There's climate change: Peterson said it isn't happening. He compares people who say that climate change is happening and that humans are making it worse and that it we don't make major changes it will kill us all -- that's most of the people on the planet, right? Most of the people on the face of the Earth, and well over 90% of the experts on climatology, agree that climate change is happening, and that we humans are making it worse, and that if we don't make major changes it will kill us all -- Peterson compares those billions of us to old men walking around in robes with bald heads and long beards, carrying signs proclaiming "THE END IS NEAR!" Peterson's insults, like his take on the climate, are decades out of date.
Peterson claims that smart women want smarter men as mates, and that strong women want stronger men, because they want to be dominated and controlled. ...Eh, res ipsa loquitur. It's hordes of frustrated young men who are flocking to Peterson, not great crowds of women who think that he is stronger and smarter than they are, and therefore find him irresistible.
And by the way: Peterson claims that he's not anti-LGBT+, but this and other positions he has taken, much like a lot of the worst stand-up comedy of the past few decades, fail to account for the existence of non-heterosexuals.
If Peterson is an actual expert in anything, it's mythology: he's studied many myths. He can tell you the stories -- it's when he tries to tell you what they mean that the familiar right-wing gasbag appears again. Peterson, like Jung, insists that myths lead us to universal truths, when the truth is closer to the opposite: myths distract us from uncomfortable truths which we are in danger of learning. Peterson wants the truth? He wants me to tell him the truth?! HE CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
And that's the truth!
Lobsters and dominance and serotonin, anyone? Peterson says we share ancestry with lobsters, the most recent shared ancestors having lived 350 million years ago, and that lobsters get a nice serotonin rush by dominating other lobsters and maintaining the lobster hierarchy.
Our most recent shared ancestors with lobsters lived more like 500 million years ago, or more, than 350 million years ago. Our most recent shared ancestors with chimpanzees and bonobos lived several million years ago. Lobsters and chimpanzees and bonobos, in their natural states, live outside. Chimpanzees throw their poo. Humans and chimps and bonobos and lobsters and bananas and some single-celled organisms all have serotonin, and humans eat lobsters and bananas. The wide range of social structures and hierarchies among chimpanzees and bonobos, who are much more closely related to us than lobsters, would tend to suggest that lobsters having one particular sort of hierarchy is irrelevant to understanding human sociology.
Some leftist critics of Peterson say that he will soon go from revered guru to universal laughingstock, as it becomes understood that his supposedly deep understanding of various branches of knowledge is mud-puddle deep at best. I hope so. The more broadly-dispersed and deep scientific and other academic forms of literacy are, the more quickly will come the time when it is generally understood that Peterson was never more than a charlatan posing as a multi-faceted intellectual. I had at first feared that Peterson might pose a great challenge to my ambitions for Leftist intellectual credibility. Now, after two short posts about him, it feels as if my work on him is just about done. There's no substance there with which to grapple. The man is quite simply a raving loon.
