Jordan Peterson has political issues with Marxism, totalitarianism and the genocidal deaths of millions under Communist regimes in the 20th century Soviet Union and China. Apparently he has come to the conclusion left is dangerous and right is OK. What makes a person tick to transform into a bloody killer. Has Peterson written about the Vietnam War, Cambodia intervention, Central and South America, Abu Ghraib and Iraq, Libya and Syrian intervention? I would place Peterson in the realm of Bernard-Henri Levy.

Peterson is a psychobabbler using social media to gain notoriety, and not through his peers, on his favorite topic of today: the deplorables of Donald Trump.

○ Aspen Institute: From the Barricades of the Culture Wars
○ The Gulag Archipelago: A New Foreword by Jordan B. Peterson

Planned visit to University of Amsterdam, an advice to the academy ...

Some eighty UvA employees and a number of student organizations want Room for Discussion to invite an extra guest for her episode with the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson next Wednesday. 'An extra guest can counteract Peterson's conservative, patriarchal, anti-feminist, anti-climate-scientific,' politically incorrect 'worldview.'

Jordan Peterson reacts on his website ...

○ UofA Host added a 20 min. Q&A session to the event, but no second guest

"See you in Amsterdam, you cowards, denouncers and totalitarian wannabes."

The rise of YouTube's reactionary right by Ezra Klein

One way to understand the Data & Society report is to see it as another cut at what Bari Weiss described in The New York Times (again naming Rubin and Shapiro, though omitting a lot of the more extreme figures identified by Lewis) as the "intellectual dark web." Weiss's piece described something real and important, but it had trouble defining their ideology, in large part because it was overly credulous. Here, for instance, is her explanation of what unites this community:

They all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what's politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought -- and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.

This is definitely what the members of this community say about themselves. But spend some time listening to Rubin call progressivism "a mental disorder," or emailing with Sam Harris -- a New Atheist author and podcaster in this community -- and you find the commitment to civility or even debate is pretty thin. Similarly, this movement's vaunted commitment to free speech looks a bit shallow after you receive a letter from Jordan Peterson threatening a lawsuit because you ran an interview with a scholar who criticized him. And, of course, every community believes they're the ones who prize facts over feelings.

From Wikipedia entry ...

Writing for The Spectator, Tim Lott said Peterson draws inspiration from Jung's philosophy of religion, and holds views similar to the Christian existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich. Lott also said Peterson has respect for Taoism, as it views nature as a struggle between order and chaos, and posits that life would be meaningless without this duality.

Starting around 2000, Peterson began collecting Soviet-era paintings, displayed in his house as a reminder of, he argues, the relationship between totalitarian propaganda and art, and as examples of how idealistic visions can become totalitarian oppression and horror. In 2016, Peterson became an honorary member of the extended family of Charles Joseph, a Kwakwaka'wakw artist, and was given the name Alestalagie ("Great Seeker"). Since late 2016, Peterson has been on a strict diet consisting only of meat and some vegetables, to control severe depression and an auto-immune disorder, including psoriasis and uveitis. He stopped eating any vegetables in mid-2018.

Jordan Peterson's Jungian best-seller is banal, superficial, and insidious

But the real problems in Peterson are far more dangerous than his prolixity, superficiality, or banality. The real danger in this book is its apologia for social Darwinism and bourgeois individualism covered over with a theological patina. This, as we shall see, becomes obvious in a number of places early in the book, but it is confirmed in an offhand comment near the middle of the book. (As Adam Phillips reminds us in Side Effects, offhand comments usually reveal far more than we intend, and are often closer to the truth.) Here, purportedly while telling us about his intellectual trajectory (which he never finishes because nearly every page spasmodically lurches to another topic at precisely the moment he might have to develop or substantiate a point), Peterson says of his early days that "I had outgrown the shallow Christianity of my youth by the time I could understand the fundamentals of Darwinian theory".

But he could not quite abandon the Christianity of his youth, and so Peterson spends a lot of time in this book purporting to tell us what Scripture really says, and does so with all the exegetical and hermeneutical skill of Ayn Rand. While Rand's scorn for theology and Christianity was well known, warning most believers off her, Peterson's presentation, given the lack of theological literacy of our time, contains just enough jargon and scriptural references to fool a lot of people into thinking he knows what he's talking about. He does not. If his psychology is suspect, his theology is absolutely insidious.

○ I was Jordan Peterson's strongest supporter. Now I think he's dangerous

[Update-1]

My recent diary - Digital Media and the Rise of Populist Right-Wing

Digital media and the rise of right-wing populism | JStor |

Studies of the internet and politics often focus on progressive politics – on the internet as a democratizing influence or on movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the United States. The other main area is the deviant internet hackers and mischief-makers like trolls. What gets far less attention are the retrogressive mainstream political forces such as right-wing populism, which, I will argue, have been the single most important political change in at least three of the countries examined here (in China they are the most important). To make the argument, this chapter compares four right-wing populist movements: Donald Trump, in America, Narendra Modi in India, the Sweden Democrats and Chinese nationalists. Digital media have been a necessary precondition for the success of all four, but in quite different ways, depending on the media system, including digital media, in each country. Common to all four, however, is the fact that digital media have bypassed traditional media gatekeepers.

○ War On BDS, Progressive Left Under Attack
○ Democratic Ideologues, Populism and Identity Politics
○ Christian Zionists Collude with Alt-right Trump

Related reading …

○ The Hate Report: The alt-right is down, but not out

The alt-right, as we know it, looks to be in serious trouble.

Richard Spencer is beset on all sides by lawsuits and begging for money. Milo Yiannopoulos, who toured U.S. campuses and incited riots, has seemingly disappeared from public view. Andrew Anglin, once arguably the world’s most powerful neo-Nazi, is running from lawsuits.

…
The alt-right is in trouble, sure. But those who closely monitor the far-right, in all its incarnations, have a warning for anyone who thinks the broader movement is dying: The far-right is just suffering a temporary setback. It’s here for the long term and the lasting effects of the alt-right aren’t going anywhere.

Here’s how Daily Beast reporter and far-right expert Will Sommer sees it:

“There’s a lot of chaos in … (the alt-right) now, obviously, but I think they’ve successfully implanted in a lot of white people, especially angry white young men on the internet, the idea that white identity politics is acceptable. They’ve been derailed by a lot of personal issues among their leaders, but hard to imagine that idea going away.”