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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   32049 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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JBP was fine until he started using twitter regularly. So were lots of people. I genuinely think that the human mind isn't built for high stakes conversations with thousands of people at once. Let alone doing those every hour of every day.

It takes some character to tell a roomful of people that they're wrong to their face, but imagine if you were brought back to a new roomful of angry people every day for the rest of your life.

I do notice that Elon's zaniness has increased in proportion to his shitposting. But who knows which direction the causality goes there, if any.

Peterson has been a particularly sad one to watch - in some of his early appearances he seems relatively articulate, but watch anything from him later on and it's like watching a man destroy himself in slow motion. My first reaction to Peterson was that he was uninteresting but basically reasonable. Now my reaction to Peterson is a kind of tragic pity.

He used to be a lot more interesting, Maps of Meaning, which is what put him on the map remains a genuinely interesting work if you are into comparative religion from a Jungian perspective.

I want to be fair here, it does seem like he lost some of his wits, but his recent Bible stuff isn't that bad. It just doesn't hit as hard as his old lectures for some reason.

Maybe we've all just moved past such ideas in some sense.

I haven't read that book yet, actually, but I remember Rowan Williams' review of it. Williams is certainly a theologian and biblical scholar of some depth, and one whose judgement I have a good deal of respect for, so that warned me away. It sounded more like Peterson reading the Bible and then using it, no matter what it says, as an excuse to get on one of his regular hobby-horses. This much harsher (and more entertaining) review made it sound quite self-indulgent to me.

You're onto something there for sure. If you ever draw the ire of a Twitter hate mob, the first hundred people that are angry at you make you feel bad. But by the time you've seen the thousandth you have fully dehumanized them and wonder how you can use this power.

It wasn’t a Twitter hate mob. The thing is that in the case of Peterson, they basically got him turned out of university, forced him into choosing between “training in woke” and not being able to practice psychology. And this wasn’t Twitter, a lot of the hate came from news media, political pundits, the students at his university. Basically he was fortunate to have popularity with young men and thus could still earn a living.

I stand corrected.

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