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   XPost: talk.politics.guns, alt.atheism   
   From: patriot1@protonmail.com   
      
   Pity Jordan Peterson. Can a giant lobster analogy   
   ever replace a sense of humour?   
      
   The leading member of the self-styled intellectual   
   dark web likes to think he is ‘locked out’ of the   
   mainstream media. Which makes his interview in this   
   month’s GQ all the more revealing   
      
   The nights have drawn in, the rains have come, and it   
   is time to start unveiling some of the lines in the   
   Lost in Showbiz Winter Collection. Let me say right   
   now that one of our absolute key pieces will be   
   Jordan Peterson.   
      
   Quite how it’s taken this column so long to alight   
   lovingly on the winningest public intellectual of our   
   age is unclear, but please now consider me officially   
   very into him. This week, I read Jordan’s most famous   
   book, 12 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter,   
   and found it an absolute scream. Forgive me – the   
   opus is actually called 12 Rules For Life, but it   
   certainly forced me to tear down every other thought   
   leader poster peeling off my bedroom wall. I am   
   highly excited to get around to Jordan’s only other   
   published book, some kind of vast theory of   
   everything which took him 12 years to write. Oscar   
   Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray in about a   
   fortnight, so imagine how much better Jordan B   
   Peterson’s Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of   
   Belief is going to be.   
      
   But we race ahead. Are you even familiar with   
   Peterson? A University of Toronto psychology   
   professor, his raging stage show involuntarily   
   reminds me of that incredibly moving speech from The   
   South Park Movie: “This is aboot dignity. This is   
   aboot respect. [Laughter] This is aboot – [More   
   laughter] What’s so goddammed funny?” Anyway, you may   
   simply know Jordan as “the lobster guy”, after his   
   most famous proposition/abstraction: the idea that   
   lobsters and their serotonin levels explain why human   
   hierarchies exist and are good. But were better in   
   the 1950s. Put simply, you’re really doing this wrong   
   if your first thought on seeing a lobster is: “I’d   
   like to eat this thing, not surrender my abortion   
   rights to it.”   
      
   Owing to his sell-out speaking tours, huge YouTube   
   following and multimillion book sales, Peterson is   
   frequently described as a “Pied Piper” of angry and   
   disaffected men – though my understanding of the   
   original Pied Piper was that he took all his   
   followers away into some kind of mountain from which   
   they never returned. Yes please! Except, how come   
   Peterson’s followers continue to wander around our   
   metaphorical Hamelin, explaining stuff like there is   
   no patriarchy because of crustaceans? Can we try   
   DynoPest instead?   
      
   Anyway, Peterson is also a leading member of the   
   arseoisie, or the “intellectual dark web”, as they   
   prefer it. Again, are you familiar with the   
   “intellectual dark web”? I do hope not. It’s a self-   
   styling by a loose group of soi-disant intellectuals   
   you’d cross continents to avoid having a pint with   
   (although they didn’t go with that tagline in the   
   end). There isn’t space for a full passenger   
   manifest, but they include Peterson, talkshow host   
   Dave Rubin, Newsweek columnist and perma-pundit Ben   
   Shapiro and a bunch of other people bizarrely   
   obsessed with what students do, even though we’ve   
   known since time immemorial that students often act   
   like idiots, and mostly grow out of it unless they’re   
   Hamlet or whatever. Think of the intellectual dark   
   web as a very whiny superhero team. Marvel’s A-   
   Whingers. Guardians of the Galaxy Brains. The League   
   of Extraordinarily Fragile Gentlemen.   
      
   Like the rest of the gang, Peterson apparently   
   imagines himself “locked out” of the mainstream   
   media, despite having sold 2m books and being   
   interviewed every 10 minutes by actual international   
   media outlets. I can’t help feeling that Jordan is   
   “locked out” of the mainstream media in the same way   
   that Justin Bieber is “locked out” of pop music.   
      
   As I am given to understand it, all these chaps ply   
   their trade in the “marketplace of ideas”, which   
   largely seems to be grown men shrieking “Not the   
   face! Not the face!” at their detractors. Truly, to   
   watch their online arguments is to clamber inside the   
   Athenian agora simulator.   
      
   I’m not even being sarcastic. A lot of those guys who   
   hung around the ancient Athens debating society   
   (while helpmeets of one sort or another took care of   
   their day-to-day shit for them) were quite clearly   
   insufferable edgelords. Come on – Diogenes lived in a   
   large urn and would absolutely have been into   
   bitcoin. In some accounts, the Oracle told him to   
   deface the currency, which seems not entirely Delphic   
   of her, though he found a way to make it so and   
   decided she meant he should deface the currency of   
   prevalent ideas. Arguably, then, Diogenes is the   
   Jordan Peterson analogue, as he was the agora’s   
   leading NoFapper. Hang on, that’s wrong – he was the   
   agora’s leading scourge of pleasure-seeking. But I’m   
   pretty sure he’d have been one of the senior thinkers   
   in today’s anti-masturbation movement.   
      
   If you need a further Peterson catch-up, can I   
   recommend a video posted by GQ magazine this week, in   
   which Jordan is interviewed by the New Statesman’s   
   Helen Lewis. It’s hard to pick my favourite moment   
   from the nearly two-hour-long encounter, but I very   
   much enjoyed the bit where Lewis reasons: “Lobsters   
   don’t get depressed. I think you’re   
   anthropomorphising to a ridiculous degree. These are   
   creatures that urinate out of their faces.”   
      
   Then again, it must be said that Peterson spends most   
   of the interview looking like he’s about to urinate   
   out of his face. In the entire exchange, he smiles   
   about once, at some perceived irony in something   
   wistfully arch that he has just said. One’s primary   
   takeout is not: here is a man who can laugh at   
   himself. Which is such a missed opportunity. I am   
   reminded of the time when Jeffrey Archer told Dame   
   Edna Everage that “the most important thing is to be   
   able to laugh at yourself”. “You’d have to do that,”   
   came the deathlessly sympathetic reply, “otherwise   
   you’d be missing the joke of the century.”   
      
   Other takeouts from the GQ interview? Peterson   
   dresses and looks like the third Gruber brother from   
   the Die Hard franchise. As all world cinema fans will   
   know, the first brother to lose to Bruce Willis’s   
   grubby-vested cop was played by the late great Alan   
   Rickman in Die Hard, while the second was played by   
   Jeremy Irons (himself blue-vested) in Die Hard With a   
   Vengeance. Peterson very much presents as the third   
   sibling that Mother Gruber kept at home because he   
   was “chesty” – though without the self-knowledge to   
   accept he is a character actor rather than a leading   
   man.   
      
   Perhaps it might be kinder if his agent or publicist   
   helped him to come to terms with this? As things   
   stand, each of the several times Peterson intones   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)