SJA #30 - CAM & An Open Letter to Christians

CAM

Complementary medicine. Alternative medicine. CAM. These names have been floating around for a while now. What do they refer to?

Broadly, they refer to anything that calls itself medicine that isn’t medicine. Anything that has been demonstrated to have some actual effect on disease, illness, or injury is medicine. Anything that hasn’t been shown to work or has been shown not to work is not medicine. Doctors aren’t allowed to use or recommend things that haven’t been shown to work, or that have been shown not to work, because that’s what’s known as “medical malpractice”, which can get you sued for millions of dollars and cost you your medical career. Or get you a spot on Oprah then your own TV show.

Anyone who shills this sort of thing (ie. things that aren’t medicine) aren’t allowed to call it medicine or say that it cures or heals you (nevertheless, they very often do, until they get caught and go to prison). So they like to talk about “wellness” and “health” and “holistic” a lot, and they call themselves “alternative medicine”, or “complementary medicine”. That way they can pretend like they’re doing something real while maintaining enough distance that they might not get sued or go to prison.

In short, anyone selling complementary or alternative medicine (CAM) is a fraud, a quack, a piece of shit in a white coat pretending to be a doctor.

Now, that might be a little bit mean. Many people honestly do buy into the shit they’re selling. They really believe. Hell, I’ll go so far as to say that it’s the overwhelming majority. They honestly believe and think they’re helping people. This is true for CAM quacks as much as it is for fortune tellers, psychics, and so on. I’ve a friend who practices acupuncture, as well as cupping and burning roots and other pseudoscientific mystical nonsense. He’s not a bad person, but he has dedicated years of his life to a lie that he honestly believes. He really thinks he’s helping people.

But they’re not helping people. I want that to be absolutely clear. They are. Not. Helping.

CAM quacks sell things that either haven’t been shown to work (random ass injection of stem cells, or wierd herbal concoctions) or that have been shown not to work (acupuncture, chiropractic, reiki, basically anything with a name). The best you can hope for is that whatever nonsense they’re selling you will do absolutely nothing. Very likely, it will have an effect, and it won’t be good.

“Herbal” and “natural” are not synonymous with “healthy”. Tobacco is an entirely natural product; nicotine is a pesticide. Plants are full of chemical compounds, usually intended to keep other things from eating those plants. That those chemicals can, in rare cases, have positive medicinal uses doesn’t mean that all of them always do. Aspirin is based on the chemical salicylic acid, extracted from the bark of the willow tree. It can be used to soothe pain, but it’s also used to remove skin (it’s an acid).

People recommending CAM shams don’t necessarily have … Okay, they necessarily don’t have good education in biology and chemistry generally nor medicine specifically. If they did, they wouldn’t be quacks, not honestly anyway. Regardless, they cannot have a good education in this stuff, and thus can’t know if what they’re recommending will help you at all or if it’ll just ruin the lining of your stomach, or destroy your kidneys. They don’t know, and neither do you.

Of course, not every Cam quack gives you things to eat or drink, right? Acupuncture is strictly topical, and chiropractic, too, right?

Again, nothing would be the best you could hope for, there. Are the acupuncture needles clean? Is the chiropractor going to dislocate something? But more than that, quacks almost never limit themselves to one form of woowoo. An acupuncturist isn’t only going to offer to poke you with needles, but will also offer other things like burning herbs on your skin, or cupping. Chemicals can have effects without being ingested; ever had poison ivy? And cupping .... it comes in a lot of varieties, and they’re range from mildly bad to holy shit.

All your woowoo blends together; a psychic will also sell themself as a mystic, a medium, and a fortune teller, because why not? Your chiropractor will offer reflexology and kinesiology and aromatherapy and all sorts of shit. Anything to get you to part with a few more bucks, and all with a clean conscience because they honestly believe in the crap they’re selling (most of the time).

And sometimes things can go horribly wrong, even or especially if the quack is doing exactly what they were taught to do. There’s a new craze in acupuncture called apipuncture, where instead of poking you with needles they sting you with live bees. Yes. People have died. Chiropractic involves manipulating joints… beginning with the spine. Not only does the spine house the spinal cord, it also houses a number of incredibly important blood vessels. Again, people have died as a result of chiropractic manipulations.

Quacks will treat any damn thing, but they love to target cancer. It’s the disease everyone will get eventually, and it’s the hardest to treat. Britt Marie Hermes is an excellent resource; I recommend her site naturopathicdiaries.com. Naturopathy is a broad, deliberately non-specific brand of woowoo that, like chiropractic, can occasionally bill itself as actual medicine thanks to asshole politicians in Arizona and Oregon. Hermes was driven out because her cancer patients weren’t able to get their medicine because it had been seized by customs… because it’s illegal.

A weekend of research later and Hermes was devastated to realize her boss had been lying to her and she had been lying to her patients. She had spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars earning a degree that was completely worthless, and had dedicated two more years to helping kill desperate people. She now lives in Germany, studying evolutionary biology at the University of Kiel. She’ll never be able to pay off the loans that paid for her worthless degree, which means she’ll probably never be able to return to the United States. She, like her patients, was a victim of a system that in absolutely no way intended to help people.

CAM is not medicine. CAM is not science. CAM does not help people. CAM kills. The people who practice this shit usually have the best of intentions. They honestly believe that what they’re doing is for the best.

They’re wrong.

In many ways, CAM practitioners are like preachers. They’re caught in a terrible trap, one baited with their own good intentions. They thought they were on the path to making the world a better place, and now they’re stuck, with no knowledge or skills, with no path toward a new career. Their degrees are garbage, their skills are garbage, all they have is the ability to make people feel better without actually helping them. Like a preacher becoming an atheist, a quack learning they’re peddling bullshit and lies might not see any way out.

I feel for them. Honestly, I do. Being stuck in a situation like that? Terrible. Even the ones who still believe are trapped; their situation encourages them, forces them, to continue believing, to ignore evidence, to dig their heels in and keep going. The only way out is to abandon their identity, to walk away from their community. At least, unlike preachers, they probably won’t lose family. Maybe. Still, I imagine it’s a lot like contemplating suicide.

But as much sympathy as I have for the quacks, I have far more for the victims they make in the surrounding community. The quacks are making a living off their foolishness; their victims aren’t. Their victims are coming to them for help and receiving none. Worse, they’re going to them instead of real doctors. Worse still, the quacks might even hurt or kill them in their pig-ignorant foolishness.

So, just as I’ll always advocate against religion for the harm it causes, despite the earnest beliefs of the pastors trapped in the pulpit, so I’ll always advocate against CAM. So-called complementary or alternative medicines kill.


Links

• Skepdic entry on alternative health
• Brit Hermes site Naturopathic Diaries

Musical Interlude
Whiskey in the Jar


Letter to Christians
Dear Christian,

Your neighbors are afraid of you.

This may surprise and upset you. What could you possibly have done that someone might be afraid of you? You’re a good person, leading a good life, and you don’t want to hurt anyone.

But how would your neighbors know that?

What they know is what they can see, the things you choose to show the world and the things you can’t hide. They can see your haircut and your car, your clothes and whether you wave at them when you leave for work. And they can see your religion.

They can see it in the decorations you put up around the holidays, the cross you wear, and your habit of attending services once or twice a week. And that makes them afraid, because they can’t see beneath the surface.

They don’t know if you’re a quiet, gentle person who feeds the homeless, who builds houses for the poor, who visits lonely seniors. They don’t know if you’re a loud, angry person who screams at strangers for holding hands, who throws trash at girls for dressing “wrong”, who nods in approval at the man throwing the stiff-armed salute. They don’t know if you’re the very quiet, very angry person who mails bombs to strangers around the city, who fires a rifle from a van on the freeway, who shoots a doctor in a church on Sunday.

There are many kinds of Christians. You might want to say that those others aren’t real Christians, but they say they are. And how are we supposed to tell? You all look the same until the shooting starts.

Or until the voting starts.

Because in the end, it’s not just the openly violent Christians who kill people. The Christians who support bigoted bakers, who want to force trans people out of the military, who enact racist laws, who kidnap children from the “wrong sorts of parents”… those Christians kill people, too.

They kill people in small ways, by making life harder, by adding burden after burden, simple stress that steals a day of your life for every week you survive. Until every day begins with dread and ends with dull exhaustion.

They kill people in larger ways, by isolating them from friends and family, forcing them to live alone, unloved, afraid. They don’t get to have the same jobs, they don’t get to shop at the same stores, they don’t get the protection of the police, they don’t get to go to the hospital. Because the hospitals are run by churches, and the police have crosses on their necks, too. The shops, the bakeries, the businesses, those have religious beliefs now, too.

And they kill them in the big ways, by encouraging the “very fine people” who vandalize Jewish cemeteries, drive cars into crowds, mail bombs to strangers, or open fire in newspaper offices. By voting for people who assault journalists, who use slurs against Jews, Mexicans, or black folk, who promise to ban ethnic groups and minorities.

Is this Christianity? You say it’s not. They say it is. You each quote scripture and revelation to support you. How can we say what’s right?

How is anyone supposed to decide?

And, until you do figure it out, how can we tell the difference between you?

