#1360

he is literally used by fascists as a part of indoctrination thouhg

1 Like
#1361

^this, one-stop dunk shop please (I’m a busy man)

1 Like
#1362

Yeah, whilst I don’t think he’s fascist I think he occupies a space which is easily co-opted by fascists. You see it basically every time he posts something on twitter.

#1363

He just reminds me of that one of your mums old school friend you see at Christmas and he’s a Thatcherite and doesn’t understand anything and ruins the mood by shouting over everyone about how young people should walk into a job for life like he did. except for some reason this guy gets interviewed for news sites.

1 Like
#1364

pogroms on mainland europe are making a comeback guys!

#1367

One was already started:

If you fancied posting some stuff in there that’d be much appreciated. The stuff you post in the Feminism thread is/was always good.

#1370

I would like to hear what you guys consider fascism too. If we categorise the actions of the right of centre UK government under this label, I’d like to know why it’s such a stretch for this guy?

I suppose it’s because whilst his assertions are often dubious, definitely sexist and ridden with numerous inaccuracies, he doesn’t appear to discourage dissent or the right to question his ideas nor does he appear advocate removing the rights of others.

I think the problem with him is that he creates the space for people who do think like this to emerge.

1 Like
#1372

i think the problem is that people still use a model of fascism that’s more suited to describing movements from the first half of the 20th century, without accounting for how the modern world has enabled it to evolve.

it’s like the US supreme court definition of pornography, in that i know it when i see it.

#1375

If this is about Bill C-16 I could see what you mean but I genuinely think he misrepresented it for other reasons specifically to make it an issue of freedom of speech by denying what it actually was.

#1378

No idea who this Peterson guy is but anyone who thinks others, by dint of their gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexual preference, religious practice or social & economic circumstance is of less worth, ie less than human, is a Fascist

Any political, intellectual or social structures that uphold these types of hierarchies are Fascism in action

14 Likes
#1379

I’ve always found Umberto Eco’s rules for fascism very helpful in arguments and stuff, clear and definitely make very good sense (though I would also add that fascism typically also carries out the transfer of capital to the hands of a tiny few and uses Eco’s rules as a cover). I think yr man Peterson ticks a fair few of the boxes, certainly.

#1381

well i’d say that a state like the US has never really been a democracy in the true sense anyway, but a lot of the things we associate with america are actually fascist to some degree. pledge of allegiance in class, deference to the troops and police, militarism, imperialism.

i guess trump isn’t a fascist going by the traditional model. there’s no cult of personality, totalitarian system, officially designated concentration camps, ethnic purges, imperial wars of conquest, blackshirt militias, etc.

except all that shit is actually there, was there before him in fact, and he’s just amplified it all. they just call it something else to make it more palatable to the majority of the population. concentration camp = prisons, migrant detention facilities.
black shirt gangs = ICE, police, 3%ers.
totalitarian system: NSA, FBI, surveillance state.
ethnic cleansing = deportation, police killings, etc etc.
then just the horrifying collusion between capital and the state

is it classically fascist? i guess there’s no conscious mass movement of this kind in america but the state, the education system, the culture and the media undeniably have intensely fascistic characteristics imo. i mean like there is a reason why jordan peterson has a best selling book, in that as you say he is a fascist and a huge number of people have no problem with that.

it’s a very slow shift which is why i’m typing essays.

#1382

Yeah that was the idea, as you say upthread there’s lots of calling things fascist without explaining or perhaps understanding what fascism properly is, so I thought some rules that do just that might be of interest to some people is all. Would also argue that they show that the UK/US are pretty far gone by now, but I imagine most people in the thread already know that too!

1 Like
#1383

i think it’s instructive to see how the state evolves to meet the threat of democracy too, without officially going fash (not challenging eco, i’m just some internet dipshit, but i’m saying we should take his list as a blueprint and then add and expand where appropriate)

the neoliberal “democracy” doesn’t even need to go overtly fash. like the tories have done the most horrific shit and they have a cast-iron defence no totalitarian regime would ever have: “you voted for us”. and in fact this is what they’ve been parroting about the brexit result ever since it happened.

man i’m riffing tonight.

1 Like
#1385

This is a good point! Though perhaps they’ve also moved into other methods of control and manipulation. Things like the gradual but continual dragging of political discourse and what is/isn’t publicly acceptable so far to the right that people voted for them, but only because we have a society where they’ve managed to present themselves as the only acceptable option, if that makes sense? Though of course people voted for the Nazis so maybe it’s not so new after all. And voter suppression is a big and old issue too, particularly in the US.

What’s definitely new, or at least a major expansion of past propaganda etc is stuff like social media, which lets us willingly give them all of our data, which obviously they can manipulate to make themselves even stronger. Cambridge Analytica, the Trump campaign, things I’m sure you must know already :slight_smile: Social media and new technologies also act as crazy new methods of social control which we semi-willingly enter into, but that’s an extension of what they’ve done to public discourse wherein we regulate ourselves/make ourselves stupider and less questioning like some crazy panopticon.

All of these things happen in a democracy, but I’m not too sure they’re particularly open or democratic, rather just ways to limit and get around it. There are lots of great books on all these things I can recommend, I’m not sure I’m very good at explaining them and this rambling mess of a post is too long already…

And I’m just an internet dipshit too but of course we have to adapt things to meet each case!

1 Like
#1386

In the NYT article posted last month he advocates for enforced fucking monogamy. So he’s clearly more than happy to strip rights from women.

'Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners, Mr. Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married.

“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end.’

#1387

Seriously, though. Everything points to this guy being a monumental douche. Can anyone wanting to go round in circles chatting about him please bugger off into another thread to do it and let this thread get back to being what it was?

Thanks.

(And that’s absolutely no reflection on you, @anon82218317 - no idea what the real backstory to the merge was or why you were cited.)

4 Likes
#1388

Not actually true that last bit

#1390

It was in another thread before Theo completely fucked it

#1391

I believe it’s because of this exchange, which myself and others read literally as a request for it to be shut down:

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In hindsight I now know you meant everyone should just think more critically about how much ‘airtime’ we give someone like JP in his own thread, but many of us saw it as an actual request.