“Communism bad”
“Why?”
200 year old tropes so ancient they were debunked by Marx himself
Of course, you go through the motions of explaining the most basic political concepts that could be grasped by skimming the cliff notes for literally any Marxist works
“Friedrich Engels? Is he like the president of Germany or something?”
It’s like a kindergartener trying to teach you calculus.
It worked for
who claims to have studied communism for over 20 years and by study he meant be really mad at the Manifesto.
Which he didn’t actually read until circa 2020.
I believe he said he read it once in his earlier days.
(Maybe his youth? I feel like it was in his livestream where he responded to a question asking what he’s doing to prepare for the debate and he told on himself because he said “well, there’s a lot you can do in 24 hours” and proceeded to say that he’s going to do a “close re-reading” of the manifesto, which he reported to have read many years prior, but I could be getting confused here.)
Bruh.
You don’t read The Communist Manifesto because you’re a fraud and a charlatan.
I don’t read The Communist Manifesto because it’s a rushed pamphlet drafted with the intent to inform the demands of the European masses during the revolutions of 1848 and as such it holds very little value as theory.
We are not the same.
It’s clear he didn’t particularly understand it either. He took the manifesto as a call to make paradise on Earth. His opening statement was saying that paradise cannot exist on earth, because living as a human means existing within brutal, uncaring nature.
He brought up that the manifesto doesn’t mention nature like this, which is true, it’s a political manifesto for organizing factory workers. If he had read Capital he’d know Marx defines labor as transformation of natural resources through human ingenuity.
I don’t think Peterson ever cared about history or theory as much as vibes. I don’t think he even regards facts as important. He likes little anecdotes that signal things with metaphorical truths.
100% agree.
I don’t think he actually read the whole Manifesto through tbh and if he did, he was too busy coming up with his own personal objections to each sentence that he was clearly unable to see the forest for the trees.
I’m not saying that he would have come out of the reading as a freshly-minted Marxist but he was really grandiose and slimy about his refuting of the communist manifesto in a way that was obvious he thought he had this list of epic gotchas but it just showed that he didn’t go into reading it with the intent of understanding it or refuting it from its own internal logic.
I’d tolerate his approach to the manifesto better if he made asides to how it didn’t address this or that issue before proceeding to critique the actual content and arguments of the manifesto itself but to expect that someone would provide an account of human nature in a 30 page pamphlet while expounding upon their entire political philosophy is, frankly, ridiculous (and even moreso when you’re expecting Marx of all people to do that.)
Peterson is such a pseud.
I bring this up a lot and I’m sorry if people here have to read it over and over, but I’m always gonna bring it up since it’s central to who Peterson is. During that debate Zizek asked Peterson to specifically name any alleged Marxist professors. Peterson had no names, probably because he wanted to say Foucault or Marcuse, guys who’ve been dead for decades. Zizek offered the name David Harvey, the British scholar who’s an expert on Marx’s Capital. Peterson didn’t recognize the name.
I still can’t believe that this wasn’t the big “Emperor has no clothes” moment that, by rights, it should have been to the Peterson fanboys.
It was super funny how before the debate Jorp was all
”I’ve studied communism”, but during the debate he was more like 
”Oh shit oh fuck I haven’t done the reading and the teacher’s asking me questions”
I think the manifesto is based and filled with bangers tbh
Fair.
I’m happy to take your word for it. I watched that debate with Zizek when it came out and tbh I was a mixture of confused and infuriated. Very happy to accept I missed his exact point. I agree with your other comment below, too: whenever he read it, he didn’t understand it.
I’d take it with a healthy dose of skepticism.
I did write “he said” intentionally there because he’s also the guy who said he read 200 books on climate change in two years when he was advising some CEO who was on a UN committee on climate change and the only way Peterson has read books on climate change is if their titles are something like “Climate Change: What The Government Doesn’t Want You To Know” and “The Great Climate Hoax”. But if you’re trying to become educated about climate change then you shouldn’t be reading books anyway, you need to be reading scientific articles instead. Of course there’s no way that you could ever disprove his claim and he’d never appear in front of a camera opposite a person who is an actual climate scientist because he knows that he’d get called out for his towering ignorance on the subject.
Suffice it to say that the guy’s full of shit and you have my full support if you choose not to believe what he says.