Your neighbor,

John the Atheist

SJA #29 - Alien Abductions & White Guilt

Alien Abduction
Alien abductions, visitations, ancient aliens … people really love to believe that we’re not alone. People do still believe in this kind of thing, but it feels like the heyday was back in the 60s and 70s. Maybe I’m just not tapped into the credulous community, though. Looking on reddit, r/abductions has about the same number of subscribers as r/antivax. There are alien abduction pages/groups on facebook with thousands or tens of thousands of fans, but antivax pages on facebook tend to have hundreds of thousands of followers. Antivax is much more popular on facebook.What I’m saying is, it feels like the alien wannabes are more in the past.

Of course, a year ago I would’ve said the same thing about flat earth nonsense, and look where we are now. Anyway.

Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, spent a lot of time dealing with alien abductions. It deals with other stuff, too, but he wrote it in response to the pseudoscience and myths that he encountered as a science educator in the 70s and 80s (Demon-Haunted World was published in 95, a year before Sagan’s death). Really, the book’s purpose is to discuss scientific methods and how they can be used to suss out junk science and pseudoscience in real life. He just used things like alien abductions and alien visitations as examples for how to apply tools in his baloney-detection kit.

Man, he was neat.

Anyway, alien abductions/visitations. We’ll save ancient aliens/astronauts for later. Ever since we started sending stuff into outer space, people have been talking about getting harassed by aliens. Oddly, no one talked about getting visited by aliens before that. However, they did talk about getting harassed by angels, demons, ghosts, saints, elves… In other words, people have always been talking about visitations.

Alien abduction/visitation believers say that pre-20th century folk who talked about angels and the like were talking about aliens, they just didn’t know about outer space and were putting it in terms of stuff they understood. Meanwhile, a lot of religious folk say that alien abduction folks are getting fooled by demons. Either way, we’re probably talking about the same phenomenon; is it sci-fi or fantasy? Well, it’s fiction regardless.

You might be surprised to learn that we have documentation of angel/demon visitations going back centuries. Demon-Haunted World is a good resource for this; Sagan talks about it a bit. And they really do sound like the alien abduction/visitation stories we get today. The visitors all look more or less human, just with dream-like distortions. They might be weirdly tall and thin, they might be short with huge eyes. Only rarely are they truly weird.

Another common feature of these visitations is that the visitors bring messages. For a while there, aliens were warning people to avoid war. Then they were warning people to avoid nuclear war. Then they started warning people about global warming. Ancient angels (or demons, or the Virgin Mary…) had warnings for people, too.

Oddly, the warnings these visitors delivered are always incredibly parochial. They never warn people about things before we’ve already discovered them. People weren’t getting warnings about nuclear weapons in the 20s. We didn’t start getting warnings about global warming until after it became a hot topic in the press. The little girl who got a visitation from the Virgin Mary in the 1400s got a warning about going to church and making sure to tithe. No warnings about the coming plague, no hints about how to build a good sanitation system, or city walls that can withstand cannon-fire…

That is to say, despite being representatives of a hyper-advanced technical civilization or magical beings from another plane of existence, these visitors never give any information people don’t already have. They never give warnings about problems people haven’t already discovered for themselves.

In short, these beings seem very, very limited.

And that’s a big part of why it’s not reasonable to believe that any sort of visitation/abduction is happening. The other part is that these events always occur when a person is asleep. That is, they’ll insist they weren’t asleep, but they were always alone, or in an isolated location, and no one is ever in a position to corroborate. Or anyone who could have corroborated has nothing to say, because they were definitely asleep. It’s also common for drugs or alcohol to be involved.

So the fact that these things always have a lot of dream-like elements isn’t at all surprising. The weird sensations people report, the oddly distorted aliens/angels (who are almost always humanoid), the vague, broken quality to their memories… everything points to people being asleep and/or in an altered state due to intoxicants.

Nevertheless, people will insist that they have evidence. Then they’ll point to things like the DoD videos that supposedly show an encounter between a Navy pilot and a UFO. It’s a weird video! You can’t explain that! It’s official! It’s ALIENS!

Now, wired did a great analysis of those particular videos and their origins (link in the thingy), and it looks like we don’t really know where the videos came from. One of the earliest appearances was actually from a video production company. Frauds like this are incredibly common; people are always willing to make money off of believers of every stripe.

However, even granting those videos are real, they still don’t help. This is what’s known as anomaly hunting, when a believer goes looking for weird things, then insisting that they count as evidence of their beliefs. That is, they find poor quality evidence or something that doesn’t match their expectations, then declare that their weird theory is true because “science can’t explain that!”

For example, ghost hunters go to old houses with cameras and temperature probes and EM detectors, and wait for… something. Wait long enough, you’re going to get a something. Drafts cause cold spots; you’re carting around a lot of equipment in houses with old wiring and you’re going to get some weird electric or magnetic fields. They also love things like “rods” and “orbs”, these inexplicable weird things showing up on cameras. And they’re right, you can’t ex… it’s dust. Dust caught in the flash of a camera that shows up as a big, bright dot, or a smeared “rod”.

Or look at conspiracy theorists. They really love anomalies. Weird bits of “the official story” that doesn’t match or that they think doesn’t make sense. “Look at the film! His head moves backward! You can’t explain that!” (We can, actually, a high-powered rifle round creates an entry wound and an exit wound; JFK’s head jerks forward when the bullet hits from the rear, then backward when the bullet exits).

Moon landing nutjobs are also pretty bad about this. They look at photos and videos that were taken on the moon and point out all the weird things that they think proves the moon-landings were faked. These are all pretty face-palmingly awful because the things they point to are all anomalous if the photos and videos were taken on Earth. They look incredibly strange because they were taken on the Moon, with different gravity and no atmosphere.

As for UFO-hunters, if you collect enough photos and videos of the sky and in the sky, you’ll eventually find weird phenomena. Things that don’t quite make sense at first glance, things that might genuinely be inexplicable, if only because there’s only one photo or the video ends. In other words, these edge cases, even if they aren’t faked, rely on us not having evidence. You gather enough evidence, you’ll find anomalies. You’ll get blips and scratches and fuzz. Equipment malfunctions and dings and so on.

A lot of “abductees” also point to weird stuff going on with their skin. Bruises! Can’t explain those! Odd scratches! Can’t explain those! This weird pattern of bumps! Can’t explain that! Yes we can, actually, on all three. Moving in your sleep, allergic reactions, your cat… Just because you don’t have a mundane explanation, or don’t want a mundane explanation, doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

No, alien abduction believers don’t have evidence. They have things they can’t explain, and then claim that the lack of explanation is the explanation. Just like religion, really.

At this point, alien abductions seem like a low-hanging fruit. But, an even lower hanging fruit would be the flat earth, and that shit’s making a come-back…

It seems to me that some false beliefs are based on a desire to explain things and/or a desire to be special. People want everything to fit within a narrative on the one hand, and they really want to be the center of that narrative on the other. The search for meaning isn’t limited to small-minded fascists like Jordan Peterson and his lobster-boys; we all want meaning, to some degree.

Another problem is that we’re not naturally very good scientists. To do good science, you have to try and prove your hypothesis is false. You have to try really, really hard to find evidence against it. But that requires discipline and training, because even considering that you might be wrong engenders cognitive dissonance. The natural tendency is to try and prove your hypothesis correct, to seek out confirming evidence, to ignore evidence you don’t like, to find communities that support you.

And, of course, some people are jackasses.

Links

• Skeptic Dictionary on alien abductions
• Wired magazine's article on those DoD videos
• What is anomaly hunting?
• Carl Sagan's book on amazon

Musical Interlude
Monty Python's - Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

White Guilt

“For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and, satisfied, drove on into the night.”

Man, conservatives love white guilt. Well, they hate it. They love to hate it.

Okay, what is white guilt? Well, it’s a little bit of individual and collective shame felt by white people over current and historical racism in the US. Oh, here’s a great bit, wikipedia follows that up with, “and to a lesser extent in Canada, South Africa, and the United Kingdom”. Like, what, South Africans don’t see the need to feel guilty about anything they’ve done? The UK doesn’t look as bad as South Africa from the outside, but they’re racist as fuck. I mean, I get it for Canada, they still live with the lie that they’ve never done anything racist, they don’t realize how awful they are to brown people up there. They’ll get theirs, is what I’m saying.

Anyway, white guilt is kind of a middle class phenomenon. White people in the suburbs with no real connection to brown people feel mildly bad about things that have happened to brown people. This lets them get away with not doing anything about what’s happening right now. Well, it can let them get away with that.

White guilt is kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can be real guilt, sorrow, anger over how people of color have been treated and are being treated. Pervasive negative emotions really can have an ongoing, serious impact, like depression and anxiety. On the other hand, not only does it sidetrack white people into seeking absolution instead of solutions, not only does it let white people feel that they’ve done enough just by feeling bad, but racists (aka Republicans) get to use it to fight against anti-racist programs.

Judith Katz, an educator and strategist, has dealt with white guilt in her efforts at anti-racism training. Specifically, she was moved to segregate her groups and remove black educators because white people in anti-racism training kept looking for acceptance and forgiveness rather than learning. The purpose of the education was to recognize and correct problematic attitudes and behaviors, and the white participants kept getting sidetracked.

So, yeah, white guilt can be a problem when it turns attention away from the people still being harmed by racism and toward self-congratulation or flagellation on the part of white people. And it can be a real pain in the ass. People of color are already spending a lot of time and energy trying to overcome racism and the fact that they have to convince white people that racism is still a problem is a huge barrier. That they then have to waste time getting white people to shut up and stop feeling bad and start working on solutions is a big burden. People of color are already fighting for their lives; they shouldn’t have to also take on the burden of helping you get over your feelings about the fact that they’re fighting for their lives.

