Critical Race Theory

News & Guts reports:

"While dozens of Republican lawmakers around the country speak out against critical race theory, there have been questions about whether these politicians actually know what they are fighting against."

Imagine how much time and energy might have been spared if more people had taken a similar approach with Jordan Peterson and postmodernism and Marxism!

Perhaps some people learned from the case of Peterson, and are better prepared this time around.

Who knows. It would be nice to think that there are people out there somewhere who are actually learning things, and therefore behaving in a more sensible and effective manner than they used to. 

Do Peterson and Republican wingnuts and similar idiots actually have a new positive effect, by acquainting people with things so as postmodernism and Marxism and critical race theory, things with which they were previously unfamiliar?

I should probably end this post pretty soon, I seem to be in danger of getting carried away by silly amounts of optimism. I like optimism generally but I believe that it can be overdone. 

Although I must mention before ending, for the benefit of those who haven't already read it in this blog, that it actually took Jordan Peterson for me to finally learn what postmodernism is and that I am a postmodernist, even though I'm about a year older than Jordan Peterson.

It takes what it takes, whatever it is.

How This Postmodern Thing is Going So Far

For over 57 years, I managed to avoid learning enough about postmodernism to have any idea what it was. (Would it have been possible for me to remain ignorant about it for so long if I had lived in Paris? That's a non-rhetorical question. I have no idea to what extent postmodernism precepts might be a "part of the air" in Paris. I don't know whether it would be as difficult to live in Paris and not know what postmodernism is as it is to live in the US and not know the rules of baseball.) I heard mostly negative remarks about it and mostly accepted those remarks. Then, just a few months ago, I heard about Jordan Peterson for the first time, because Peterson was annoying some of my friends. Some negative remarks he made about postmodernism caught my attention because they sounded so absurd. So, for the very first time ever, I looked for postmodernists and what they themselves said about what postmodernism was. Very soon, I had my hands on a copy of Derrida's Of Grammatology. I devoured that magnificent book, and exclaimed,

"I'm a postmodernist!"

Unfortunately, however, the remarks I heard about postmodernism, apart from those made by actual postmodernists, continued to be the sort of negative remarks I had heard all my life, and had little or nothing to do with what postmodernists actually said. Although I'd started to call myself a postmodernist, I am not against technology, or against reality, or against authorship. Neither are Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard...

I am against patriarchy, colonialism, over-simplification, racism, sexism. Far from being opposed to technology or science or reality, since this cataclysm which has resulted in my identifying as postmodern, I have greatly intensified my study of advanced mathematics, electromagnetism, industrial manufacture, quantum theory and other STEM subjects.

As far as being "against authorship" -- what could that possibly mean, for an author, such as myself, to be "against authorship"? I suppose that this particular misunderstanding of postmodernism comes from the incomprehension of the very basic postmodern insight that the effect of any piece of writing depends just as much upon its readers as upon that which was actually written.

Perhaps this last insight can help me somewhat when I see people claiming all sports of nonsense about an entire group of people, the postmodernists: just as any author cannot control how his readers will understand or misunderstand what he or she writes, so postmodernists cannot control what people will say or write about us. All we can do is persevere in our own efforts. Perhaps if, now and then, we notice that someone actually understands something we've said, we can recognize that recognition. That might be better than trying to chase down the endless nonsensical things said about us, like a man trying to chase down a swarm of bees because one of them has bitten him.

Perhaps I should be hesitant to apply the label of postmodernist to myself so soon after having begun to study postmodernist literature.

Perhaps it would be good for me to keep in mind how seldom those who are considered the major figures of postmodernist literature actually referred to themselves as postmodernists. Perhaps it would be better for me to say that I've read some Derrida and found him to be profoundly delightful and not at all incomprehensible (perhaps because I share many of his interests). I haven't really had a comparable experience yet with any of the other postmodernists (as they are known by others, and much more rarely to themselves).

I think it makes sense to keep the postmodernist label for now, a couple of months after having so hastily adopted it. Although I have so far only read one postmodernist with great enthusiasm, I have a great deal in common with most of those in the group: a lack of recognition of anything I can call absolute truth; as I mentioned above, an opposition to patriarchy, colonialism, over-simplification, racism, sexism; the realization that relativity occurs not only in physics but also in ethics; a suspicion of claims of having found "the answer," whether those claims have been made in the name of Buddhism, Christianity, Marxism or what have you; a particular concern for the environment -- those sorts of things.

