this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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I just want to say that if you are/were a young man, and found some value in some of what this guy was saying to you...thats's OK. Don't feel bad, or embarrassed or mad at yourself or whatever. We are all learning all the time, and doubly so when we're young. Never think that you can't take what is useful and reject what isn't. Fuck knows there is plenty to reject about what this dude says!
Something something broken clocks.
"Clean your room, bucko" is advice many people's moms tried to give them but too many of them had to hear it from a cryptofascist crank LARPing as the world's father figure before they listened to it.
I get it. I'm actually thinking of a particular friend of mine. He lost his father at 14, and his mom isn't the greatest parent. He told me Peterson was kind of exactly what he needed at a tough time in his life. Fortunately, he's always been a smart kid, and saw through the toxic shit. Five years later and he's a queer communist! I guess I'm just saying that if you really needed to hear "clean your room" from a father figure, and it helped you... don't feel bad that Peterson was the guy who filled that role at the time. Obviously I'm speaking to people who have grown to see him differently now.
I don't know if it's a new trend or something, but lots of people have something interesting to say, and say lots of hogwash besides and everyone gobbles it all up including the hogwash. You don't have to go all in when reading someone's work. For example, I read Freud and it was quite interesting. Most of it was horseshit (although historically interesting), but he still made the point that we don't do all that we do consciously , which was hugely important.
Ideas and memes (in the original sense) are there to be examined and weighed against one another, not followed blindly.
So Petersen (I'm not really sure who that is), why not, he might have some salient points, even though he seems to be a controversial figure, apparently rightly so.