Another problem is that a lot of white people acknowledge white guilt and leave it at that. It’s like they took a look at Avenue Q and “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” and said, “Yeah. Yeah. I’m a good person.”

The quote I read at the beginning in a British voice came from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which a truck-driver splashed water all over a soaking-wet hitchhiker in the rain. He felt good about it in a small-hearted bully kind of way. But then he felt bad about it. And then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it. And that last bit was him deciding that he was absolved of his sins by the act of feeling bad.

Yeah, it’s easy to put this in Christian terms, and this bullshit method of absolution is baked into Christianity. I remember a youth pastor telling a story about a time in college when he insulted a heavy-set girl who was buying one of his albums (he played guitar). He later found out she had dropped out of school and he felt so bad about it. But he apologized to God, and that made it okay. That’s so Christian. Apologizing to an imaginary friend you didn’t harm over harm (you may or may not have actually done) to a real person you never bother to make amends to.

I don’t want to claim this is unique to Christianity; religion generally doesn’t seem to ever actually invent anything new, and Christianity in particular is a hodgepodge of ideas stolen from other religions. I think it’s a problem of civilization, of living in large populations, of societal structures that encourage or require suffering in large numbers of people. We are empathic, caring beings (by and large), and we don’t like seeing suffering, and actually solving these problems is almost entirely beyond the capacity of any one person.

White guilt can be used as a sort of symbolic expiation. By recognizing that bad things are happening, you absolve yourself of the sin and can get on with your day without having to feel bad. In a way, this is necessary; you can’t really function if you allow yourself to feel the burden of these negative emotions, this guilt, all the time. On the other, you actually have to do something about it. Just recognizing the problem isn’t enough; inaction allows the problem to persist and makes you part of the problem. Ironically, white guilt as expiation is worse than simple ignorance, because it makes you feel like the problem has already been solved merely by having been seen.

But worse even than that is white guilt wielded as a weapon by the right. They love to use it to rile up white people. “I never did anything wrong! Why should I feel bad!? Why should I be punished?!” The Social Justice wiki specifically links white guilt to “not all x”, a silencing tactic used to derail discussions of social justice. It can be similar to how people leap to attack vegetarians even when the vegetarian hasn’t said anything, because the person feels implicitly attacked by the moral judgment buried in the vegetarian/vegan commitment.

But that’s just the sort of “not all white people!” response you’ll get from the man on the street. The right as a movement actively weaponizes white guilt. They take that simple, instinctive response, and dial it up to eleven. Talk show and radio hosts make incredibly emotional appeals all the time, and their rage against this assumption of guilt is top among them. It really boils down to “I’m a good person, you’re implying I’m a bad person, fuck you. Fuck you so much.” It leads to the rage so often evinced against Black Lives Matter, and the fact that right-wingers refuse to actually say “black lives matter” (all lives matter).

The response by the right is vicious and self-righteous. The Republican party deliberately allied itself with the KKK 50 years ago, and immediately switched to dog-whistle politics in order to not alienate all the other white people who were, let’s be absolutely clear about this, incredibly racist, but not as benightedly viciously gleefully racist as the southern monsters the Republicans were courting. The result is that the Republican party is the home of people who either embrace racism (as “race realism”) or merely are incredibly racist but refuse to recognize that fact and resent it whenever it’s brought up.

People on the right largely recognize that racism is a bad thing (except, once again, those who embrace “race realism”), and hate the criticism represented by people of color. The ongoing discrimination against and suffering of non-white peoples is a strong moral condemnation against white people. That’s why so many seek absolution rather than solutions, and it’s why the right rejects the premise.

When you actually embrace empathy and compassion, then the world becomes a rather hellish place. Billions of people live in suffering or even despair, and much of that is straightforwardly the result of the wealthiest and most powerful nations. We in the US bear huge moral responsibility for the deaths and torments of billions of people for the last century, and of millions of people in the century and a half prior to that.

But there’s an important word to get out of that last sentence. “Responsibility”.

Something that anti-racism activists have been focusing on for a very long time is responsibility, rather than collective guilt. Guilt is inward-focused, it’s narcissistic, it ignores the suffering of others. Compassion and empathy, in the face of such large problems, such widespread suffering, require us to eschew guilt in favor of responsibility.

No, I didn’t cause these problems, I’m not guilty for the ongoing suffering of people around the globe. It’s not something I did. But I have some measure of wealth and power as a white person and citizen of the United States. If I choose to do nothing, then I will be guilty of allowing that suffering to continue. I have a responsibility to use my position to do the right thing. I cannot simply pass by on the other side. In the end, what matters most is cleaning up the mess, not assigning guilt.

That doesn’t eliminate the problem represented by right wing douche-canoes, but it does offer a path forward.

Links

• The wikipedia entry on white guilt
• Judith Katz's page at the Centre for Global Inclusion
• The social justice wiki's page on "not all x"

SJA #28 - 17 December 2018 - Who is Jordan Peterson? Part 2

One last thing of note to take from the Crimson article, Peterson’s obsession with the Cold War. The second paragraph, “... few may know that Peterson studies aggression arising from drug and alcohol abuse and first got interested in psychology by reflecting on the Cold War”.

Talking about his break year between his first and second bachelor’s degrees, “At that time, 1982, the Cold War was still raging madly away and I was curious about how it could be that a group of people could have set up such a strange situation.” But because political science “did not answer his questions”, “I was interested in how individuals could lead a group to commit these atrocities, I was interested in typing to find out why people were so interested in their ideological positions that they would kill to maintain them.”

As has been repeatedly noted, Jeeperson’s home is full of Soviet propaganda. He even has some over his bed. His home is wall to wall Soviet art. The man has a strange obsession. Even though the state-owned, fascist capitalist soviet empire collapsed more than 25 years ago, it was such a huge part of his childhood that he’s unwilling to let it go. That probably says a lot about him. He’s still fighting a war a lot of other people don’t even remember.

And you can hear that in a lot of his fear-mongering. His favorite boogeyman is “postmodern neomarxism”. We’ll get to why that’s a serious problem in a minute. For now, let’s tackle the two words in that phrase.

Postmodernism has long been boogeyman for the right. What postmodernism is is fairly difficult to say, because the movement as a whole is 1) very diverse and 2) opposed to sweeping labels. As for diversity, postmodernism isn’t just a philosophical movement; it’s also an artistic and architectural movement. And those are both largely unconnected to the philosophical movement, and even within philosophy there’s a huge range of diversity. And that’s largely because one of the only things they have in common is rejecting labels, rejecting sweeping narratives and unity.

As for “neo-marxism”... well, that’s not well-defined, but it’s not like it’s a ridiculous word. Schools of thought evolve over time, they collect more evidence, people do more work. If marxism hadn’t changed over the century plus since Marx wrote, that would be a problem. We can just as easily talk about neo-marxism as we can neoliberalism.

But postmodernism rejects sweeping narratives of history, and marxism is a sweeping narrative of history. Marxism posits that strong economic forces drive history, forcing the rulers and the ruled into conflict over and over and over. The ruling class rules by means of a philosophy; that inspires the ruled to develop a counter-philosophy. The conflict between them leads to the creation of a new philosophy that drives the new ruling class.

Postmodernism rejects that sort of grand idea, that there is a unifying force that explains all of history. So trying to claim that something is both postmodern and neo-marxist … that’s kind of asinine.

But we shouldn’t be too surprised that Jeepers doesn’t know what the hell postmodernism is. Fools on the right love to take words and turn them into scary labels absent any meaning other than “BAD BAD THIS THING BAD”. Like “radical feminist” or “gender theory” or “Jew” or “please stop doing that”. So when Jeep says that, he’s not really talking about anything real, he’s just saying “there’s a bad thing and I don’t like it”; it doesn’t have to have an actual reference.

But “postmodern neo-marxist” is actually worse than that. Jeepers took it a step away from another popular phrase floating around the right wing edges of the internet, “cultural marxist”. And that’s bad, because it’s a step removed from “cultural bolshevik”, which was popular in the middle of the twentieth century, and never really went away.

The … hypothesis? Model? The idea at the core of this is that there is some evil force coming in “from outside” that is trying to destroy our “culture and heritage”. In the US today, the focus of this conspiracy theory is on the “left coast elites” and university academics (Jeeperson proposed a rating system for students to use to identify “neo-marxist content” so leftist professors could be disciplined). However, for all the veneer, it amounts to the same thing as it did when it was German Nazis in the 1930s talking about cultural Bolsheviks. The Jews.

Is Jordan Peterson an anti-semite? Yes and no. Well, just yes, not no. Yes. He is an anti-semite.

Jeepers is a far-right wing white guy, and he despises identity politics because he doesn’t want to think of himself has having race or gender; he grew up very comfortable in a culture that took whiteness and maleness as the norm. The push by the modern left to disrupt that narrative, to allow people of all races, genders, etc. to be part of our culture rather than othering most to the profit of a few, has upset people like him.

Anyway, Jeeperson wrote an article, “On the so-called “Jewish Question”” (link in the thingy). Of course, he has to link identity politics on the left to identity politics on the right… that’s horse shit.

Identity politics on the left is a defensive reaction to the identity politics of the right. Blackness wasn’t a thing until white people started enslaving black people. Minority groups defending themselves against genocide by the majority? NOT THE SAME THING.