And if eventually the nonsensical definitions of postmodernism by people claiming to be its adherents, its opponents or its more or less sympathetic observers -- all three can be quite annoying -- prove to be to much, then I can reject the postmodernist label -- and I will have that, too, in common with many of the great postmodernists.

The Jordan Peterson -- Matt Dillahunty Debate

Master charlatan and YouTube super-duperstar Jordan Peterson recently debated New Atheist and YouTube star Matt Dillahunty:



Dillahunty posted his reflections on the debate:



So, would I rather hang out with Peterson, or with Dillahunty? The answer is, no.

As you can see, Dillahunty got really hung up on one point during and after the debate, and since he's a New Atheist, it shouldn't be too hard to guess what that point was, because the New Atheists, all of them amongst themselves, only have one point: God doesn't exist.

I agree with the New Atheists on this point: I don't happen to believe that God exists, nor that gods exist. I don't agree with them about the importance of this point. For them, it's central to their existence: People believe in God, AND THEY ARE WRONG, AND THEY MUST SEE THAT THEY ARE WRONG! For me, the topic is exhausted after a few seconds' worth of discussion, and then there are ever so many other things to think about. But the New Atheists, they just can't let it go, they can't move on. Religious belief is the central fact in human life, the source of all trouble, and must be stamped out. Now.

Peterson, referring to myths and religion, points out that they are very important to people. I have to agree with him. It may actually be the one thing about which I agree with him. I can almost actually imagine Peterson and I having a pleasant conversation, if we stuck to this one topic: the importance of myths and religion in people's lives.

Dillahunty was not available for that conversation, because he immediately, and unendingly, hammered on that one single New Atheist point: "But it's not TRUE! God doesn't EXIST!" Geepers, thanks for mentioning that, Matt, because it may actually have been as long as five minutes since you last said it. Peterson points out that myth and religion are very important in people's lives. This is true. And it offers vast possible room for discussion. But first, Dillahunty has to establish that God doesn't exist.

It's a fact! he, along with every other New Atheist, insists. It's a fact that there is no God!

And I agree with Dillahunty that this is a fact. But there's another fact which Dillahunty, and Dawkins, and Harris, and Myers, and all the other New Atheists don't seem to grasp, or at least not in all of its dimensions and implications: the fact that there are billions of people who believe in God and who are just going to be -- at best -- annoyed by someone who won't shut up about their firm belief that He doesn't exist.

New Atheists: your refusal to just agree to disagree and talk about sumpin' else -- like, for example, the great meaning which religion holds in many people's lives, maybe in most people's lives -- or it could be another topic, like incredibly-heavy medicine balls, or cats, or food, or economics or anything else except your one point -- this refusal is not converting people en masse to atheism, have ya noticed that yet?

Time for Plan B.

Upcoming Books From Steven Bollinger

First of all, I've got to surf the Jordan B Peterson wave:

I will do this with my book 0 Rules for Life: Welcome to the Existentialist Void, the first honest self-help book. The first one that tells you that all self-help books are crap, and that you've got to figure out some stuff for yourself. It will be an introduction to existentialism (which is also known as common sense), thinly disguised as self-help crap: "The good news is also the bad news: there are no rules for life, except those you make for yourself. You make your own rules whether you want to or not, whether you realize it or not. Embrace the terror and embrace the freedom: they are one and the same." And so on. Motivational crap like that.

In fiction, there's my already long-awaited novel. I've mentioned this one before: Because it's There. It's the story of an unmotivated young man who suddenly, in one instant, is struck by a powerful motivation: to cross the entire world with no vehicles, motorized or non-. This includes no boats, rafts or even life jackets. Yeah, you can bet that the swimming will be the hard part!

And then there will be the dozens if not hundreds of books consisting of essays from this very blog. Did you realize that I've posted on The Wrong Monkey nearly 1700 times? As John Cleese said in that cheese shop which was utterly uncontaminated by chesse: "What a senseless waste of human life!"

All I need is a genius agent or a Kickstarter campaign or generous patrons or something. Anything. As always, all I need is all the help I can get. SPREAD THE HYPE! Spread it thick like decadent jelly. Spread it high, spread it low. Go spread it on the mountain. Go Spread Me. Spread me like the nice monkey I am. Spread me before I spread again!

