The End Is Nye!!
Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort (psychological stress) experienced by a person who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values. This discomfort is triggered by a situation in which a person's belief clashes with new evidence perceived by the person. When confronted with facts that contradict beliefs, ideals, and values, people will try to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.
source: Pexels
The introduction of today's post is straight from Wikipedia as I'd like to discuss this phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, which we're all capable of essentially, in relation to the beliefs propagated by many so called "free thinkers", "truth tellers" and "skeptics" found on the right side of the political spectrum; in modern social and political discourse, the extreme political right is prominently represented during the current uprise of right wing nationalist politicians in many modern western democracies. With these politicians, most notable Trump as the "leader of the free world", many proponents of alt-right ideology, embodied by a loosely connected far-right, white nationalist movement based in the United States, have come out of the shadows to have their voice heard. Since this is still mainly an online phenomenon, although we can see their increased confidence in public demonstrations as well, their most prominent speakers with the largest following can be found on online platforms like Reddit and YouTube.
Stefan Molineux, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk (founder and leader of Turning Point USA), Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin, now a member of UKIP also), Steven Crowder... I could go on for a while but you get the point: these "free speech fundamentalists" and many more are all in some degree articulating alt-right ideas and have gathered a large following. Watching them and listening to them is frustrating at times, because of the irrational and dangerous fears they spread through their channels.
It's telling that the hardest offenders have an introductory video on their channels that provide them with the most reasonable of reasons to speak the ugly truth they have in store for us; Crowder introduces his channel as some sort of "art" and claims his right to "artistic expression" while stressing that all art is made for an audience, for us, implying that we're the reason for his channel's existence and the ideas expressed therein, Sargon goes on a rant on how free speech is not negotiable, and TP USA goes so far as to show a clip of actual Holocaust survivors to let us all know how wrong the left is to compare the ICE camps to concentration camps. Technically none of these introductions contain any lies; they're just to warm us up to the real content with videos bearing titles beginning with words like "The Truth About..." or ending with "Debunked!", "Demolished!", "Destroyed!" or some other superlative. Yes, you've come for the truth, and these independent thinkers are eager to serve you some...
There's nothing wrong with being skeptic about anything at all; I think that's an admirable trait that needs to be encouraged and applauded. And that courtesy has to be extended to even the most radical of ideas in my opinion; even "flat Earthers", however misguided we may think they are, back up their beliefs with "evidence" we can all relate to, like not being able to see the curve in the Earth's surface. However far-fetched their belief may be, they at least try to be scientific about it, and, this is important, their ideas harm no one. But they do suffer from cognitive dissonance; they are being confronted with evidence that their idea is wrong on a daily basis, but they'll hang on to this belief, even after 1000 videos completely debunking it.
I'm only slightly generalizing when I say that these modern alt-right prophets of the digital highway are now skeptic of science itself, even though I am generalizing a lot when I scoop up all individuals I deem to qualify as "alt-right" in one homogeneous group. And some of that is based on assumptions, like connecting my observation that the political right is over-represented in the group of "flat Earthers" to the fact that much of the political right is motivated by religion, Christianity in particular. Sometimes these "obvious" correlations are simply the result of cognitive bias, a close relative to cognitive dissonance, of which I am personally also perfectly capable. But the alt-right's adversarial attitude toward science comes from this observation; almost all of their online representatives question some major scientific consensuses. One of those being human-induced climate change.
I do think it's perfectly reasonable to question the popular climate-alarmist narrative; I do so myself from time to time as I have a natural distrust (cognitive bias) for this type of media campaign, and for research that's essentially politically funded; yes, I distrust politics also, for my own reasons. But in this particular case I'm willing to make Pascal's Wager and there's no rational argument to not do so, as far as I can see. Even if there's the slightest chance that climate change is accelerated by human activities, we should act as if it's true and take whatever measure necessary to preserve the planet for posterity, not to speak of all the other living things; there's everything to gain and, if we go about it smartly, nothing to lose here.
Bill Nye VS Pseudoscience (Part One)
It's disheartening, to be honest, to see these alt-right channels propagating dangerous ideas centered around so much pseudo-science, while acting as if they are speaking truth to power. Ridiculous conspiracy theories like The Great Replacement are backed by bogus science, misleading statistics and mindless extrapolations. Stefan Molineux and Steven Crowder even have videos explaining why the genocide of the indigenous people of North America by the invading Europeans never happened, while spreading fears about an imagined "white genocide", using graphics and maps depicting a multitude of black persons numerically overwhelming a threatened white minority. They prosecute what they perceive to be Social Justice Warriors, while complaining about the "marginalization of white men by multiculturalism and feminism." These ideas have been debunked countless times already, but proof isn't even necessary for the simple understanding that people and cultures share one constant: they evolve, always, they mix, interbreed, mingle and learn from each other as they've always done. The past imagined by these misguided souls never existed in the first place; Europe has never been exclusively white, The Greeks and Romans imported their slaves and soldiers from all over the empire, as did the Ottomans and the British. Spain has been under Muslim rule for centuries. Most of the cited immigration numbers from Europe include the large majority of immigrants from other European countries, but these are all inconvenient truths for all that wish to go back to a place that exists in their minds only by spreading their irrational fears.