His link is to say there’s an oppressed group and an oppressor, but he claims the conspiracy theory of right-wing assholes about a Jewish illuminati is the same thing as racism. Or sexism, or homophobia…. God, I hate dishonest right-wing assholes like him.

But he is expressly decrying the far-right wing conspiracy theory, right? He’s saying they’re wrong! Right? Not exactly.

“Jews are disproportionately over-represented in positions of authority, competence, and influence. New York Jews, in particular, snap up a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes, and Jews are disproportionately eligible for admission at elite universities…”

and, to explain that disparity,

“Three well-documented factors appear to be at play:

• The significantly higher than average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews…
• The relationship between IQ and Big Five Trait Openness to Experience…
• The relationship between Openness to Experience and political liberalism…”

Concluding with, “So, what’s the story? No conspiracy. Get it? No conspiracy. Jewish people are over-represented in positions of competence and authority because, as a group, they have a higher mean IQ. The effect of this group difference … is magnified for occupations/interests that require high general cognitive ability. Equal over-representation may also occur in political movements associated with the left because high IQ is associated with Openness to Experience, which is in turn associated with liberal/left-leaning political proclivities.”

First, Jeeperson is a race essentialist. Talking about the Ashkenazi as a group, how they have higher IQs… ew. Second, talking about Jews in this way? Really, really Nazi. White supremacists use this and similar talking points about Asians as a way to claim they’re not white supremacists. “I think race X is smarter than white people! I can’t be racist!” Wait a second… Asians… I don’t know if you could hear it, but there were a lot of ellipses in the quotes up there that I used to shorten Jeeperson’s article to something quotable.

“... and Jews are disproportionately eligible for admission at elite universities, where they, along with Asians, tend to be discriminated against…”

For someone who wants to distance himself from fascists and skinheads, he’s doing a really, really good job of throwing out their talking points. Talking about racial IQ and how Jews and Asians are smarter than white people…

And the fact is that it’s really sketchy that Jeeperson is even talkine agrees “We’re measuring something, but we don’t really know what we’re measuring.” Ig about IQ in the first place. IQ is a seriously dodgy method of measuring intelligence. Everyons it a measure of general intelligence, or is just a measure of the ability to take an IQ test? IQ does correlate with later success, but so does class and skin color. There’s also the problem that IQ tests have historically been pretty goddamn racist.

We know that using IQ tests to bolster beliefs about race is garbage (even though that has been their primary purpose for the century of their existence), because people who have been the targets of oppression have been closing the gap in IQ tests steadily ever since we finally put an end to segregation. Hell, you can study for IQ tests and improve your score. Basically, we know that IQ tests have a lot of problems, there’s no guarantee they measure what we want them to measure, they are hugely influenced by social factors.

And Peterson absolutely should know this. He’s supposed to be an expert in this kind of shit. Ever since he landed in Toronto, his whole schtick has been the foundations of personality, and this isn’t even high level stuff. The problems with IQ tests are psych 101. We know he knows about IQ and its relationship to the big five because he mentions that relationship in his anti-semitic cockwaffle about “the so-called Jewish Question”. And yet he’s using IQ to backstop this shit.

In other words, Jeeperson is “the thinking man’s anti-semite”. Like all the other heroes of the dork web, the leaders of the alt-right, his purpose in the movement is to cloak their naked bigotry in intellectual verbiage, to provide a pseudo-scientific basis for their beliefs, a false justification for the things they want to do to minorities. His article claims to be an argument against anti-semitism, but all it does is use anti-semitic, fascist talking points in order to argue that there’s no conspiracy.

Let me repeat that quote from earlier:

“So, what’s the story? No conspiracy. Get it? No conspiracy. Jewish people are over-represented in positions of competence and authority because, as a group, they have a higher mean IQ.”

That’s the exact line of reasoning you get out of the new breed of fascists. Richard Spencer, Gavin McInnes, and the other “thinkers” in openly fascist movements try to use those sorts of arguments to “prove” they’re not racist. “I’m not a white supremacist, I think Asians are smarter than white people! If anything, I’m an asian supremacist!” Jeepers is providing pseudo-scientific justification against a conspiracy theory, arguing in favor of fascist race essentialism, the so-called “race realism” of new wave fascists. And it’s tied directly to all the old fascist myths about Jews.

Plenty of people have done excellent work outlining the basics of fascism. Instead of recommending a random search that could turn up who knows what, I’m going to recommend specific youtubers (and link them in the thingy): Thought Slime, Kat Blaque, ContraPoints, Innuendo Studios, ShaunandJen, and Three Arrows have all done a lot of work deconstructing these things. I’m morally certain there are far more, because fascism has been on the rise, but those are the ones I know off the top of my head.

In any event, one of the things fascism uses to define itself is a hated out-group, a way to drum up aggression and emotion in their base of support. They define their in-group, connect it to a mythological past when the in-group was great, then blame the out-group for the present being crap. That out-group is always demonized as morally horrific, and is also simultaneously fiendishly clever but ultimately stupid and weak. Thus the out-group can be blamed for short-term losses (clever) but can by mythologized to ultimately lose (because morally and intellectually weak).

You see that everywhere in 20th century fascist propaganda about Jews. You also see it in 19th and 20th century racist propaganda against Asian immigrants. The intelligence of Asians is central to the white supremacist view of Asian culture, but also built into it is the belief that Asians are physically, morally, emotionally weak, and that they deserve to be dominated (by white people) because of that.

Peterson’s essay only superficially appears to be combating the anti-semitic beliefs of his fascist fans. In reality he’s adding a layer of plausible deniability. Jordan B Peterson is an anti-semitic asshole. And that extends beyond just talking about “the so-called Jewish Question” to all the other races. He had a sit down with notoriously bigoted and hateful YouTuber Stefan Molyneux (link in the thingy), in which they traded racist talking points around IQ and how society is structured the way it is because of MERIT and some people are just better than others.

Know what else they talk about? Women! Well, not really. Molyneux drops a bit about women being dumb, but Jeepers knows the IQ data doesn’t back that up, so he bats it away and keeps talking about race. Still it lets me make the segue because holy hell Jeeperson is misogynistic.

Back in April, an ingrown toenail of a human being drove a van through a crowded marketplace in Toronto; link in the thingy. This sparked a big conversation, because the terrorist was a middle class white dude. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4vIBijzg4w) He didn’t claim any strong religious or political affiliation. How could this be? Only muslims kill people!

Minassian identified himself as an incel, involuntarily celibate, a guy who couldn’t get laid. The term originated with a small, early internet community in 1993. Things have changed in the last 25 years. Now it’s a virulently hateful internet subculture dedicated to the hatred of women. I strongly recommend the Incels video by Contrapoints, where she does a deep dive on the topic (link in the thingy).

Long story short, they hate women. A lot. Their personalities are all pretty shit, and hanging out in their incel forums spending all their time talking about how ugly they all are and how women are all shallow evil bitches really, really doesn’t help that. So they don’t get laid, and they channel all their frustration over that into hating women, and occasionally these guys lash out in extreme violence. A young man named Elliot Rodger murdered his three roommates and tried to murder a sorority in 2014 and, unable to get through the locked door of their house, murdered several people on the street before getting in his car and trying to find other victims, shooting some and running over others. All told, he killed six and injured 14 more before killing himself.

And Minassian explicitly praised Rodger online prior to his own attack.

Why bring this up? Because Jeepers had a response, of course!

Citing his quote from the New York Times article referenced earlier, “Custodian of the Patriarchy”: “He was angry at God because women were rejecting him, … The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

Now, that sounds pretty goddamn clear. Especially when you hear Jeeperson try to explain it. Why would he have to explain it? Because everyone immediately said, “Wait, these guys can’t get laid and you jump to enforced monogamy… you mean forcing women to have sex with these men?”

Of course Jeeperson walked that back. He doesn’t want anyone to think he’s trying to force people to do anything. I’ma go ahead and link to an episode of Cognitive Dissonance, because 1) they’re hilarious, and 2) they recently took this precise bit of the Jeep’s bullshit to pieces. They said it quite well (1 hour 15 ish minutes in): he’s tried to claim that he meant social enforcement, that humans naturally have a tendency toward monogamy because of children, and we should re-inforce that. But he never actually says “reinforce”.

And the CogDis guys nailed it here: it’s because Jeeperson’s a coward. It’s absolutely clear from everything he’s saying that, if we don’t enforce monogamy, then females will all go for the “high status males”. Yes, he believes in hierarchies, remember? So he thinks that some men are just better, and women (being shallow sluts), will all gravitate to the alpha males, and the alphas will have huge harems. That’s made clear in the clip CogDis responds to, a segment from when Jeepers was on Dave Rubin’s show, where he almost randomly brings up polygamy and how that’s illegal now.

In other words, Jeepers responded to the incel killing by talking about god and enforced monogamy because he agrees with the incels. Incels talk about “Chad” and “Stacy”, alpha males and slutty females. They think they’re not getting laid because the alphas are hogging all the women and women are all sluts and on, and on, and on. Jeepers thinks that society is falling apart because we’re not required to live in the strict hierarchy he advocates, that sexual morality (meaning every individual woman being the property of some particular man) is no longer enforced by law.

But he backed the fuck down from that statement because he didn’t want to face the actual social consequences of openly advocating the vile shit he believes.