Lol I saw the start of a breakdown of his bullshit video. It takes clips from multiple interviews, ‘speeches’, etc. One of the early themes is his climate change work. In different clips he says completely opposite things. An advisor in one. A panelist in another. Etc, etc. He’s an unabashed bullshit artist. The real problem is what it means for the modern ‘intelligentsia’ if he could blend in for so long (not sure how many people in the academy believe him nowadays but I bet there are some; I saw his 12 Rules listed as a course text, for example, in a shocked Twitter screenshot).
Western “communism studies” invariably consists of undergrad classes taught by either cold warrior professors or miserable academics, and the “study” consists entirely of regurgitating passages from whatever pseudointellectual anticommunist steaming drivel Anne Applebaum shat out this year.
I think he’s read Solzhenitsyn too haha
I’ve read the Gulag Archipelago that Peterson recommends.
It’s the most propaganda ridden book I’ve read about the USSR, so many factual inaccuracies and lies.
Dude’s own ex wife said in an interview that it’s all nonsense
“It’s not true, but it basically is true because that’s how I already felt about gommunism vuvulzula gorillion dead!”
This is gonna sound like it’s a bit and that I’m just parodying Peterson’s way of speaking in vague hand-wavey style but I promise you that it’s not and I’m legitimately making an argument here…
To Peterson, the historicity of The Gulag Archipelago is irrelevant to him because it represents a higher order, metaphorical truth.
When you grasp this about what is important to Peterson’s approach to truth then it becomes very obvious that he plays fast and loose with facts because he’s not concerned with mundane truths that are the domain of historians and scientists, in fact he holds them in contempt especially when they run counter to his understanding, because he sees his purpose in uncovering and elucidating the metaphorical truths that structure our existence.
If this sounds like a bunch of nonsense woo then you’re right. If this sounds like the attitude of an aspiring prophet then you’re right.
But if you want to really understand how Peterson’s brain works and why his avid followers seem largely immune to facts then this is the mentality that you need to wrap your head around. Pretty much everything that Peterson does is a sort of exegesis on this higher order, metaphorical truth that he’s both attempting to understand himself while attempting to articulate it to his audience at the same time.
There’s a quote from him that really illuminates his belief about his “mission”. I’ll try to find it and if I do I’ll edit it into this comment.
I know he’d argue that. He’s on a very special personalized level of solipsism with The Secret characteristics.
And to add on to your comment, I think Solzhenitsyn himself sort of takes this approach in writing. I’ve heard Gulag Archipeligo described as “campfire stories about the gulags”, and I think that’s very apt. It’s not factual information, it’s just him gathering stories he hears from others. Whether or not those stories are true isn’t relevant. Solzhenitsyn saw it as his mission to bring down the USSR (and replace it with some Christo-fascist authoritarian state) and whatever stories he needed to pull out of his ass to make that happen was fine by him.
I’m totally picking up what you’re putting down here, yeah these people love subjectivr metaphorical truths, it gives them a spiritual charge. Its like they live in a world of pure signifiers, like they exist in a fog of metaphor and allegory and symbolism (they fuckin love their numerology too). It’s like they’re hoping to reach some kind of existential truth by tunneling through nonsense. It’s ironic that theyre the ones who bang on and on about “facts and logic” because they have neither. They use the concepts as ritual fetishes, invoke their strange bile and wave around an ornate little doll called Facts and Logic. They present themselves as unassailable, because they have the doll on their side, but as soon as you assail them it crumples.
deleted by creator
“Well the fact that I could believe it really says something about society”
“He could have been simply brave for speaking truth to power, but instead he was braver for speaking untruth for power”
I’m aware.
Even if you tell libs/conservatives that, they just ignore it and say that her interview is just propaganda. Unreal.
Unfalsifiable orthodoxy
@ParentiBot@lemmygrad.ml
The quote
– Michael Parenti, Blackshirts And Reds
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the admins of this instance if you have any questions or concerns.
Oh you can do that on Hexbear? Tight.
It responds to mentions on any instance, but it only looks for the trigger words on lemmygrad.
I’m assuming that you didn’t literally work for
, but (from what I can tell) this is exactly what he means by “studied communism” also: he collects the propaganda artwork and gets mad at Marx as he’s concocted him in his head.
I’ve had classmates, roommates, and faculty peers that were devotees of