Anti-Peterson desperation

Vox Day in his crusade to ‘expose’ Dr. Peterson is really scraping the bottom of the barrel here: Jordanetics confirmed

Here are the pertinent passages:

Another thing to which I did not give sufficient concern was his teaching. As the undergraduate chair, I read all teaching reviews. His were, for the most part, excellent and included eyebrow-raising comments such as “This course has changed my life.” One student, however, hated the course because he did not like “delivered truths.” Curious, I attended many of Jordan’s lectures to see for myself.

Remarkably, the 50 students always showed up at 9 a.m. and were held in rapt attention for an hour. Jordan was a captivating lecturer — electric and eclectic — cherry-picking from neuroscience, mythology, psychology, philosophy, the Bible and popular culture. The class loved him. But, as reported by that one astute student, Jordan presented conjecture as statement of fact. I expressed my concern to him about this a number of times, and each time Jordan agreed. He acknowledged the danger of such practices, but then continued to do it again and again, as if he could not control himself.

So out of 50 reviews, one was negative, and somehow that single outlier, for which the author gives no specifics as to what conjecture was passed off as fact, is indictment on Dr. Peterson’s intellectual and moral character. Teaching reviews are supposed to elicit good and bad feedback. Criticism is expected.

If this is the best they can come up with, Dr. Peterson does not have much to worry about. Give it up Vox. I don’t know what he hopes to accomplish. If it’s to sully Dr. Peterson’s public image or to ‘deconvert’ his fans, it’s not working. On Reddit, Dr. Peterson’s support is as strong as ever. His recent AMA was a huge success, and the reception from what I gleaned from the comments (given that there were over 10k of them, I obviously couldn’t read of all of them), was overwhelmingly positive. I’m not saying Dr. Peterson’s message isn’t without it’s faults (such as here, here and here [1]), but it resonates with a considerable number of people, and there is something to be learned from that. If his popularity can be reverse-engineered to understand why he is so popular (nut just his message, but how he presents himself, his public image, appearance, etc), it can be applied to other things.

Vox Day in an earlier post attributes Dr. Peterson’s popularity and sudden fame to his fusion of the Holocaust and Nazism with Christianity (Holocaustanity). If making Nazi and Holocaust videos is how you earn $60k/month in donations, I’m gonna do that. Obviously it’s not so simple.

[1] A major misconception about postmodernism is that it’s a rejection of truth and empirical reality; it isn’t, rather it is a rejection of a preferential value system, specially, a Western one. It does not, as Peterson erroneously assumes, mean infinite facts or interpretations, but rather infinite values. It’s not that postmodernists deny that men and women are, empirically and biologically, different but that such differences are of social value, which is why they are so critical of ‘patriarchy’ and ‘phallogocentrism’. Postmodernism does not reject truths and universals (it’s not ‘anti science’); rather, it rejects values.

Related:

Postmodernism: It’s about Facts, not Values
Scott and Postmodernism