And that’s the sort of thing Jeep does all the damn time. He works very, very hard to be unclear. He strives to make his statements vague enough that they can mean different things. He wants his fascist fanboys to understand him when he talks about race, genetics, hierarchies, women, IQ, all that shit, but so that he can back away and pretend that’s not what he was saying when confronted about it.

As when BBC Channel 4’s Cathy Newman tried to interview Jeeperson back in January (link in the thing). She kept trying to say “So you believe misogynist thing X”, and he kept squirming away, denying it, and throwing out his pseudo-science shit-waffles. His fans loved it because they thought it meant he “won” the interview, and centrists dismissed Newman’s efforts as a dishonest smear because “she kept wrongly accusing Peterson of things”.

Make no mistake, though, if you follow Jeepers for long enough, you’ll see that his view of women is dim, and his opinion on where they belong is clear. He sees women as lying sluts who do not belong in the workplace. He’s convinced they’re not very bright, and take advantage of men. He wants to force them to act “properly”.

[FADE TO BLACK]

Before I conclude, something that popped up while I was writing this. Jeeperson defended Nazis. Well, he defended Nazis last year during his interview with Sam Harris. I mentioned this when I called Sam Harris a far right wing douche. It’s just taken until now for the mainstream media to really figure out that Jeepers is fascist as hell. He offered a defense of the Holocaust, describing it as a logical progression of events.

There’s an excellent article in the Independent (link in the thingy) going over this, linking Jeep’s casual apologia with Senator Lindsey Graham’s defense of our own war crimes at the US Mexico border in response to hundreds of Hondurans seeking asylum. As the article’s author, Matt Greene, makes clear, the Holocaust was a logical progression because fascism will take whatever path necessary to get to the end goal of genocide. If the Nazis could have started with gas chambers, they would have.

But is he really defending the Holocaust? Or is he just trying to understand the Holocaust? Taken in isolation, perhaps we could give Jeeperson the benefit of the doubt. But this isn’t the only thing he’s done that indicates he’s defending rather than understanding. He’s explicitly used neo-nazi rhetoric describing the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews (going beyond simply “the Jews” to specifically identifying a certain ethnic subgroup). He also absolutely adores the anti-semitic “postmodern neo-marxist” dog whistle. If I were willing to dig in, how many more examples would I find?

I’m going to leave that there. Jeepers disgusts me and I’m not eager to spend more time digging into his odious beliefs than I have to.

So I’ve tried to talk about different parts of Peterson’s life and career, here. Give a few highlights to try and flesh out who he is as a person and public figure. What can we get out of all of this? Who is he as an academic, a teacher, a public speaker, as a person?

He’s a fascist.

Gotta be honest, I wasn’t expecting to come to that conclusion. I was fairly well aware of Jeeperson and his controversies going into this, but I thought he was a Christian conservative with fascist sympathies. I wrote my intro, the guy who wakes up and realizes he’s mediocre and runs in terror from that realization, because I thought that’s what he was. A guy who thought he’d change the world and was appalled that he hadn’t.

I figured his would be the more prosaic racism of Yer Dad; from Philosophy Tube’s discussion of Transphobia: yer dad has never really thought about these things, is uncomfortable with change, but isn’t hateful or dedicated to bigotry and can change with a little work.

Nope. Peterson has done a lot of thinking about this. He is hateful, and he is dedicated. He has spent a lot of time over the years honing his beliefs, dedicating himself to a view of humanity that essentializes them and connects them to a mythological worldview. He explicitly wants a hierarchy with a certain kind of person (himself) at the top, and people he views as biologically inferior or morally degenerate at the bottom.

And he’s dishonest. Fascism as a system of beliefs is concerned almost exclusively with power, the in-group, and hierarchy, and have no qualms about how they achieve those goals. Fascist will happily work within the system to get to power: Mussolini marched on Rome with tens of thousands of armed men, but Hitler positioned himself within government and manipulated the system to seize control. A simple fascist credo could be stated as “it’s okay so long as I’m the one doing it”.

Peterson’s classes freely mixed fact and fiction so that he could spin a compelling vision of psychology and human nature. His entire program of research in grad school and Harvard was a smokescreen so he could get tenure, securing the freedom to pursue his agenda. His public lectures match his teaching style, pretending to expertise outside his field and telling lies in support of his beliefs. He deliberately strives for ambiguity so that he never has to answer to critics for his beliefs and statements.

Peterson’s entire career has been a campaign of dishonesty, misstatements, lies, and obfuscation for the purpose of, in Peterson’s view, saving the world from the Dragon of Chaos. He believes he has found the central, true narrative of human history. He believes he has the key to understanding everything thanks to his Jungian mythicism, his Christian narcissism, his fascist hierarchism.

Who is he?

Jordan B. Peterson is a mystic. He believes he has unique, special, unquestionable access to the truth about reality and human nature.

Jordan B. Peterson is a quack. His career as a public speaker is dedicated to spreading lies and pseudoscience in order to support his bigotry.

Jordan B. Peterson is a misogynist, a racist, an anti-semite. He believes in an unchanging core of every human being, based partly in biology and partly in the soul, that places them permanently within a hierarchical structure, with himself at the top.

Jordan B. Peterson is an unprincipled zealot. His professional life has been a deliberate falsification intended to put him in a position to preach with credentials so that he can lead young white men to his better world.

Jordan B. Peterson is a fascist.

Links

• The Crimson article on Peterson
• The NY Times article on JBeep: Custodian of the Right
• Beeper's shitty "On the So-Called Jewish Question" blog post
• YouTubers who have covered fascism
• Thought Slime
• Kat Blaque
• ContraPoints
• Innuendo Studios
• Shaun and Jen
• Three Arrows
• Six minutes of fashy chat with Peterson and Molyneux
• The Toronto van killer
• Contra's excellent Incels video
• The Cognitive Dissonance episode including their takedown of Beep
• The fun BBC4 interview with JB
• The article in the Independent on Beep's Holocaust apology

SJA #27 - 10 December 2018 - Who is Jordan Peterson? Part 1

Who is Jordan Peterson?
Part 1

One day you wake up. It’s an ordinary day. You have a family, you have a job, you have the things you’re supposed to have. But you’re not famous. You’re not a celebrated intellectual. You aren’t invited on television or radio. You’re not in charge of anything.

Confronted with a lifetime of evidence, you nevertheless insist that you aren’t mediocre. You’re not an average person, with average abilities, in an average life. You’re special. You’re great. But the world hasn’t recognized that.

There’s something wrong with the world.

[FADE TO BLACK]

Who is Jordan B. Peterson?

One of the leading lights of the new Intellectual Dark Web, Jeeperson exploded onto the world stage when he started lying about the Canadian government’s bill C-16, an act which would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to provide protections for trans people (link in the thingy to an excellent podcast about C-16 and Jeep’s lies). He has now transitioned into a darling of the far right, traveling the world making largely inchoate pronouncements on difficult issues and earning tens of thousands of dollars a month on patreon from violent fanboys who needed to be told to clean their rooms.

But who was Jeepers before that?

He was a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who also operated a private clinical practice. Before becoming a full professor in Toronto, he was first an assistant professor and then an associate professor at Harvard (1993-1998). He got a BA in political science at the University of Alberta (1982), spent a year in Europe, then returned to Alberta for a BA in psychology (1984), then got his PhD in clinical psychology at McGill University (1991).

His research topics have covered a lot of ground. At Harvard he studied aggression arising from alcohol and drug abuse and, “supervised a number of unconventional research proposals”. That quote comes from a piece written in the Harvard Crimson (the school newspaper, link in the thingy) in 1995. That article is… illuminating. I’ll be referring to it from time to time, because it really says a lot about Peterson.

His wiki article (also linked) provides a long list of wiki-linked areas that Jeepers has researched.

• psychopharmacology
• abnormal psychology
• neuropsychology
• clinical psychology
• personality psychology
• social psychology
• industrial and organizational psychology
• religious psychology
• ideological psychology
• political psychology (okay, maybe they’re different, but why aren’t industrial, organizational, religious, ideological, and political psychology all just branches of social psychology? And how are religious, ideological, and political psychology not all the exact same thing? Anyway…)
• finally, creativity psychology

So what about his research? Personally, I’m not a clinical psychologist and don’t really want to read through a bunch of papers where I’d spend half the time looking up the vocab and the other half slogging through statistics. Fortunately, there are other things you can do, like compare him to his peers.

When you hop over to google scholar (linked), you can get a handy list of an author’s publications, as well as how many citations those papers have received. Like any other database, GS doesn’t include every publication (some databases are better for journals, others for conferences, others are only good for a particular field, etc.), and Google Scholar’s particular weakness is pre-1990 publications. However, Jeepers didn’t enter the field until the early 1990s, so this will provide an accurate reflection of his career. Also, since I’m comparing him to his colleagues in the field of psychology, any weaknesses in the database should apply similarly to all of them.

Jeepers isn’t the top of his field. Look into the GS list of people publishing in psychology and you get page after page of people ranked by how many citations they have. This doesn’t necessarily directly reflect how influential a person is in a field; authors tend to pile up citations over time. Various indexing methods that try to measure an academic’s impact and influence tend to suffer from a similar defect. On the other hand, you’re not going to be incredibly influential right out the gate; you have to establish your research, you have to establish that you know what you’re talking about, you have to have something to talk about.