Also high on their target-list are the Social Justice Warriors, and they are sick and tired of the political left's incessant virtue-signaling. Again, there is a way to criticize virtue-signaling in a meaningful way, but when they start rambling about "cultural Marxism" and it all being a conspiracy by extreme leftists behind the screen influencing the media, Hollywood and universities, your critique immediately becomes meaningless. I have complained about this blatant agenda being played out in some of my favorite movies, I've written more than once about how putting this agenda before making an actual good movie has ruined many large and popular franchises, Star Wars being the most "painful" for me. Those quotes are placed deliberately, by the way. But it's not a political agenda, let alone some shadowy cultural Marxist agenda; it's a corporate agenda. To keep it short and simple; more females and minorities are cast with the singular goal of targeting as large an audience as possible, to sell as much tickets as possible, at home and abroad. It's the economy, stupid...
Recently I noticed that some of the alt-right crowd aimed their verbal arrows at Bill Nye the Science Guy, in another display of refuting science, scientists and scientific consensus. Many remember Nye from their childhood as he hosted a popular children's program about science. He recently got a new show on Netflix called Bill Nye Saves the World, and he made the alt-right angry by making an episode about genders existing on a spectrum as opposed to being strictly binary. The onslaught of articles, blogs and videos condemning Nye as a "soy boy" spineless SJW string-puppet that followed, is somewhat awe-inspiring in its sheer magnitude; the video linked above is a response to three or four alt-right "skeptics" that were part of the anti-Nye bandwagon, and it has a part two!
This ability to hold on to a belief that's so obviously wrong, that's so easily debunked and disproved, has no better example than those who believe that The End Is Nye. Sorry: that The End Is Nigh. We live in an age when belief in the apocalypse is getting stronger. We see this in our culture, movies and books, the hype surrounding the date of December 21st 2001, the supposed end-date of the Mayan calendar and a renewed popularity of the rapture in certain Christian circles. To close I'd like to share with you the origin of the term cognitive dissonance. It was coined by Leon Festinger, an American social psychologist in his 1956 book entitled When Prophecy Fails;
When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is a classic work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter published in 1956, which studied a small UFO religion in Chicago called the Seekers that believed in an imminent apocalypse and its coping mechanisms after the event did not occur. Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance can account for the psychological consequences of disconfirmed expectations. One of the first published cases of dissonance was reported in this book.
source: Wikipedia
The subjects in Festinger's study were a group of 15 - 20 people who were member of a small cult that believed the world would end on December 21st 1955; the group formed around one person who claimed to have received telepathic messages from an alien race that warned her about many things that never materialized, among which was the prophecy of an apocalyptic flood on the 21st of December. Why is that such popular a date among Apocalypticists I wonder? Anyhow, the study goes on to see what happens to the most dedicated believers and concludes that they always manage to hold on to their beliefs, even if the world is still there, staring them in the face, proving the invalidity of their convictions. It's a wonderful story, really, one that's worthwhile listening to in my opinion. And for that reason I leave you with this final video today, a podcast explaining Festinger's investigation of this remarkable little cult in great and amazing detail:
Leon Festinger and the Alien Apocalypse
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The "diversity" agendas only exist in white countries. I don't see any "diversity" agenda in hispanic countries, african countries, muslim countries, asian countries... only in white countries.
Whites are also a global minority representing less that 15% of the global population. It is funny but if a person from India moves to Canada he is suddenly a minority despite the fact that India has 1000 million people and Canada only 30 million.
It is an accepted fact that in the future whites will become a minority even in their own countries:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/us/white-americans-minority-population.html
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/21/u-s-counties-majority-nonwhite/
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/sep/03/race.world
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/02/06/trump-immigration-plan-could-keep-whites-in-u-s-majority-for-up-to-five-more-years/
It is a real tragedy watching this play right before our eyes.
You hate free speech?