Almost forgot: there are also the 2 novels I've already finished and nearly forgotten: Salvation, my version of the story of Jesus in which Jesus is an atheist, Jesus and Pilate are good friends, and Christianity spreads as the result of a series of misunderstandings. For example, in my version, Jesus says, DON'T turn the other cheek. If you're not going to fight back, then at least cover up or run away. Misunderstandings like that.

Then there's my second novel, The Independents, which is about 300 or 400 pages long.

Then there are the two novels I've begun on this blog: the one with angels, with no title yet; and Because of Mistakes!, a novel about some people in London in 1900, at least two of whom are autistic. (It's not a mistake to refer to autism in 1900: it's an anachronism of which the author is aware. A piece of poetic license.)

Present-Day Epicureans and Stoics in Academia

At around 6:45 in this podcast of The Majority Report with Sam Seder,



Nathan J Robinson, editor-in-chief of Current Affairs (a wonderful magazine, by the way) says:

"There is a kind of sense among many academics that engaging with the public is something that is at best optional, and at worst, actually, almost anti-intellectual."

Sam and Nathan are discussing how it is that pseudo-intellectuals such as Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris are able to pass themselves off as geniuses and have great success engaging with the public. Nathan points to the disconnect between academic journals and more popular media, and the resulting lack of push-back against frauds and/or fools (it isn't always easy to see which is which) like Peterson and Harris. Many academics, Nathan is saying, see their task as involving academic journals and book publishers in their specialty, and their lives as being located in somewhat closed communities of their peers, and are quite simply not particularly interested in, or are even disdainful of, the wider public. Their ivory towers can be quite comfortable, quite blissfully calm compared to the strife of public life and politics, and they can see little reason to venture outside.

In short, many of them are Epicureans.

There are other academics who actively fight against the sort of nonsense being spread by people like Peterson and Harris, and like Stephen Greenblatt, at least when Greenblatt ventures outside of his specialty of English Renaissance literature, and spreads sheer hair-raising nonsense about ancient Latin literature and its transmission, as he does in his huge bestseller The Swerve. The ones who try to stand up for academia in public, who denounce the charlatans and half-wits posing as intellectuals, are thoroughly Stoic in their outlook: the work of their disciplines is important, they feel, and it is important that the public not be grossly misinformed about it.

Nathan J Robinson, somewhat plugged into the academic world, has spoken to neuroscientists and asked them what they think of Sam Harris, and found that often they have never heard of Harris. This is somewhat surprising in that Harris is the most famous living neuroscientist in the world, and somewhat distressing in that he has sold millions of copies of books full of positions on neuroscience which have little to no credibility among those neuroscientists who have bothered to look into Harris' work. (Harris, with a BA in philosophy from Stanford in 2000 and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA in 2009, has published a total of 2 peer-reviewed papers as well as his 7 "popular" books.) Similarly, Jordan Peterson has sold millions of books in which he pretends to be expert not only in his academic specialty of psychology, but also in philosophy and evolutionary biology and other fields as well, and, similar to Harris when it comes to philosophy or neuroscience, and similar to Greenblatt on the subject of ancient Latin literature and its transmission, Peterson rarely says or writes anything with which a scholar competent in those fields would agree.

Some academics seem, at least at first blush, to be Epicureans and Stoics at the same time. For example, Bart Ehrman is a respected specialist in the history of early Christianity who has published well-received scholarly papers and books, and has also published "popular" books aimed at the general public, which offer a sort of watered-down version of his "academic" books: no footnotes, less detail.

Such a split of one and the same scholar into "academic" and "popular" publishing, gives short shrift to the Stoic side. It implies that the public can't really handle the good stuff, unadulterated. It contains a bit of the contemptuousness of the Epicurean.

I have often been greatly tempted to follow the Epicurean path, and leave the big dumb ugly world to blow itself up. And perhaps I'm a fool not to have followed that path. Who can truly say how much we change the world, how much of the grim effort to change the world is a waste? Be that as it may: as a Stoically-minded person outside of academia, but with great interest in academia, I wish more academics would attempt to shine more of the full light of their learning into the public arena, both to expose pseudo-intellectuals to whom many of them have until now abandoned the stoa, the public marketplace of ideas, and also to be more sharing with the full delight of truly learned discourse.

Who is Jordan Peterson and Why Have 7 of My Previous 8 Posts Been About Him?

(8 out of 9 if you count this one.) I'm so glad you asked!

Jordan Peterson

is a Canadian professor of psychology who is one year younger than I am and specializes in myths and their Jungian interpretation. For example, he points out that in some myths males represent order and females represent chaos. So far so good, that is an accurate description of those myths.

