Comments

1

"The weaker you are, the stronger your society is."
Chuck - You are by far the strongest society (of one) that I have ever encountered.

4

Charles,
You're in Toronto. Right? You wouldn't be attending the Zizek-Peterson debate Friday, 4/19?

5

@3

Sometimes there aren't any dead raccoons on the way to work, all the paper bags have handles on them, the wine at the local convenience store has been thoroughly reviewed, and a workaday writer just has to stretch a bit to pad out the daily word count.

Or perhaps Our Bumbling Charles is fixated on whatsisname simply because he's encroaching on Mudede's turf: incoherent, overconfident political diatribe sprinkled with quotes from white male mostly-dead philosophers.

6

One thing the communists got right: shoot the intellectuals first.

7

6

Isn't that what Trumpfy said?
Or was it the Journalists...

Muslim Legislators
from Minnesota?

8

I was quite surprised when I read some Jordan Peterson at how shallow everything he says is. But I guess if you tell people what they want to hear and that it's based on something the speaker says is "deep", then large numbers of them are happy to skip the critical thinking on their own all together.

I understand Charles's surprise that any serious philosopher would be willing to elevate Peterson's stature by bothering to debate him.

9

Again Charles? Another useless article citing a very select few postmodernists that one could argue were not complete Marxist although they had some Marxist tendencies. You truly believe it wise and enlightened to throw that out as your be all end all in proving this ridiculous point?
Same as your last article yet somehow more sad....
Although this time you are not making the ridiculous proclamation of no Marxism at all in regards to your heroes, rather you claim "it is not cultural Marxism, simply economic Marxism" and they're works are to be used to create a Marxist economy rather than a Marxist society to protect from evil capitalism in accordance with the labor theory of value.
Please explain how the economy can be pushed towards Marxism without first pushing the culture towards Marxism. Do you think the capitalist economy that continues to grow and prosper is going to make that switch for no good reason other than a false sense of guilt for poor people?
Capitalism doesn't work like that Charles.
The one and only way to turn a prosperous capitalist economy into a (failing) Marxist leaning economy is via a revolution of the people, one could almost call it a cultural revolution. And if your philosophers admitted end game is economic Marxism then pray tell what kind of cultural revolution would be needed? A Marxist one.
I truly don't believe you are this stupid Charles, but I do believe your livelihood depends on your readers being so.
Oh and to the scholar that managed to type out the eighth comment, compare three things, fields of study, years of study, as well as higher learning degrees between that of Charles and Jordan before making the claim that Jordan's works are shallow.
I have read both and Jordan calls on studies containing the best science we have available at this time to legitimize his works that cover a time period that goes as far back as before the dinosaurs and up to present day.
We still can't seem to get Charles out of the period of 1900-1970, and I have made it very clear, those works and thoughts are not back by any form of credible science.

10

KpDerailed, well said. Claiming that Peterson is some type of self-help Guru is intended only to degrade his actual work. Making him seem like a Tony Robbins instead of one of the greatest intellectuals of our time.

Let's see how the pseudo-intellectual Marxists " philosopher" Stacks up against Peterson in this debate. It doesn't seem like a real good idea to try and defend bad ideas but more power to him.

By the way why are we calling this guy a philosopher? It's been done there's no philosophy behind it. It's now a failed ideology. It's no longer possible to talk about Marxism in a purely theoretical fashion. To do so is to completely, and oh so conveniently, leave out the last 100 years of bloody Marxist history. That's right I forgot, all those guys didn't get it right. But the new Marxist philosophers, we should trust them because they can do it better. Lol Yeah right.!

11

What a circular bit of reasoning.
The current obsession with socialism/Marxism is more of a last gasp.
The really fresh thinking would be post-socialist.
Marxism/socialism are the most failed experiments in history yet our self declared intellectuals want rerun the experiment again.
And if Peterson is a "self-help guru", that leaves the hive mind so well represented in this tautological essay as the "anti-help gurus".

12

Charles is a Utopian. He reads philosophy without researching historic applications because he just wants his progressive European philosophy so bad...ECONOMIC Marxism, not CULTURAL Marxism, he says. Yes Charles, and i want to live forever, exploring the universe on the back of a unicorn.