It's funny how criticizing someone's free speech leads you to believe that's an indication for hating free speech; that may be part of the reason why you fail to see the onbvious fallacies in the free speech criticized in this post. Or is it simply that you hate critiques of the free speech you agree with? In that case I advise you to stop for a moment and meditate on what "free speech" is.
I love the Proud Boys.
When people start spouting Jordan Peterson as a right wing voice... Just shows how left off field their mental state is...
Are these your ideas? Or you're just cutting and pasting just enough that you ain't getting flagged for plagiarism.
Better yet you are getting hits on your post..
He may have fell for some of the fake news out there.
That's what am afraid of
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You must be tripping my friend; whatever you're smoking, I want some :-) Peterson is a self-confessed "race-realist", explaining in one interview that the difference in IQ between men and women isn't nearly as big as the difference between certain races and gave the worn-out examples of Jews having an IQ, on average, of 15 points higher than other white ethnicities. Peterson has stated in interviews that women and men can't work together because women are too "sexually provocative", complaining about women wearing high heels and make-up. He said that if he disagrees with a man, he knows where the lines of engagement are; we talk first, than we argue, call each other names, and after that it gets physical. He complains about not being able to defend against "crazy feminists" because with women he's not allowed to get physical. He justifies top-down hierarchies among humans by comparing them to lobsters... I don't even think you know who you're talking about here; Peterson is the personification of the conservative wish to go back to the 1950s... I appreciate you leaving a response here, I really do, but please; know what or who you're talking about before you covertly accuse someone of plagiarism, it doesn't come across as genuine or intelligent.
Peterson argues that "men and women don't know how to work together because they never had to before" not that they can't. He also says the race and IQ thing not as "we should be racist to lower IQ people" but just to mention that it plays in to how people live and survive. higher IQ is well established with delaying grafitication and better long term planning. If you take a look at any low IQ country it is almost inevitably a bad country full of dictatorships and corruption, opposite that is high IQ countries(where white/black/brown/asian/etc doesn't matter). There are very well off countries where the dominant skin color is non-white and they also have above average IQs and do very well.
You totally take everything out of context that Peterson says, as someone who has listened to Peterson's stuff for quite litterally over 400 to 500 hours to get a good understanding, I can tell your understanding of him is way less hours listened to. You don't have the context or the history or the facts, and you shouldn't comment on such matters.
At my work place it is dominated by women and I can't say anything back to them, I also have friends who are in the same position. I seriously can get fired if I don't agree with them.
@truthforce writing
Sorry my friend, but I didn't: Vice did. Yes, I've seen the uncut version too, that doesn't change anything though. Ask yourself: has Peterson even once said that men dress provocatively? He said the opposite if I remember, something like: men wear uniforms or suits or something, conveniently forgetting how that attracts (some) women. The interviewer didn't ask: "why do you shave and use aftershave before going to the workplace?" And even with that, I was actually on Peterson's side in that particular interview because I agree completely with how vapid some of the rules are that came into being after all the harassment scandals of late, like don't look at someone for more than 5 seconds, or put a limit on the duration of a hug...
Your (and Peterson's) arguments on the whole race-realist narrative... well, I'm not even going to answer that: If you can't see the fallacy in that line of reasoning yourself by now, I can't help you.
And to be clear: you're talking to someone who has sit through hundreds of hours of his stuff as well; I make it a point not to talk about things or persons I don't have a reasonable amount of information on. I've seen many of his lectures, ranting against a non-existent enemy called Cultural Marxism, his discussions with the atheists (the one with Dillahunty was very nice if I remember well), all his interviews with the other members of the "intellectual dark web", I could go on.
People aren't always what they say they are. When asked, for example at the very end of the Vice interview (which was edited in a dishonest manner by Vice, I agree) if he's not worried that his speech attracts so much individuals from the alt-right, his answer is: nope, not worried at all. And when asked what to say to those alt-righters he says: tell them to grow up, clean your room, stand straight and the rest of his usual shtick.
He often does get the short end of the stick with journalists; his claim to fame is his completely irrational critique of Bill C16 in Canada. In his very first interview (that I know of) on the subject though, the infamous one with that British lady, he immediately fell victim to a very dishonest way of interviewing someone. I was glad he put that straight, but that does not absolve him from the actual beliefs he spreads. I'll admit that Peterson is not high on my list, and that I, like anyone else, can learn a lot from him; he's not dumb, the opposite actually, he's one of the smartest men I know, which makes it even harder to see him spread some of the dumb things he spreads.
As for your workplace... so you can't talk back to women? You're not allowed to disagree with them? But you are allowed to disagree with men on the same level? If that's true, I'm sorry for you and hope you're able to find another place to work sooner rather than later.
