The Professor of Piffle

Jordan Peterson is a huckster and charlatan and if you take him as a serious scholar you should not be taken seriously. He's a slicker, more credentialied Molyneux, and real scholars know that he is misrepresenting those he disagrees with and offering a one-sided take on the issues he's discussing.

To those libertarians, young and old, who are fans, you are hitching yourself to a doomed train. We can and should do much better than this nonsense. Find and follow real scholars who treat the left the way you'd want the left to treat you. Spit out this poison before it destroys you and and the case for liberty. Seriously.

"What he is not, however, is the author of any lasting work of scholarship, the originator of any important idea, or a public intellectual of any scientific credibility or moral seriousness. Peterson’s sole discovery is that “postmodernism” can be usefully exploited alongside the more familiar, established populist scare tactics....

As a description of what the “postmodern” thinkers actually wrote, it is very flawed. If all of Derrida’s and Foucault’s writing can be made to support one sweeping claim, it is not that interpretation is potentially infinite and therefore meaningless. It is that interpretation must be socially and historically contextualized in order to become meaningful. Much art that we now deem canonical—Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, for instance—would have struck nineteenth-century art patrons as incomprehensible garbage. The point is simply that artistic values are not universal but produced by historically situated communities of people.

Let’s be clear: Peterson doesn’t understand the major thinkers in the “postmodern” tradition who he libels for money. His grotesque caricature and slander of the humanities is very different from what actually happens in humanities classrooms."