But then, instead of pointing out that such myths (developed and propounded mostly by males, of course, with very little consultation of female viewpoints) are descriptive of the psychology of the myth-tellers, he actually claims that they are literally accurate. He insists that males are ordered and that females are chaotic. All 4 billion or so human males, Peterson says, are ordered, and all 4 billion or so human females are chaotic.

And furthermore, he insists that male and female are the only 2 human genders which exist. (Any real experts in myth who never heard of Peterson before this blog post are already beginning to sense how much myth Peterson has to ignore in order to keep his worldview intact.) And this leads to the way in which Peterson became famous: by objecting, in 2016, to the the 2nd clause of Bill C-16, which reads:

This enactment amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to add gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination.

The enactment also amends the Criminal Code to extend the protection against hate propaganda set out in that Act to any section of the public that is distinguished by gender identity or expression and to clearly set out that evidence that an offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on gender identity or expression constitutes an aggravating circumstance that a court must take into consideration when it imposes a sentence.

Peterson objects to this because, he claims, it will infringe upon his freedom of speech by forcing him to use pronouns other than "he" and "she" when referring to persons.

As far as I know, Peterson has not yet faced any criminal or civil prosecution because of his use of pronouns. Still, in tried-and-true right-wing fashion, he is claiming to have been victimized when no-one has done anything to him.

That's what made him famous. That, and some very popular YouTube videos in which he spews his right-wing viewpoints which, in tried-and-true right-wing fashion, he claims are not right-wing, but Classical-Liberal (or, as we would say in the United States, libertarian.) And also his book which followed very quickly upon his sudden fame as a martyr against pronoun abuse, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. (Remember: as mentioned above, Peterson says that males are orderly, females are chaotic, and that no further human genders exist.)

Peterson is a far-right-wing nut. He checks all the boxes: He claims that women need (and secretly want) to be dominated and controlled by men. He says that postmodern neo-Marxists have (again, secretly, as the postmodernists deny that they are Marxists and the Marxists deny that they are postmodern) swarmed into the faculties of our universities, where they are trying their best to enslave the minds of our young people in preparation for marching all of us off to the gulag. He is a climate-change skeptic. He says that white privilege doesn't exist. He's against women's right to choose with no if's and's or but's. He's against casual sex and gay marriage.

And he's passing himself off in many -- by no means all -- mainstream media outlets as not being right-wing at all. And he has a huge following among incels and other groups of misogynistic young men. And, annoying to me personally as a real intellectual, very many people, even including some generally-sensible Leftists, keep referring to this doofus as an intellectual. Does this help answer your question about why I've been posting about him?

12 Rules to Change Your Life and Make it Swell

1. There is no such list of rules anywhere. There is much too much diversity among human personalities, bodies and predicaments for one book to be able to help all of them. The whole self-help industry is a scam. Which doesn't mean that none of the self-help gurus are sincere. The sincere ones are fooling themselves as well as their followers.

Repeat Rule #1 11 more times if necessary.

2. Now that we've got that nonsense out of the way, there are 11 more slots in which I can say something interesting, edifying or otherwise useful (to some).

I wonder whether the world is divided up into Giorgio Moroder fans and Dario Argento fans? Moroder and Argento were both born in 1940 in Italy and they both compose music and produce musical recordings, although you might not know it from Argento's Wikipedia entry. Moroder has produced albums by the Bee Gees (disco version), Donna Summer, Blondie, David Bowie, Janet Jackson and many others, as well as composing and producing some movie soundtracks. "Stayin' Alive" and "I Feel Love," that's him. The soundtracks to Cat People, Scarface and DC Cab, that's him too.

Argento, on the other hand, may be more well known as a movie director than for his music. He made the soundtracks for some of the movies he directed and for some movies directed by others, notably, George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead.

Anyway, back when I used to hang with a bunch of film aficionados, it seemed we were divided into those who liked Moroder and those who liked Argento. And I can't remember anyone from that group except me who liked Moroder. Anyway, it just seems to me that it would be very difficult to really like them both.

3. There's a squirrel who lives outside my house who's as black as the blackest black-eyed cat you ever saw.

4. I had schwaerma for the first time yesterday. It was okay, I'll probably get it again. I first heard about schwaerma toward the end of the first Robert Downey Jr -- Scarlett Johannson Avengers movie. I wonder how many other people first heard about Schwaerma this way. (It is also spelled shawarma and other ways.)