But that focuses on one interview and not his whole body of work(which is a cherry picking fallacy). I am talking about his entire body of work across everything, which gives more context and explanations. If someone were to disect just a few things I did and didn't connect it to my entire body of what I have written for context, then that is cherry picking to obfuscate context. Not every interview allows for an entire lecture length talk on one specific topic, and no interview should be treated as "this is his views" unless that specific interview was on a narrow topic that was tuck to for an extended length of time(which is the opposite of the 5 minute gotcha clips MSM does) I am also not interested in what the interviewer did or didn't ask, that isn't relevant to his entire body of work. I actually don't like Peterson any more and totally stopped listening to him, just to give you perspective of where I am coming from.
I don't believe in racism, its stupid and for retards. There is no fallacy in knowing facts about certain races or religions or countries or cities or whatever. Jordan's stance on it is that people don't talk about "controversial issues like that because "people get upset", but cultural and IQ barriers exist and cause friction between groups. This isn't taught in school, far from it, we are taught we are all the same and everyone can grow up to be an astronaut and a President, which is a total lie. We aren't all the same, we are mostly the same in many ways as humans.
I should clarify with an example, two different students can sit through a class and one receives an A+ and one receives a D. I should have said, you need to sit through hundreds of hours of his lectures and talks and have also deeply understand what he is saying. You have a major disconnect on what Cultural Marxism is and how it greatly affects things. The Frankfurt school is what you need to do a deep dive on as a primer. The entirety of USA schools and many Western schools have been infected with the Frankfurt schools plans and designs, it remains to this day to churn out uninformed masses who vote for big government, as we continuously see all western countries turn into huge government(that is not by mistake).
People become radical because they can't think of or conceive of a different way, its the same reason people join cults too. Desparate and craving attention and acceptance, humans are social creatures who want to belong. Humans are very irrational as well and are easily tricked by people with charisma and smooth talking into believing anything, charisma and smooth talking is one of the main things that people see in "leaders". Whether or not those leaders are competent is another story, and whether or not they want to lead them to doom and gloom or make things worse or good for them is another story. Peterson's message isn't to lead to doom or gloom, its to get better, volunteer, clean stuff, work on improving yourself. "clean your room, stand straight" is short hand for explaining the entire thing, which would be a long lecture in that of itself.
His critique of Bill C16 is not irrational just because you claim it to be so. His critique is extremely rational and it would do exactly what he said it would do, it would infact force you to address people by their pronouns, at threat of the government getting involved. People are getting arrested for using the wrong pronouns in the UK and other countries, this quite literally is a real thing and just because you deem it "irrational" or dismiss it with a handwave(another fallacy) doesn't make it so. It is quite rational as he is a rational person who often does not use almost any emotion when speaking, this is a tell to me that you let slip in proving you didn't really listen to hundreds of hours of Peterson. Peterson is almost robotic in every lecture or speech, irrational is not a synonym of this person. Don't lie to me, please. You vaguely say he spreads dumb things, which I am not sure what you are referring to. Type more clearly and define what your issue is with something he says.
I can't disagree with the women in my work place. If I do I risk getting in trouble and them starting a clique about me like they do to others that they frequently do out in the open. They are nasty and its like 20 different women who all participate in it. Its childish and immature nonsense that they do. I can disagree with men at my level or lower or higher and I have never run into any issues in the corporate world I work in. It wouldn't matter what job I go to, its been the same every job I had with that.
Wow... Thanks for putting so much work in responding @truthforce. Even though I'm going to disagree with almost everything you say, I really appreciate the effort and sincerity you display here; thank you :-)
Bill C16 is an amendment to a long existing Canadian Human Rights Act, and pronouns are mentioned nowhere in it. I don't know on what planet you live, but on mine a simple google search shows me that there have been 0 arrests in Canada for using the wrong pronoun since the bill was passed. All it did was add gender preference and gender expression to a long list of protected groups like sex, race, religion, age and sexual orientation. It means you're not allowed to discriminate against those groups or incite hate or violence against them. Are people getting arrested for discrimination of various groups? Sure. Are many of these cases shady and sometimes difficult to gauge? Most certainly. Will there always be crackpots who will abuse this to their advantage? Of course. Does that mean you can ever be arrested for just using the wrong pronoun? If you listen too much to Peterson you might believe that, yes. Does that make it true though? Using another country as an example for excusing Peterson's gross exaggeration and fear-mongering when talking about it, well, you know what follows. And even then; when you look into these cases you'll see 9 out of 10 times that it's not the misgendering itself, but doing it deliberately, repeatedly and / or publicly, which brings us into the realm of discrimination and hate-speech for which most western civilized countries have had legislation a long long time. Peterson is irrational. Don't lie to me.
