Andrew Nikiforuk Takes Jordan Peterson to the Woodshed for a Damn Good Thrashing

 

I'm sure that quite a few of us have had our fill of the rightwing dandy and pompous git, Jordan Peterson.

Recently JP attempted to revive his flagging celebrity with an op-ed in, where else, the National Post, "Open the damn country up, before Canadians wreck something we can't fix."

Tyee columnist, Andrew Nikiforuk, penned a timely retort to Peterson's whinging.

I'm not going to cherry pick Peterson's op-ed or Nikiforuk's broadside in reply. The links are there. Read them for yourself. I think you'll be glad you did.


Comments

  1. Bill MalcolmJanuary 18, 2022 at 3:04 AM

    I think there's only one solution to the travails of this entitled man. Send Peterson to live in Tennessee. or better yet, Florida. There's no shortage of Canadians down there in Trumpland who've found our winters entirely too much to bear for their fragile constitutions. For generations. The appeal of the roadside $2.99 all you can eat buffet of forty years ago was just too much to resist. Canadians wanted to be as fat as Americans, and Reformers agitated in the early '90s that this here rule of not living over 183 days a year abroad in order to keep up their pensions and free health care was just too much government overreach. I got several phone calls on the matter from local Reformers searching for support from "citizens". I was so scathing that they somehow loved the verbal punishment and told me my fiery attitude was just what they needed in the party. With mental adjustments, of course. Unbelievable.

    Peterson is a fake if you read some of his lectures. The term "sweeping generalizations" aptly describes his poorly thought-through arguments. Apparently, for those not used to economists and their penchant for authoritatively scribbling meaningless graphs with no axes origins on the board at the drop of a hat, such facile and practised movements impress -- "Oho, we have a real genius here". Taking the imprecise approach of the non-science of ecoonomics to his sociological ramblings, Peterson has impressed the undereducated wealthy by projecting a facade of competence.

    Some people love snake oil salesman purely for their chutzpah.

    For the rest of us, Peterson epitomises entitled piffle.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibJanuary 18, 2022 at 9:07 AM

      That is why, Bill, I used the descriptor "celebrity" to define Peterson. Dr. Oz has a medical degree but he's a quack, a celebrity.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Navigating the Minefield of Short-Termism

Image
Its disappearance went largely unnoticed. There was no post mortem, no eulogy, no deep sighs for what had been lost. Posterity slipped from our consciousness as we ushered in the neoliberal era 40 years ago. Populations would now be administered, not led. Grand vision was a quaint artifact of generations past. Besides, the invisible hand of the marketplace would see to all our needs today, tomorrow, forever. Politicians grew smaller and smaller until they shrunk to fit the mold of technocracy.  Like sheep being dipped we were plunged into a world of supply-side economics in which lower taxation and deregulation would deliver manna from heaven. We focused on skinning the economy, and society, right to the bone. Everything would be maximized, nothing would be wasted, not even the offal.  We were surrendered to a world of short-termism. We elected governments of technocrats - grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard - whose horizons were measured in electoral cycles. They would do what they
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr
Read more