(05-24-2019, 04:23 PM)rva_jeremy Wrote: This essay best explains why some find Peterson unpalatable. In short, he's an obscurantist who delights in saying a lot without really ever delivering any added insight. In this way he often comes out on top in conversations, not because he convinces the other party or anybody else, but because he never allows himself to be pinned down, and so his points can never really be challenged. Right wingers typically gravitate to this approach to ideas because it allows one to sneak in all sorts of untestable assumptions about reality that more or less map to "tradition". I personally find myself upset at the way he spins Jungian philosophy in pretty silly and unnuanced ways; as a leftist, it's hard enough to defend Jung from legitimate critiques of his fascist period.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/t...we-deserve
thank you for the link - excellent analysis of Peterson waffle
having done a university degree I recognise his using faux 'academic' spiel to obfuscate - not clarify meaning .
He was on a National broadcaster televised panel here in AU with intellectuals, scientists, politicians, students, etc of varying beliefs, ideas, affiliations, but all were either disconcerted, bemused, bored, or astonished fairly soon into the 'debate' at his inability to be concise and interactively flexible (he spoke in a sort of rote droning paternalistic 'give me half an hour to explain myself' for each short (time constraint) allocated reply) - he was very 'ponderous'; basically was unaware it wasn't possible to speak in a self indulgent 'holding court' manner - given there were 5 other panellists and a live studio audience. He spoke in such a self conscious, self aggrandising way it was embarrassing - panel members and audience alike, were either huh? 'who is this guy?'...or if they knew of him... still astonished at his monotonous pomposity. He rarely interacted with others - more gave replies that were spiels on his pet theories/beliefs - there was no open engaging of ideas... he spoke with a fixity, a closed circuit of ideas - a self referring absolutist meaning of 'truth'. It was very embarrassing - he just didn't realise it; because he was in Australia not Canada/USA - we haven't swallowed his 'pill' - but he's so fixated on the certainty of his own 'brilliance' - he was (naturally) blind to that.