the alt-right

Schadenfreude today: prominent alt-righter with a pregnant wife tries to use feminist dating app, gets dunked on

https://www.fastcompany.com/40521433/bumble-bans-alt-right-darling-jack-pobosiec-in-a-very-public-way

looool

white supremacists are always the best argument against their own ideologies

just tremendous opsec from a guy with 'veteran navy intel officer' in his twitter bio

'incel officer' more like amirite

Peterson is posting on twitter in barely concealed accounts again:

https://www.twitter.com/WeeEgalitarian/status/957873627311038465

https://www.twitter.com/shujaxhaider/status/957949776129155072

https://www.twitter.com/ETZithrow/status/958052099752939520

corny. these people are all so fuckin corny before you even consider their ass opinions

https://alternativeright.hopenothate.com/my-year-inside-the-international-alt-right

In march, spencer is coming to speak at the university where I work. He either threatened or actually pursued legal action and they capitulated. Since they had to give him a venue, he will speak in what is essentially the ag school cow barn at the ass-end of campus, on the Monday of Spring Break week when nobody will be around.

I'm already seeing tons of flyers, ranging from "we should meet at the library to talk about the impact of this" to a number rather large posters about attacking a group of nazi marchers in 2006 and running them out of town and how they can't wait to do it again.

This should be fun. I'm kind of glad I'll be out of town.

There was still a local ARA chapter when I was there, of course that was almost 20 years ago. Here's hoping they're still around.

lmao @ "Hope Not Hate" and the "alternative right" (didn't read the actual piece tbf)

many xps. I'm reading derrida and foucault again because of this thread <3 thank you, jordan peterson. you kermit-voiced sack of albertan shit

wtf i love jordan peterson now

its been over a week since ive let everyone who helped me out of prison down, so many of you have helped me thru tough times, i tried too hard to do too much, im sorry im a human being and not a symbol, i have hit rock bottom

— Chelsea E. Manning (@xychelsea) January 30, 2018

Chelsea Manning not feeling too great about hanging with the fash

In all seriousness, though, everyone should check out Derrida's seminars. Due to their self-evidently pedagogical and oral nature, they're more idea-oriented and hence more approachable (as well as more easily translatable into English). They're also more explicitly 'political' than many might expect, giving the lie to the all-too widespread, quasi indestructible notion according to which he never seriously engaged with anything beyond philosophy and, at best, literature.

sorta tangent to peterson's fame i really fuckin hate the centrist anti-left crew and their wounded/smug act: the weinstein brothers, sam harris, quillette mag.

haidt, maher, chait, ~sullivan fit that description too.

yup. chait didn't used to, i didn't think! but maybe he did.

there's the feminist-not-feminist annex too: paglia, sommers, roiphe

paglia is too weird to be in this group imo

yea camille paglia does not fit but sommers & roiphe are def in there

what's infuriating is how content-free their politics are. it's all meta concepts like open discourse and closed mindedness and group thinking and hard reason but... there's no meat.

like, what do you want the world to be? what do you want to say that (you say) you can't say now? make a list of 25 live issues at work in this country, or any country, and none of these people will have said anything about them. voting? climate change? war? (ok we know what harris thinks about war...) financialization? (one of the weinsteins works for peter thiel lol) worker rights? abortion rights? there's n o t h i n g

these are the only people left who care about paglia!

there's an essay to be written about the fetishization of live debate across the right wing: this set ^ of people, the alt-lite youtube scene, ben shapiro

shuja haider wrote that great piece of JP, most of the angry replies were "you couldn't take him on live, i dare you" or that like, writing everything down in a essay was... cheating somehow? against the rules? oddly authoritarian impulse. it has to be a match with rules and if you lose you have to stay down! or something

these are the only people left who care about paglia!

wrong, also fans do not condemn the person. camille paglia talks about her views all the time, she's written thousands of pages about art and literature and history

i know, it's a shame

just replace paglia in yr annex w/ caitlin flanagan

is jon stewart somehow culpable for the "reasonable moderate"?

Nah

maybe a bit. can we blame capitalism? i feel like we should blame capitalism

no lets blame the daily show

"lets"... ugh. sorry #groupthink

About the diaper-clad shitheads in TPUSA

https://thebaffler.com/the-poverty-of-theory/no-re-turning-point-u-s-a

a chilling must-read; thanks.

I keep waiting to encounter these guys on campus

They hit the northeast and Big Ten schools, right? So it’s just a matter of time

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/02/jordan-peterson-enlightenment-nietzsche-alt-right

This is a much, much better/more incisive takedown of Peterson than the other two pieces that have been shared here.

Everyone who writes these JP takedown pieces gets absolutely pilloried with death threats and insults online and I thank them for their service

This is the only good one. It gets to the heart of why he is wrong and doesn’t go for a cheap caricature.

After Stalinism crumbled, the old Marxism continued in the guise of what Peterson calls “neo-Marxist postmodernism.” Like Nietzsche before him, Peterson sees the metaphysics of reason, as embodied in the Enlightenment project and modern socialism, leading inexorably toward relativistic nihilism. Nietzsche called this condition “passive nihilism” and argued that it could only be overcome with an “active nihilism” that would create a new system of values based on new modes of slavery and mastery. When Peterson criticizes “neo-Marxist postmodernism,” he is merely repeating Nietzsche’s diagnosis of passive nihilism — that is, the slavish revolt of the masses.

Peterson’s positivism — the dualism between descriptive facts and values — makes his Nietzscheanism possible. If the world is an atomized chaos of facts, it needs a strong will to define it and impose order. In Peterson’s need for something that transcends this chaotic reality, he subjectively imposes a mystical solution for the alienation and suffering of humanity, grounded in a Nietzschean version of Christianity and original sin. The strong will inherit the kingdom of heaven, while the weak are destined to fail.

When we theoretically confront Peterson, we need to do more than refute his pseudo-scientific claims, his bad pop psychology, and his Cold War–inflected version of history. The real challenge is overcoming his fundamental irrationalism.

I don't know. I don't think you need to deploy hifalutin academic language to explain why his ideas are bad and wrong.

I'd like to read that, but I've recently come to the conclusion that spending too much time reading/debunking bad ideas actually makes you stupider in the long run. It's like a virus that can infect your own thinking.

(I'm using "bad" in distinction from just simply "wrong," there.)

There is, like, a neo-reaction movement going on. If the ideas are never seriously refuted they’ll get stronger and more popular — the intellectual “forbidden fruit” the left won’t touch even to critique.

I'm glad there's an intellectual critique, I just don't imagine JP's chud squad engaging with it.

They already think the postmodern neo-marxists (lol) are out to drain them of their vital essence, so why should they listen to some Jacobin pinko?

xxp

Maybe, but that's a very optimistic conception of intellectual discourse!

But yes people are welcome to it.

Idk these ppl are theoretically reading carl jung and solzhenitsyn now that jp has turned them onto them

I would like to see JP get absolutely bodied in an interview the way spencer was a couple months ago. (I wouldn't mind a literal bodying either, but that would be purely for self-satisfaction.)

"theoretically" is doing a lot of work there, and you're assuming they're capable of good-faith argumentation. the important thing to them is that JP is their dad. the only solution is public humiliation and/or convincing advocacy for a more humane and compassionate alternative.

Somehow Jordan Peterson shouts about Derrida without ever having read a single line of his, and it seems to work anyway?

Plus ça change…