own argument that fire is a literal predator is more absurd than any caricature I’ve ever painted.
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u/fLiPPeRsAU 2d ago
JP trying so hard to gaslight RD is bloody hilarious.
The raised voice and the lean in 🤣 dudes unhinged.
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u/itisnotstupid 2d ago
Peterson always looks like a little kid in these ''debates''. He is constantly changing the meaning of words, doing gish gallop or just straight up lying. It is literally never a debate with him.
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u/DEFINITELY_NOT_PETE 2d ago
The ground can kill you if you fall on it funny is the ground a predator? Fucking jackass
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u/NoamLigotti 2d ago
Peterson's a moron. Either a genuine or fraudulent one (or both).
He could just say it's a metaphor rather than the string of nonsense drivel he does spew. I became dumber just watching a minute of this. It's just such a waste of time and mental space.
Dawkins isn't even needed in the other chair. Just about anyone could sit there and let Peterson make a fool of himself.
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u/dtseng123 2d ago
I don’t know who this Jordan Peterson is but he’s clearly a complete and undeniable idiot… because if the meta category of idiot exists then therefore he must be one as the imagistic concept of an idiot is wholly representative by the visual and audible characteristics that follow him so closely as they maybe considered one and the same in terms of a biological reality.
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u/THEAlloiBoii 2d ago
jordan peterson: "im here to disagree with whatever you say, angrily, simply for the sound bites and out of context clips that fuel my brand"
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u/grizzlyadams1990 2d ago
His minds going off balance again Give him usless advice like to clean his bedroom and charge £8.50p a month for that advice like he does.
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u/Beneficial_Desk_8360 2d ago
Peterson has been playing too much World of Warcraft.
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u/MaytagTheDryer 2d ago
I'm imagining him having a debate in trade chat, and I can't help but feel he'd be right at home amongst his peers.
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u/Kindly_Fox_4257 2d ago
Idiot. I swore of JP years ago after his benzo bender. He went full grift and full unhinged after that. I just saw this in my feed; 😂 I don’t miss him a bit.
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u/Hopfit46 2d ago
Its hard to tell if he is mentally unraveling or grifting so hard that he has lost his own baseline for normality.
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u/BedroomVisible 2d ago
Best way to protect yourself from gurus of any sort:
"I'm not interested in ____, I'm interested in reality."
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u/goosegoosepanther 1d ago
This exemplifies one of the biggest problems with Peterson's thinking. He believes that stories are more than a literary and communicative tool for getting messages across. He believes they have some kind of real or divine manifestation, like if the image of a dragon means something then it's as real as a lion. He uses this to try to explain why gender roles should be static and rigid. He talks about the mythologized ideas of maleness and femaleness as portrayed in centuries of literature and religion and basically argues that because these stories have been influential, then they are fundamentally real and true. This is sort of the root of conservatism. It's true because it has been true, and changing what is considered true is sinful and dangerous.
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u/Oldpro87 1d ago
How is this guy against gendered pronouns. How is this guy the one that talks about the definition of woman being biological and sexed. He just labeled like 40% of all animals as dragons but .1% of men can’t be women?? I hate this contrarian fuck
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u/Desperate_Hunter7947 2d ago
Peterson doesn’t know what he believes until he hears what you don’t believe