Never have the economic trajedies of marxism been separate from top-down cultural engineering. If you'd read the first chapter of the communist manifesto, you'd see the way marx recommends achieving the great change to a communist economy is through a top-down change in culture to create fertile, brainwashed psyches, receptive to the leaders' ideology, beginning with the doctrine of the oppressed proletariat.

The French and German socialist philosophers--from hegel to Rousseau to marx--lost this argument over and over again in the real world, and we are the proof--the richest, freeest nation (yes, it's true) in history. Yet you're preaching that we need to kill humanity's golden goose of free market capitalism in exchange for something the soviet union, cuba, venezuela, North Korea and nazi Germany all tried?

Take one day to study macroeconomics and try to explain to yourself how what we need is more state-control of the economy.

Charles is the kind of ideologue who reads animal farm and thinks it's about the dangers of capitalism and white people. "Four legs baaaaad!"

13

Charles is a utopianist*

15

@10 Jordan Peterson is, at best, the most bloviating pseudo-intellectual of our time. To call his work anything but self-help books for Neo-Fascists and other racist and misogynistic white males insults genuine scholarship. He is a perfect example of the guy who majors in Psychology to fix what he felt was broken in him, only to decide that his delusions are the true reality, and the rest of civilization is the ones who are wrong. Think the Principle Skinner meme.

16

@14, and yet we see the American Religious Reich advocating the same sort of primitive superstition, and their Trumpenfuehrer making those sorts of things law. Islam hardly has a monopoly on such hate, and I find it ironic that it is the Arab state that is the worst at all of that that the current administration is so supportive of that they are ignoring the murder of an American-based journalist by that nation, and participating in the cover-up.

17

Charles Mudede's hard-on for Jordan Peterson is only restrained by the thin fabric of his squishy left field pantaloons. I fear for the security detail that must repel the front row antics by a certain tu-tu wearing philosophetic on the day of the big showdown.

18

@6. Yeah. You would think Omar or AOC would say that. And they would. I think Omar would go with "kill the Jews" first though. Don't you think? Lol.

Also, who are these "journalists" you speak of? BuzzFeed? Vox? Vice? Huff? CNN? And the amazing Maddow, the conspiracy theorist? Yeah.... the irony.

Hmmm.....

19

And thus, again, we see the fatal flaw in socialism: since it is based on nothing of substance, it will commence a circular firing squad amongst devotees trying to prove to each other they their version of Marxism is the most correct. Rinse, repeat.

20

18 was aimed @7. Whoops. :)

21

Now if Jordan Peterson believes women are to blame for Charlottesville because we wouldn’t cosy up to neo nazis then I have a bridge I could sell to you.
The fatal flaw of capitalism is that is is based on exploitation and destroys life and the environment. Socialism is based on sharing. Which to most people would be a blessing.
Wealth accumulation is an engine for poverty. By the way your white hoods are slipping. Go ahead and scream.

22

18 So you have no idea who these journalists are. You are way out of the loop.

23

It's as if this article were written by a hummingbird on crack.

24

Where are the rest of all the usual Peterphiles? Didn't this get linked to 4Chan or Stormfront or whatever?

I bet Charles was banking on at least 50 comments. You guys are letting him down. Maybe Katie should try again next time.

25

@17: Thin Fabric of Squishy Left Field Pantaloons. The most creative words I've ever encountered in this paper - LOVE IT.

26

The greatest fallacy of feminism is that women and men would like to be doing the same things but socialization is preventing this from happening. Why is it so hard to believe that women and men have, in aggregate, different interests? If it turns out that women are just more interested in medical work and men are more interested in engineering or whatever, why is that an issue? The only way you are going to get an even 50% split between men and women in any field is to literally make people do work they are not interested in. Why are we assuming that a woman who is a nurse for instance would be happier doing something else?

27

@26

Mainly because there are vast variations across time and cultures in the ratio of men to women in any given occupation, where we should expect it to be uniform for a given profession if there is some innate gender preference for certain kinds of work.

50 years ago, over 90% of all computer programmers in the US were women, and the percentage of men in nursing in the US has quadrupled in the same time. In Latvia and Estonia today, over 70% of all doctors are women; in Korea and Japan, the ratio is reversed-- the figure is under 25%. 200 years ago there were no female doctors in the UK at all; today about half of their doctors are female.

Basically the reason there aren't more people who share your belief is that pretty much all of the evidence available suggests it's wrong.