5. I spend a significant amount of time, maybe too much time, worrying about whether the populations of cities are measured in ways which are similar enough around the world that people from one part of the world can get a good idea of the sizes of cities in other parts of the world without quite a lot of world travel and attention to population statistics. For example, the population of Detroit is around 700,000, or a little under 4 million , or a little more than 4 million, or almost 6 million, depending on how you define it. Which means that Detroit has less then half the population of Phoenix, or almost as many people as the entire state of Arizona, depending how you measure it. Forget other countries -- is Phoenix measuring even close to the same way Detroit does?

6. I finally figured out, a little while before I stopped hanging with New Atheists, that New Atheists define religions much more strictly than most of the adherents of those religions do. A New Atheist may well insist, "A Christian literally believes that an old man in the sky created the entire universe, and gave souls to humans but not to any other forms of life, and that there is no life anywhere in the universe except Earth, and that Jesus was born without his mother becoming pregnant or having sex, and that Jesus died and then rose from the dead, which was necessary to give humans a chance of not spending an eternity in Hell [...]" and they may go on in this vein for quite a while, adding more and more items to the list of things which Christians, they say, literally believe, when in fact many people who identify as Christian don't believe any of those things.

7. I keep reading the figure 750,000 for the number of copies Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules has sold. I think that figure might be out of date. Or maybe it only counts US sales. The damn thing is still selling, #52 just now on the Amazon bestsellers' list, and hasn't yet come out in paperback, I believe. Peterson has claimed sales of over 2 million (perhaps he was referring to worldwide sales), threatened to sue one reviewer for a negative review and to slap another one.

8. By the end of WWII over 40 countries were at war with Nazi Germany.

9. When Pulp Fiction was filmed, there were no Red Apple cigarettes and there was no restaurant named Jack Rabbit Slim's. Since then, several bars and taverns have opened which are called Jack Rabbit Slim's. I do not know whether Quentin Tarantino has sued or slapped any of the people who opened those establishments.

10. With few exceptions, mostly within the Soviet bloc, cars have only been exported in significant numbers from companies headquartered in the US, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Korea, Japan and China.

11. Some of the earliest watches were made in Switzerland, and they say it had something to do with Calvinism. (Make as much much money as you can but be sure not to enjoy it? I don't know.)

12. More than 7% of the electricity generated in Germany is solar.

While I Was Busy Making Other Plans

I'm looking at a copy of The Best American Essays 2017, editor: Leslie Jameson. The name didn't ring a bell -- is she the woman who wrote that ridiculous piece in The Atlantic praising Jordan Peterson and dissing The Left? No, that was Caitlin Flanagan.

Paging through the volume, an author's name catches my eye: June Thunderstorm. Her essay is against anti-smoking laws, maintaining that they have always been "about social control." A former smoker who might very well have died from emphysema if I hadn't quit over 20 years ago, I rolled my eyes and was about to dismiss her and everything she ever stood for before reading the entire first page of her essay, but then I remembered that, on this very blog, I did something similar with an essay by Thoreau on Lincoln, and then later found out that I was mistaken to do so, because the essay begins ironically, with Thoreau posing as the sort of insufferable upperclass American twit, who sneered at Lincoln, which the majority of the text of the essay actually denounces while praising Lincoln highly. Then it also occurred to me that June Thunderstorm might be a Native American, and therefore entitled to some attitudes toward tobacco which are foreign to me. Anyway, I don't feel like reading her entire essay right now, but I won't diss it before I do. Learned my lesson with Thoreau. I can't remember whether I've yet added the necessary PS and apology to that essay.

Inside the front cover are listed 32 editors of The Best American Essays, 1986 to 2017. I recognized 17 of those names. I've dissed at least three of them in this blog: Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick and Christopher Hitchens. One of those 17, Edward Hoagland, I admire very much,

and several more have some level of my respect.

After I'd first looked at that list of 32 celebrity editors for a minute or so, it occurred to me that all 32 of them, and surely either all or almost all of the essayists whose work is printed in this volume, and surely many if not most of the hundreds of other authors whom Robert Atwan mentions in the back of the volume as having also written notable essays published during the year under review, and many if not most of thousands more writers either printed or mentioned in the other annual volumes of The Best American Essays published since the late 1980's, have one thing in common: they've written entire volumes which were published long before they reached age 57. I'm 57, and I'd always planned to become a big-time celebrity writer long before I got this old.