Jeeperson is down on the fifth page. That’s not bad. He’s a solid, top tier researcher with 10,000+ citations under his belt. Given his recent notoriety, you might expect that to have changed, and there’s something to that. You tend to see a positive slope in an academic’s citation numbers; they keep writing newer papers, and those and their old papers keep getting citations, so the number of new citations they get keeps increasing. Jeeperson follows that trend up to 2016, a steady upward growth in citations.

Then he got a bump in 2017. This was the year immediately after he became famous, and it looks like some of his colleagues were curious, saw a little bit in his research, and cited him. But it wasn’t a big effect. His number of citations increased by 77 going from 2013 to 2014, by 71 ‘14 to ‘15, by 92 ‘15 to ‘16, by 217 from ‘16 to ‘17. His total number of citations in 2013 was 841 and it was 1289 in 2017. So it looks like popular celebrity landed him some extra academic attention in 2017, but it hasn’t moved him to the front of the pack.

On the other hand, 2018 doesn’t seem to be shaping up to be a very good year for the Jeep. He’s got 1010 citations as of writing (11/16), which means, depending on how/when the numbers are updated, he’s looking at roughly 1100 or 1200 citations. In other words, a decline. Part of the reason for that is that he’s spent so much time on the road being a famous fascist that he’s not been able to do much research. In fact, he shut down his clinical practice in 2017 and stopped teaching in 2018. You’re not going to get as many new citations if you’re not writing as many papers.

So Jeeperson’s research career looks to be successful, but not legendary. He’s on the fifth page in terms of citation numbers and the various indices meant to indicate a researcher’s impact are all on the same level as others on that page (some a little more influential, some a little less). The other psychologists on page five are also solid researchers, middle-aged men (and they’re all men) at good universities (and one clinic). You should expect people on higher pages to be a) older researchers with more publications, b) better researchers with more influential publications, or c) both.

And that’s what we see. Some of the front-page researchers (which list does include some women) are older, 70+ years of age. Others are a few years younger than Jeepers and clearly eminent in their fields, with very impressive awards and appointments. Not only do they have a large number of citations, but their citations are consistent and the various indices of influence are impressively high.

All of this is to say that, as a clinical psychologist, Jeepers doesn’t look like a crank. He’s not running a paper-mill, churning out worthless research like what happened at Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab under Brian Wansink (link in the thingy). He’s not a top-flight researcher, the darling of the academic conferences, moving the field by leaps and bounds, but he’s also not a plodding dullard, publishing papers pro-forma and achieving nothing.

On the other hand, that list of research topics is troubling. Most researchers settle into a field early in their career. You take a look at their google scholar page and you’ll immediately see a theme to an academic’s publications. This one’s interested in depression and anxiety, this one focuses on recovering from trauma, this one is doing deep research into the formation of personality. Jeepers doesn’t really have that. Personality, social ability, creativity, drug abuse, anxiety… he’s kind of all over the place.

But what that means is that Jeepers might be a brilliant researcher. Ordinarily, you have to devote yourself to a field, learn all about it, and explore the whole structure to find the cracks that you can open up for new research, new insight. And those new insights and developments are what make other researchers want to cite your work, to build on what you’ve discovered. Or it challenges their work and they want to prove you wrong.

Which may be all that Jeeperson has actually done. Instead of a long career of powerful insights and great work, it could be that he’s something of a dilettante, moving into a field for a few years, achieving what he thinks of as an astonishing insight, then prancing along to a new project before anyone can tell him how deeply wrong he was.

So, which is it, is Jeeperson a masterful researcher in psychology, offering fresh perspective and insight into multiple fields thanks to his broad approach, or is he just an asshole who drops a nasty coffee fart in the elevator just before getting off at the second floor?

That’s hard for me to judge. I can’t dig through his citations to find out if they’re supporting or contradicting his work. Not only, again, am I not a psychologist with the training to read the papers, but the overwhelming majority of academic work is behind a paywall and thus inaccessible and I’m definitely not shelling out hundreds of dollars to find a snippet “DeYoung et al. say X, we disagree”.

From my perspective as an outsider, he’s a good researcher, who appears to be respected by his peers (or at least he was before he became the replacement daddy-figure for all the lost boys on the far right). He could be a crank who lacks focus and is unwilling to commit to a field because that would open him up to criticism and the possibility that he’s not the brilliant wunderkind he always thought he was, but I have no way of seeing that.

Where Jeepers definitely shines, no question, is in his ability to speak to an audience. His research work at Harvard got him hired at Toronto, but they might not have looked deeply into his teaching. They should have.

Remember that article I mentioned way back there? It was published in Harvard’s student newspaper, the Crimson, in 1995, two years into Jeeperson’s time there, and it should raise red flags for anyone looking to hire a professor. Let’s go ahead and start with the opening paragraph:

“Harvard students may know Assistant Professor Jordan B. Peterson as the entertaining lecturer with the Canadian accent who taught Psychology 17, ‘Introduction to Personality’.”

That’s not terrible. Being an entertaining lecturer is good. Certainly better than being a boring drone, like Ben Stein’s character in Ferris Bueller. However, here are a few other snippets.

Quoting a senior: “Anyone who’s taking his class can immediately recognize that he’s teaching beyond the level of anyone else.”

A sophomore said the most notable thing about Peterson was “the way he synthesized information. He didn’t just talk about the theories, but he talked about some of his own ideas and different sources of information.”

Another sophomore said “Peterson’s wide breadth of knowledge allows him to create ‘beautiful’ theories linking together ideas from mythology, religion, philosophy, and psychology.”

Finally, quoting the Jeep himself, “The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.”

It might be one thing if you use literature and mythology to illustrate the enduring character of human psychology through the ages, how human beings have universal concerns and drives, and they build these into their beliefs, into the stories they tell and the dreams they have. But that’s not what Jeepers does. Because he’s a Jungian.

Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, died in 1961 and he looks like the movie villain who hypnotizes you, makes you into his accomplice in grotesque serial murders and rapes, then “cures” you himself through lobotomy before turning your wife and children into his sex slaves and getting away scot free and dying, happily, of old age thirty years later. Is that a movie? Feels like something like that is already a movie.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Jung’s work is crap. He and Freud did a hell of a lot to move psychology away from “How are these people evil and how can we Jesus the crazy out of them?” and into a genuine science, but each of them was incredibly wrong about a lot of things. He believed in paranormal phenomena, for example. More importantly, he saw everything as manifestations of his weird spiritual interpretation of human development, what he called individuation, and also as manifestations of archetypes, a sort of platonic ideal of universal values buried deep in the human unconsciousness.

Any individual human being is a complex assemblage of parts and processes, but we all have core similarities, being variations on a powerfully unified central theme. We all have similar psychologies because we all evolved from the same small population of apes, and we all did so on our home planet with its environments, which only appear incredibly different if you don’t compare them to the things the universe as a whole has to offer.

What I’m trying to say here is that, when you study the psychology of human beings, you’re going to find common trends, tendencies, themes. You’re going to find that people as a whole tend to have the same sorts of reactions to the same sorts of situations. And you’re going to make those observations for the same reason you’ll observe that human beings have hair, mammary glands, external genitalia, a skull with a single, now closed fenestra… I’m saying we share an evolutionary heritage.

Jung and his followers do not have that basic understanding of biology. When Jungians talk about the “collective unconscious”, they’re not talking about the culture we live in, whose beliefs and attitudes we absorb without reflection. They’re talking about an actual collective entity that expresses itself through all of us. Jung studied the paranormal, alchemy, and the occult precisely because he thought those methods could provide insight into the collective unconscious.

And Jeeperson is a Jungian. He talks about archetypes and mythology and literature because he thinks they are a reflection not of a deeper biology, but of a deeper spiritual reality. That’s why he said studying myth and literature is more important than studying biology and the other sciences.

Some of the things Jeep has talked about in his many lectures and interviews include mythology and weird snippets of the natural world. He looks at an ancient Indian painting of a pair of snakes in a spiral and he doesn’t see artwork about snakes (there’s artwork about every damn thing in the natural world), he sees a deep archetypal insight into DNA (again, link in the thingy). Jungians think scientific discovery doesn’t happen because of research, but because it’s tapping into the collective unconscious, into this realm of real truths that can only be accessed through dreams.

Jeepers also got a bit of flack for talking about lobsters. Why lobsters? Because they have hierarchies and they use hormones that humans also use, and therefore humans should also live in the strict hierarchies Jeepers wants us to live in. That’s all garbage and any biologist could tear it apart, and many have (link!). But Jeepers isn’t interested in the actual biology; he’s talking about Jungian mysticism, where everything is a reflection of this deeper reality. He wants to talk about lobsters and hormones because he wants to say we’re all reflections of the collective unconscious, we all have to live that way because it’s the true way to live.

If you read his work, if you find out about his love of Jung, and you hear about how he’s tying mythology and literature into his lectures… that’s a matter of huge concern. The fact that he’s not just “teaching the theories”, but also “building his own beautiful theories”, that’s a matter of huge concern. Jeepers is a captivating lecturer because he’s passionate, because he’s not providing the facts, because he’s not teaching, he’s preaching.