28

I still don’t understand why a debate between two intellectuals would create disdain. Or why Peterson does to be honest. Secularism being dogmatic.
I’m looking forward to it. I wish there was a live streaming event in Seattle.
You don’t have to agree with everything said to appreciate the conversation being had.

29

The idea of socialism is inherently flawed as it limits the productivity of individual. Game over,mate. Zizek will be seriously beaten with his dilusional followers and that's why some followers did wish the debate never take place.

30

@ 19 actually, all of the evidence suggests literally the opposite of what you're saying lol. In the countries with the most freedom from social and economic pressure (in Scandinavian countries), where people are most able to follow their interests, the difference between occupational choices of men and women are largest.

Unless you are suggesting that men and women were more able to follow their interests, free from economic and social constrictions, in Latvia, Estonia or in the 1960s lol

31

@17, @25:
Is it possible for a fabric to be thin AND squishy?

32

Do we HAVE to have the "Marxism is not the same as 'Marxism-Leninism' conversation again? Do we have to have the "Socialism is not the same as Marxism-Leninism OR Marxism" conversation again? OR the "Cultural radicalism and anti-oppression work are not, in any universe, going to turn the world into the world's largest East Germany, and we don't have to be a society where straight white guys hold power over everybody else just to avoid building gulags" conversation? GAAAAAWWWWWWWDDDDDDDDDDDD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

33

In @32, the sentence should have read "turn THIS COUNTRY into the world's largest East Germany".

34

@29: No, game not over. People don't have to be struggling just to hold their ground to be "productive".

Productivity of what is truly needed, of what is of genuine human value, can be driven as much by filling the workplace with opportunities to be creative, to have the say in how the workplace is run, to be valued and treated with respect.

When Thoreau said "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation", he was observing the horror of daily life around him in 19th Century Industrial Revolution New England; he wasn't justifying the imposition of said desperation, or advocating that those lives be made more desperate still.

It's always fascinating and bitterly amusing that those who champion conservatism and "market values" by arguing that conservatism and markets give us freedom human freedom, always insist, at the same time, that the world of work, the world where most of us spend most or our days, must be utterly devoid of freedom for the vast majority of people who inhabit it, that within the workplace management must hold absolute power over the employees, must be able to berate, belittle, disrespect and threaten the employees without challenge or constraint, with the employees-the people who actually do most of the work and create most of the wealth, having no options but "if you don't like it, you can damn well leave".

Taken to the ludicrous extreme, these people end up living the inherent contradiction of Scott Adams, creator of the "Dilbert" comic strip, whose comics depict a soul-destroying hellscape of a workplace, yet who, as a self-described "libertarian", is an unquestioning champion of the system which perpetuates such hellscapes and, in so doing, shares responsibility for their continued existence. Scott thinks he is Dilbert; at lack of heart, he is the Pointy-Haired Boss.

35

I'm working away, listening to this debate. quite interesting and high level thinking. So much better than most locals we see around here attempting these topics. Here's to more like this - i would much prefer this to GOT or watching sportsball at the moment. I may still prefer playing sportsball or talking about these topics to listening. but for the receptive beta state, this is some sweet "content" - zizek is a fucking badass and peterson is worth a listen

36

ok, just want to point out here that the connection between Heidegger and the Frankfurt School is kind of bonkers, as in totally BS. Adorno, horkheimer, Benjamin, not on board with Heidegger stuff at all. Yeah, Derrida was a huge fan, but he wasn’t Frankfurt school. Neither was Foucault, whose even less into him. And I mean, maybe it’s padantic to get into the weeds of who influenced who, but you guys are the ones making the claims here. Did you even bother dailing up any reputable Heidegger scholars? There’s like a dozen, maybe two, in the US, and I can assure their calanders aren’t too booked to explain why it’s ridiculous to equate Heideggerian though with the Frankfurt school.

37

In any case, it is absurd for Jordan Peterson to be trying to revive the myth of "The International Communist Conspiracy" in an era when large-C Communism no longer exists. Russia is now right-wing Christian nationalist; China is, for all practical purposes, a Confucian dictatorship. North Korea is nothing but its own irrelevant hunger prison. None of the ACTUAL grassroots movements for radical change in the world today are advocating anything even remotely similar to Stalinism or Maoism.

And it's delusional to argue that the only way we can avoid a totalitarian future is to forbid any advocacy of any sort of social or economic change. The slumlord and the douchebag are NOT "the defenders of our liberty".


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