Life is what happens to us while we're busy making other plans, as William Gaddis or Readers' Digest or someone else first pointed out. (John Lennon wasn't the first.) Although I feel perfectly justified in dissing Sontag or Ozick or Hitchens as if I could do better, because I think I could, I think I can, I think I do, I think I have for quite a while -- nevertheless, I have absolutely zero credentials to support this attitude. And you, you either agree with me, or you regard me as a conceited crank, which really wouldn't bother me, which you may or may not believe. But not being published, not having any entire published volumes written all by me, that really irks me.

Some people have suggested to me that I self-publish a volume. I don't think that really counts as being published, nor does blogging, which anyone can do. Being published means that a publisher has selected your work and approved and that it gets published and that you get paid for it.

Jordan Peterson Accidentally Helped Me Realize I'm a Post-Modernist

Can it really be less than 24 hours since I began to read Derrida? Yes. It be.

About a week and a half ago, I first started to notice the existence of Jordan Peterson, in the remarks of otherwise seemingly sedate and reasonable people expressing extreme distaste for him. I soon heard Peterson, on YouTube, describing what he asserted was postmodernism. I was hazy about what exactly postmodernism was, but not so hazy that I couldn't see that what Peterson was saying had to be inaccurate.

More precisely: Peterson is warning us all about neo-Marxist postmodernists. He claims neo-Marxist postmodernists want to destroy Western civilization. That they say people belong in groups determined by their ethnicity and gender, and that all these groups are condemned to war against each other forever.

So I did what I could have done decades ago: I turned to actual Marxists and postmodernists for their definitions of Marxism and postmodernism, and learned that, outside of the imaginations of people like Peterson and his fans, neo-Marxist postmodernists don't exist: a defining characteristic of postmodernism is a skepticism toward all meta-narratives, and Marxism IS one of those very meta-narratives.

Now: Marxists and postmodernists will agree about SOME things. Such as that Jordan Peterson is constantly making stuff up and selling it at high prices as invaluable truth. But any reasonable person of any political or philosophical tendency will see that, if he or she takes a little time and effort to examine the matter.

A huge bell went off in my head, because, for decades, I had been skeptical toward all meta-narratives. I'm always insisting that things are more complicated than that. You know that episode of "The Simpsons" where Lisa is reading some Buddhist literature, and has a sudden epiphany and yells, "I'M A BUDDHIST!" Same thing happened to me, except I didn't yell, and I realized I'm a postmodernist, not a Buddhist.

Yesterday, I began reading the 40th anniversary revised edition of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's English translation of Derrida's On Grammatology, with an introduction by Judith Butler and a new Afterword by Spivak, and, people: these are my peeps.

And we don't want to destroy Western civilization or war against all other groups. Derrida is a total Western-civilization-phile from Homer to Heidegger.

My advice, besides checking out Derrida and Spivak and Butler, is to not believe anything Peterson says. About anything. At all. Ever. When Peterson disses a dead writer like Derrida or a living one like Butler, READ THAT WRITER.

Man, wouldn't it be a huge irony if Jordan Peterson, of all people, unintentionally caused people to read more good books?

It was with some reluctance that I sought out an English translation of a book by Derrida, rather than the French original, but undergraduate French classes were a long, long time ago. In the case of Of Grammatology, I was fortunate -- we all are fortunate -- because Spivak, the translator of Of Grammatology, is a tremendous writer in her own right. I have no idea, yet, what the quality of other English translations of Derrida or other French postmodernists might be.

Jordan Peterson is Not an Intellectual, He Just Plays One on YouTube

PZ Meyers sez we should call Jordan Peterson what he is: an anti-intellectual. I'm down with that. (And it's nice to be able to agree with PZ Meyers about something for a change.)

This takedown of Peterson by Nathan J Robinson in Current Affairs is wonderful. I take exception with Robinson referring to Peterson as an intellectual. But Robinson makes it clear that he uses the term very loosely:

"In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train. But we do not live in a reasonable world."

And I also take issue with Robinson's... okay, I was about to say that I take issue with Robinson's characterization of Peterson as "the intellectual we deserve," and giving some of the responsibility for Peterson's success to the sorry state of the Left -- but then I remembered the Occupy movement and their position that "it's okay not to have goals" and how that has always struck me as a particularly poor attitude for a (supposedly) political movement to take.