If you watch his youtube videos, he bounces from topic to topic, rarely staying on psychology very long. He jumbles up psychology with mythology, literature, politics, pop culture, and science. If you know anything about any one of those, you can easily see how he’s incredibly, entirely, powerfully wrong. But few people know much about any of those, let alone all of them, and because Jeeperson loves to bounce from topic to topic, sometimes within a single sentence, and hates saying anything with clarity, it’s very difficult to construct a coherent response to anything he says. Hell, it’s difficult to construct a coherent understanding of anything he says.

I don’t know if that’s deliberate or not.

[FADE TO BLACK]

Jeep’s first book was Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief, published in 1999, a year after he moved from Harvard to Toronto. It took him thirteen years to write. He was 37. Which means he started it at the age of 24. In 1986, when he was just starting his PhD work at McGill. It purports to be a masterwork, explaining history. It is filled to the brim with Jungian nonsense.

AND DIAGRAMS. He has these… nonsense. They’re just wall to wall nonsense. A whole bunch of labels and arrows. It’s the worst collection of the most inconsequential venn diagrams ever. Let’s see if I can paint a word picture for you. Describe one of these things. Maybe get some coherent information out of it. Probably not.

So here we have a box labeled “YAHWEH: The Spirit of God” (note god’s name is in all caps), then that box is in an oval, because you have to have an oval. Then there’s another box, “THE VOID: Matter and the Deep”, and that box is also in an oval, because the boxes aren’t enough? The ovals make it official?

And there’s an arrow going from YAHWEH to THE VOID… well, from oval to oval, not from box to box. There’s probably something VERY meaningful there, something from the collective unconscious. … Ovals are probably eggs. Boxes are… penises? Maybe? Anyway, there’s another arrow from THE VOID to YAHWEH. Then there’s “Sexual” written above the arrow from YAHWEH to THE VOID… “sexual” is in quotes for some reason. Then between the two arrows there’s “(Creative)” … in parentheses… then below the arrow from THE VOID to YAHWEH there’s “Union”, with neither quotes nor parentheses.

So is “sexual” just for the arrow going from YAHWEH to THE VOID? Are all three words meant for both arrows? Why is “sexual” in quotes? Is it meant to say that YAHWEH’s interest in THE VOID isn’t actually sexual? That it just appears sexual? Is “(Creative)” for both? And how does THE VOID … have Union? Create Union? Do Union? For YAHWEH? To? At? With YAHWEH? And the oval around THE VOID is also an arrow. The oval’s line has a little arrowhead randomly placed on it. Pointing counterclockwise, though who the hell knows if that means anything for Jeepers. But we’ll see soon enough that the arrowhead isn’t an arrowhead. No no no, it’s just a head.

Now, THE VOID and YAHWEH are both inside another oval. With another box! This one labeled “The Precosmogonic “Egg””. “Egg” is in quotes for some reason. “Cosmogony” is the theory of the origin of the universe. So “precosomogonic” means “whatever came before the universe”. So “egg” is in quotes because it’s not a “real” egg, it’s a … metaphorical egg? It’s just a placeholder. Because he has a low opinion of his readers and didn’t want to seem too much like an egghead just saying “the precosmogony”? But YAHWEH and THE VOID are… totes sexual … well “sexual” for each other, even though they exist in the stuff before reality itself actually existed?

Now, there’s an arrow going from The Precosmogonic “Egg” to another oval. But this oval is outside the Precosmogonic “Egg”’s oval. It’s PARADISE: The Walled Garden. Now, this oval is a dashed line for some reason. Probably because it’s even more imaginary than the Precosmogonic “Egg”. The line going from the “Egg” to the Garden is labeled “Creation of Unconscious Paradisal World”.

But wait, there’s more! We also have… The Dragon of Chaos! You may have heard of the Dragon of Chaos. It’s kind of a theme for Jeeperson. Shows up in a lot of his diagrams. This one isn’t called the Dragon of Chaos. It’s just a picture of a dragon and it’s labeled CHAOS. In a box. And now we know why the oval for THE VOID has that arrowhead on it. Because it is also the Dragon of Chaos eating its own tail! And there’s an arrow going from the Garden to the CHAOS labeled Descent and Disintegration and another arrow from CHAOS to the Garden labeled Anomalous Information. And, next to the dragon, we have Eve, naked, holding a baby, and a fig leaf, both quite strategically placed. And Eve is in her own oval. No arrows for Eve, though. She’s just standing there. Naked. Next to the dragon of CHAOS.

Now, because symbolism is useless if it’s not hammered home with all the subtlety of a drag queen, we have MORE OVALS. These last two ovals are in dotted lines. One oval goes around THE VOID, Eve, and the dragon of CHAOS. The other is around YAHWEH and PARADISE. Both ovals are labeled, with boxes made of dotted lines, but outside the dotted line ovals and connected to them with more dotted lines. YAHWEH’s and PARADISE’s oval is “The “Patriarchal World” of Light”, with “Patriarchal World” in quotes. The dotted oval for THE VOID and Eve and CHAOS is “The “Matriarchal World” of Darkness”. Yup, “Matriarchal World” is in quotes.

And this whole diagram is Figure 56: Genesis and Descent.

So, this diagram is clear, right? YAHWEH is totally banging THE VOID, and imagining an Unconscious Paradisal World that is descending and disintegrating into the CHAOS that is feeding it Anomalous Information. Also, there’s some naked chick holding a baby.

No, the diagram doesn’t make any sense. Nor do any of the other diagrams. There are dozens of the damn things. All of them just collections of ovals and boxes and arrows and random clumps of vocab. The Jeep is absolutely garbage at creating clarity.

And you see the bit where it’s full of Jungian archetypal bullshit? He’s positing these as actual structures existing in places, full of serious meaning and value and … they create things and they’re why people do things.

And did you see the part where it is absolutely incredibly sexist? Did you notice the male world of light with the spirit of god and the garden paradise? The dragon of CHAOS, THE VOID, and the random, inexplicable, Eve? Did you notice that YAHWEH totally wants to metaphorically “sexual” the mystical vagina? THE VOID? The female chaotic darkness that destroys the male paradise of light....

And yet Jeeperson expresses confusion that people would think he’s a sexist piece of shit! His work is full of this shit. Male = Order = God = Civilization; Female = Chaos = Destruction = … somehow necessary but we won’t talk about this.

Maps of Meaning is intended to explain all of history, how and why people fall into ideological beliefs and go to war and commit genocide. He spent thirteen years putting this garbage together. It is loaded with pseudoscientific, mystical, debunked Jungian garbage, the sort of stuff that shows up in Hollywood movies because it’s a lot better for building a story than any actual science or medicine would be.

If Jeepers weren’t a faculty member at a real university, would any of this be taken seriously? His lectures combine a few snippets of things he actually knows something about (basic psychology) with mountains of falsehoods in fields where he’s utterly unqualified (politics, science, philosophy, literature, history). Without that PhD, what would he be?

I don’t doubt he’s an engaging teacher. He speaks with a great deal of confidence and assurance. Those who are wrong often do. He offers a universal and universalizing vision that seems to draw from every corner of human thought. The fact that he is as ignorant of all those things as the people listening to him is what makes him so compelling. Not being bound by mere truth is a great boon to passion and conviction.

It’s probably not an accident that he didn’t publish his garbage book until his move to Toronto. Tenure’s a hell of a drug.

So what about his teaching? What about his philosophy? What about his work? How did the hiring committee at U of T not see all this? Probably because Jeeperson was keeping it under wraps. Going back to the Crimson article, his teaching was engaging and full of his personal bullshit, and he let undergrads do all sorts of ridiculous projects (“Lopez notes that Peterson is willing to take on any research project, no matter how unconventional. His lab examines everything from sensitivity to loneliness to aggression among adolescents. “If you have a strange project, [the department] will immediately send you to [Peterson] because they know he’ll take them.”)

But Jeeperson’s own research? Orthodox, orthodox, orthodox. From his time as a grad student at McGill until he left Harvard, all of his publications are standard research into the psychology of alcoholism and aggression. Then he moves to U of T and both addiction and aggression almost completely disappear. The first thing he publishes after moving to Toronto is Maps of Meaning. Everything after that is talking about personality and the search for meaning, and politics. Toronto thought they were getting a good researcher and an engaging lecturer. Instead they got a passionate fruitcake.

It’s not impossible or even unusual for a researcher to be discouraged from following a controversial line of research. Grad students are frequently dissuaded from following lines of thought they find intriguing because it will make it difficult for them to get their doctorate, then to get a teaching position, then to get tenure. In a way, this is in keeping with what tenure is for. It’s there to protect faculty so they can do controversial research. However, it’s somewhat rare for their research to take quite such a dramatic turn.

What Jeepers did was dedicate himself to a single line of research, drug abuse and aggression, for more than a decade, only to abandon it on getting tenure. That’s not unprecedented, but it’s extreme. Academics who want to pursue their passion but are worried about not getting tenure normally pursue more orthodox lines of research related to their passion. For example, a sociologist who wants to study atheism in the United States will be discouraged from doing so because atheism is still largely taboo. So until they get tenure, they’ll study religion and religious beliefs.

What Jeepers did is more like when the occasional creationist stealths their way through a geology or biology doctorate. They spend years doing the work so they can get the degree, then go out and do whatever the hell they want with it. It’s kind of dishonest. Peterson wanted to be a sociologist and political scientist, a cultural anthropologist. Instead he became a psychologist.

To be continued...