Or maybe he's not irrational, in which case he's a brand, a mini-one-man-industry, with something to sell, and he's selling it to a young, vulnerable, cis, white, male and economically disenfranchised audience. And he's selling them poison comrade. Me saying that he's just irrational, that's he's merely incapable of seeing Cultural Marxism for the mirage that it is, a mirage originally invented by the Nazis for that matter, is me being charitable. Please don't lecture me on the Frankfurt Schule; I know that it is real, but I also know that they, Habermas, Adorno and others, were even greater adversaries of the nihilism Peterson proclaims to detest.
I'm very interested to learn in which country you live. I'm curious to see the legislation that prevents you from disagreeing with the women in your workplace; must be some totalitarian regime you live under. If you can show me that legislation, I promise I'll let it go. But until then I thinks it's a reasonable question, especially seeing that you apparently feel someone must know Peterson's "entire body of work" to be able, or allowed to form an opinion on that very public figure. If there's no such legislation, but you still genuinely feel you can not disagree with women in the workplace, I'd like to know if this goes for all disagreements or just certain specific disagreements. The way you describe it though, I doubt you'll be able to produce any legislation of the sort; you make it sound as if you're suffering from some sort of social pressure, maybe systemic even, since you claim it doesn't matter what job you take or where... Hmmm... Where have I heard people complaining about this kind of suppression before..? I hope you can see the irony here, and how you're illustrating the way certain males have come to see themselves as a suppressed minority, which is silly of course.
Would you like me to give you an exhaustive list of people who's "entire body of work" I'm not familiar with, yet dare to criticize? Yes, I've seen many hours of Peterson't lectures and interviews. But when he agrees to call one of his public speeches "Identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege," I know pretty much where he's coming from, and where his hardcore alt-right white nationalist following comes from (I'm not saying that's the entirety of his following). He provides them with yet another narrative that shows them they've been right all along, he provides them with a method behind their madness, as do Molyneux, Crowder, Harris, Akkad, and I could go on, unfortunately. And we will politely disagree on all these things, or most of them. Peterson and robotic? Do you know some other Jordan B. Peterson I'm not familiar with? I see him get quite emotional, crying even, on many occasions. He has a great sense of humor as well and the thing he constantly does with his hands and fingers when he really gets to the heart of what he perceives to be the truth of some topic, I think it's endearing. I do like Peterson the man on occasion and not everything he says is nonsense but that's not important here.
What's important is that Peterson is a mouthpiece for a certain group of white males by reacting to a political climate in which these white men never had a voice of their own, were never treated as a "protected" group like women, immigrants, LGBTQ people and so on, roughly the groups protected by that infamous C16 facade, Peterson's ultimate claim to online fame. Seeing yet another group being added to this special list was too much for them, and all that is perfectly understandable because most of them were screwed by politics and the economy just as hard as anyone else. And who came to THEIR rescue, they wondered... Certainly not Obama or, God help us, yet another Clinton. No, it's Peterson, Crowder and Trump. By the way; Trump IS living, walking, trying to talk sense proof that anyone can grow up to be president. They are the ones denying the existence of a Patriarchy, white and / or male privilege and so on. They are the ones to say: "the law applies equally to anyone" when confronted with highly skewed racial distribution of prison-populations. If you believe that, if you keep denying, like Peterson does, that these systemically induced differences in outcome exist, then what IS the difference? Well, then it must be that people of color are just more likely to be criminals. That's Jordan's entire body of work, right there. He, like all his "intellectual dark web" peers, never say it, it's just implied in their rhetoric. That's what you and Peterson deem to be "interesting topics of discussion and investigation" that people on the left shy away from, and what attracts their alt-right followers and fanboys. And you should know that if you're even passingly familiar with his "body of work." There is no spoon. There's only you. There is no white privilege. There's only you. And if you don't make it, you, and only you are responsible for straightening your back and clean your room. That's his body of work, and he's even too blind to see how that persistent message, which is nothing new by the way, contributes to the nihilistic tendencies he so vehemently despises.
I'll leave it here for now, so you have the last word here. But there will be future posts by me about this and other public intellectuals. Even if I haven't read any of their books ;-)
Hmmmm you're sounding like that channel 9 interviewer. Putting words in his mouth. He has never said men and women can't work together. You are cutting up while sentences to make me once from his interviews.
I think you need to have a serious look in the mirror man. Picking and choosing doesn't suit what you are spouting.
If you keep it up only shit comes out. This is me trying to say it nicely.
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I love Alex Jones.