But in this post, I'm about accentuating the upside. I see intellectuals (real ones) being energized by Peterson. If anyone ever could energize and unite Marxists, postmodernists, intersectional feminists, philosophers in general, English teachers, evolutionary biologists, comparative mythologists and other (real) intellectuals who normally don't necessarily all get along so well with each other, then surely it's Mr Go Clean Up Your Room There Bucko. If any one person ever could inspire us to go grab the public by its mental lapels and explain to them just who really does and does not deserve to be called an intellectual, it's Peterson, with his constant and thorough misrepresentation of who we are and what we do and say and want.

Oh and by the way, let me take the opportunity to address the reason I've seen most often proposed by writers on the Right for the Left's hostility to Peterson: the amount of money that he makes. That's absurd. George Clooney has made over a billion dollars so far, many times as much as Peterson, and we're not pissed off at him. Because Clooney isn't constantly talking out of his ass.

I'd also like to address the excuses so often being made for him by critics on the Left: he's not so bad, they say. Yes, very many of his fans are alt-right and antisemitic and brimming with toxic sexism and otherwise atavistic, but he's not far-right. How much longer will the non-Right keep giving Peterson this thoroughly undeserved concession? Wake up and smell the barbed wire: he's far-right. That's why all of those fans of his are far-right (and very often deny that they are, perhaps oftener than not). I know of only one admiring description of Peterson from the Left -- except, to be precise, it's from an author, a fellow mythologist, who sez "I'm a Leftist and I like Peterson." I'm not sure whether anyone else sez that that guy is a Leftist.

Jordan Peterson and Young Love

The top panel is an actual political cartoon by a conservative political cartoonist, portraying today's young men as the tragic victims of political correctness run amok. I have a strong suspicion that this cartoonist and Jordan Peterson would get along just swell.

In the bottom panel, the same cartoon has been just slightly revised, in order to explain to Peterson and the rightwing boneheads who revere him that things really aren't all that bad for young buckos who can reasonably expect to be up for big promotions 30 years from now.

If you're not sure: ASK.

If you're not interested in whether or not it's okay with the other person: YOU'RE A PREDATOR AND A CRIMINAL.

Very simple. Very straightforward. And young men are not being oppressed by it.

Jordan Peterson Is a Climate-Change Denier --

I'm trying to find something Jordan Peterson has said or written which isn't both erroneous and right-wing -- including his claim that he's not right wing. You see all those wingnuts praising him? Me too. You see any Leftists claiming him as one of our own? Me neither.

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.

Jordan Peterson, Marxism and Postmodernism

Jordan Peterson is a horse's ass, a pseudo-intellectual, someone that stupid people can follow and believe that they're engaging in intellectual discourse.

One of Peterson's favorite topics are the neo-Marxist postmodernists who have taken over our campuses and are busy enslaving the minds of our youth. Peterson goes into very great detail about the history, motives and goals of this movement of neo-Marxist postmodernists, as if he were a great authority on the subject of neo-Marxist postmodernism.

Here's an example of how far Peterson is from being a real intellectual, or a real authority on anything at all: there is no such thing as a Marxist postmodernist, neo-Marxist or not, and there is no such thing as a postmodernist Marxist. One of the most central and basic features of postmodernism is a skepticism toward all-encompassing theories of society. Marxism IS such an all-encompassing theory: namely, the theory that all human history has been the history of economic class struggle. Marxism insists that it all boils down to that. Postmodernism, in response to Marxism and to any other theory which insists that person A responds in manner X because of condition 1, for example, Freudianism and its insistence that all human behavior can be reduced, ultimately, to the sexual impulse, says that people are free and can respond differently, that they are not bound by economic or sexual forces or by any other universal conditions. Postmodernism is always insisting that things are a little more complicated.

As for historical context, postmodernism arose in the form of philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida in opposition to a Marxist domination of certain parts of French academia in the 1960's. At the time, the Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was about as popular as Peterson is in the US right now. Fortunately for France, Sartre was very far from being a horse's ass.

But why take my word for any of this? Some Marxist works written in opposition to postmodernism include Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism: The Cultural logic of Late Capitalism, David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, Perry Anderson's The Origins of Postmodernity, and Alex Callinicos' Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critque

As to Peterson's assertion that we can learn from the social hierarchies of lobsters, if you're not already laughing out loud, you can ask an evolutionary biologist about that one. Probably just about any evolutionary biologist would do.