Links

• Peterson’s wiki page
• Serious Inquiries Only #10: Peterson is Wrong or Lying or Both
• The Crimson article on Jeepers
• Petersons google scholar page
• Google scholar for all the clinical psych folk
• Vox article on Wansink
• The guy in Toronto who hired Jeep
• The wiki page on Jung’s collective bullshit
• Debunking Peterson’s snake thing
• PZ Myers debunking Peterson's lobster thing

SJA #26 - 3 December 2018

Just me chatting a bit about my cat, Sappho, who died last week.

SJA #25 - 26 November 2018 - Thanksgiving Break

Nothing this week! Taking a break.

SJA #24 - 19 November 2018 - Alchemy & Offense

Alchemy
I’m skipping right over the akashic record in the skeptic’s online dictionary and getting right to alchemy. The akashic record was part of the theosophical movement, a mystical gnostic thing from the 19th century. It’s a bit of spiritual mumbo jumbo about how all human experience and knowledge is contained in some sort of spiritual realm. It’s not really different from other spiritual or supernatural nonsense, except in that it honestly looks a lot like a celestial filing system.

Seriously. They … they talk about it like it’s an actual set of records. Tablets, or microfilm… Obviously they mean it metaphorically, but come on. Anyway, I haven’t seen references to the akashic records around, though maybe that’s just me, and it really fits in with any other kind of supernatural otherworldly stuff or gaining access to special knowledge through mystical means. Basically, just plain false.

So, alchemy! The popular conception of alchemy is of the attempt to turn lead into gold (and other “base” metals into other “precious” metals, but lead into gold is the popular one), and the skeptic’s dictionary falls for this one hard. They open with the mysticism, and eventually get around to mentioning an alchemist who contributed something to real knowledge (Paracelsus, in the 16th century).

Alchemy is a pseudoscience. It is a bunch of mystical nonsense about the transformation of one material into another and creating magical potions to do wondrous, impossible things. But that’s not what it was.

It’s really easy to see the connection between alchemy and chemistry. Alchemist. Chemist. Alchemy was the ancient world’s fumbling, hesitant steps toward a genuine understanding of physical materials and their chemical properties. Yes, it came bundled with a lot of nonsense; that’s what you expect. It was hampered by the fact that storing, transmitting, sharing knowledge was difficult and incredibly expensive. There were individuals scattered all over the place, working entirely alone, pursuing false leads, making discoveries, all in almost complete ignorance of what everyone else was doing.

Like everything else, the discovery of cheap paper and the development of the printing press revolutionized alchemy. It took a few hundred years, but the mystical and religious horseshit was pared away and we were left with chemistry, a solid foundation of genuine knowledge about materials and their interactions. The elixir of life, the philosopher’s stone, the four elements (and the elusive quintessence), those all stuck around in alchemy while chemistry joined the rest of the world in the light of day, doing things that actually worked.

I think it’s helpful to remember that ancient people weren’t stupid and the things they were doing … in some ways what they were doing then is exactly what we’re doing now. The ancient alchemists were early scientists, struggling, alone, in the dark. They were also early mystical dipshits doing stupid, dangerous things and fooling themselves into believing nonsense. The people haven’t really changed; some are better at deluding themselves and others have a better knack for honesty.

What’s really changed is the method, the way we talk to one another and cooperate. We all record information and share it, we talk and argue, we work together. Mysticism, religion, faith, for all it looks like a community, always boils down to solitary individuals, talking only to themselves, thinking they’re talking to something else. A scientist in the lab, no matter how lonely they look, truly is part of a global community, is never working alone.

Alchemy today is nothing but magical potions, supernatural elements, impossible dreams, and the denial of science and medicine. Once upon a time, alchemy was a difficult, mostly blind, sometimes dangerously misguided, but ultimately noble quest for greater understanding.

• Alchemy at the skeptic's online dictionary
• Alchemy at wikipedia

Offense
It’s not about offense. It was never about offense.

Riley Dennis, a phenomenal youtuber, recently had a video about people being offended, how the term is used in defense and … offense on both the right and the left. Riley speaks mostly about her personal experience being attacked by people claiming she’s a snowflake and how she tries to use different terms to better communicate what she’s really trying to say. I really recommend the video in particular and her whole channel. She’s pretty goddamn awesome.

That video inspired me to talk about this in my own way. This has been rolling around in my head for a while. I read an article, years ago, which I’ve never since been able to find. I wish I could, because it had a really great line in it that, obviously, I have to paraphrase because I can’t find the damn article. “Offense was the greatest own goal the left ever scored.” And the author was really correct there. Unfortunately, I don’t think we could do anything else. It was the only way to move the conversation forward.

Take a look at what SJWs get “offended” about vs what fundagelicals and trolls get “offended” about. I don’t know if you can hear it, but I’m putting quotes around “offended” up there, because I want to indicate that “offended” probably isn’t the right word. I also put quotes around it in that last sentence, but that’s because I was talking about my use of the word rather than actually using the word. Ah, philosophy. USE MENTION ERROR.

Anywho, what SJWs are “offended” by, in no particular order:

• people using racist dog-whistles
• people using racist slurs
• people committing racist hate crimes
• people using sexist dog-whistles
• people using sexist slurs
• people committing sexist hate crimes
• people using homophobic dog-whistles
• people using homophobic slurs
• people committing homophobic hate crimes
• people using transphobic dog-whistles
• people using transphobic slurs
• people committing transphobic hate crimes
• people using dog-whistles against religious minorities
• people using slurs against religious minorities
• people committing hate crimes against religious minorities
• people harassing, stalking, doxxing, abusing, attacking, raping, or murdering other people

Things right-wingers get “offended” by, in no particular order:

• people not saying merry christmas
• coffee cups not having merry christmas on them
• not being allowed to use the government to promote their religion
• not being allowed to use the government to stop other people practicing their religion
• being called racist
• being called homophobic
• being called transphobic
• being called anti-semitic
• being called islamophobic
• being called xenophobic
• being called sexist
• being called a harasser, abuser, doxxer, rapist
• being called jerks
• being asked to be kind
• being asked to be polite
• being asked to leave other people the fuck alone

Amanda Marcotte had an article recently and she’s written a book about how the right has gone into full-on troll mode. They don’t care about facts or truth, or even about doing the right thing or making the world a better place, even for themselves. All they care about is winning, about “owning the libs”. They’re driven by hatred and anger, by self-righteousness and fear.

They’re offended. They’re offended all the damn time. They’re offended and upset that they’re losing their power and privilege. They’re incredibly upset that they’re no longer able to get away with the things they used to get away with. Like putting their religion in a special place and using the power of government to protect it. Like not having to think, ever, about the fact that they’re white and not everyone in the world is white. Like not having to think about the fact that they’re men and not everyone is a man. They’re used to just being in the center of everything and having the world set up for them, for their assumptions, and never having to think about anything or work to fit their desires into the way the world functions.

The left isn’t offended. The left has never been offended. It’s never been about offense. It’s about oppression. On the left you have people who have had to fight for their damn lives. Queer folk, trans folk, people of color, women, the disabled, immigrants, native americans, jews and muslims and hindus and every other religious group… Every single group of people who aren’t rich, straight, cis, white, christian men. They’re not crying because you were mean, they’re fighting to get equal pay for equal work, they’re fighting for the right to stability, to not get fired or evicted by a bigot, they’re fighting so they don’t have to fear violence in the street, they’re fighting for all the things middle class white folks take for granted every day.

They’re not upset that you hurt their feelings, they’re worried you’re going to kill them.

Take a look at those lists. The left are “offended” by attacks on the basic humanity of people who don’t have power. The right are *offended* by attacks on their privilege.

It’s not about offense. It’s never been about offense. Offense is for people with privilege. Offense is for when you have a toy and you’re worried someone’s going to take it away. This is about oppression. Oppression is when you’re one step away from starvation and you’re worried someone’s going to take your food away.

In a way, talking about offense was an own goal. It let the right latch onto this narrative and call the left a bunch of spoiled children while acting like the worst brats in existence. But… it was necessary. We had to talk about offense, because it’s the only thing the privileged could understand. White people don’t get followed around in stores by suspicious clerks, straight people don’t get harassed or attacked on the street, cis people don’t live every damn day with the pain of a body that isn’t right, christians don’t have to worry about an asshole in a MAGA kicking down the door and hosing their temple down with bullets.

The privileged don’t understand oppression. Sometimes it’s possible to explain it to them, to get them to take the tiny step from “people treat you differently because you’re poor and that’s wrong” to “people treat you differently because you’re black/gay/a woman and that’s wrong”. That’s often difficult because they’ve been fed lies for so damn long about how minorities aren’t being treated worse, but actually have more privilege than WASPs. They honestly believe that black people don’t have to pay for college, that women get jobs more easily, that being Jewish means you’re rich.

White people also used to think that black schools were better than white schools in segregation, and they were upset about that. Different era, same lies, same racism. Same hatred all around.

Talking about offense is a good first step, but we need to keep going. We need to talk about oppression and why people on the left aren’t upset about being insulted, they’re afraid because bigots are attacking their humanity. And attacking someone’s humanity is followed, as we’ve been seeing more and more in Trump’s America, by attacking them with guns, knives, fists, cars. Dog-whistles and slurs lead to murder and genocide. That’s what people on the left are fighting against.

• Riley Dennis's Youtube video on being offended
• Amanda Marcotte's Salon article: Conservatives Have Gone Fully Fact Free
• Amanda Marcotte's book at amazon.com: Troll Nation