Probably

If you think Jordan Peterson is really right wing, then you’ve not really read or listened to him that much. There’s a difference between being conservative about some issues and being right wing

Peoples definition of right wing today is a strange one, basically anyone who doesn’t completely tow the line for the extreme far left loonies is now right wing.

Ha, what a load of bollocks. 

Peterson isn't just right-wing; he's a far-right nutjob who manages to wrap up his beliefs in the kind of faux-intellectualism that impresses the most stupid people on Earth. He stops short of saying anything that might give the game away, though - instead, he'll just wonder things like: "IQ is the best way of tracking social worth and intelligence, and according to the military, masses of people just aren't useful to society because of that. So, what do you do about that? Hmm. I don't know. That's a tough one. I don't have the answers, I'm just asking questions". Never mind that every chain in that logical link is utter bollocks, or that it's just a lazy way of propping up right-wing eugenics; hey, he's just asking questions, man! He didn't even say anything right-wing, then!

He's a hack who tried to "debunk" climate models while not understanding the difference between climate and weather. He's a creep who claimed that women who wear make-up in the work-place are hypocrites if they don't also want to not be sexually harassed. He's a religious fantasist who thinks God created "the strong Masculine" in the form of the national flag and the trains that run on time to control the "Chaotic Feminine", and if you can't see the right-wing dog-whistles screeching at you there, then perhaps you're not as centrist as you think. He has, at various times, claimed to be "an evolutionary biologist" and a "neuroscientist", despite neither being slightly true. 

But he's clever enough to know that saying the stupid things out loud isn't great, so he'll wrap them up with bland truisms - "some hierarchies are beneficial and needed, you can't deny that", "men have a naturally higher sex-drive in most instances", "law is there to have a disciplinary effect", "some people might tell you that everyone is the same, but they're not!" etc - to make it all seem obvious and reasonable. If someone tries to pin any actual suggestion of policy on him, though, any concrete real-world suggestion: hey, you're taking him out-of-context! All he said is that hierarchies are natural, you loony-left extremist! Not everyone is the same is what he said!

Either that, or he'll dazzle his audience with hilarious brain-rot like this:

- “Meaning is manifestation of the divine individual adaptive path”.
- “Meaning is the balance between the chaos of transformation and the possibility/discipline of pristine order”.
- “Meaning is an expression of the instinct that guides us out into the unknown so that we can conquer it”.
- “Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose”.
- “Meaning means implication for behavioural output”.
- “Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure". 

Nothing concrete, nothing real, just a political astrologist feeding fuel into his idiot-machine. And if you don't think any of this wander-right-up-to-extremism-and-then-pussy-out routine isn't having an effect, here's some of the comments from Peterson's audience on a video where he talks about hitting women without ever outright saying that it's okay to hit women, but instead discusses the social para-meters of the philosophy of the feminine chaos of the archetype of the violence of the dialectic relationship between the dragon of chaos and the blah-blah:

- My grandmother once told me “Never hit a women, but you can sure as hell hit her back”. (660 thumbs-up)
- I would never hit a lady. An aggressive bitch is another question... (576 thumbs-up)
- I believe women deserve rights…. and lefts!!! (550 thumbs up)

Weird, huh?

Strange that such a reasonable, non-right-wing guy would say this stuff and attract comments like that.

The truth is that he has nothing of any worth to say that you couldn't boil down to same conservative position that has been roundly defeated by progress for all of human history: "All the progression we've done to this point is wonderful and I support it, but going any further is chaos and terrible and loony-extreme nonsense. All the issues we have are just unfortunate-but-unavoidable consequences of the current, correct version of the world." It appeals to people who grew up with no encouragement to think critically about their place in our society, but an assumption that things were working more-or-less as they should be, and that they themselves were liberal and progressive within it; as more of that assumed truth is revealed to be wrong, as their conservative tendencies on many things are revealed, the sad truth is that they would rather believe in a "Marxist cultural" take-over than do even the slightest scrap of self-critique about the social POV that they assumed was natural. 

FFS…We REALLY need some new album news

Serious question — when did Russell Brand supposedly become right-wing?

I’ve watched quite a bit of Peterson. And I like much of what he has to say. And I’ve never heard him spout much of what you’ve claimed here. That is not to say your claims are incorrect. Not at all.

Okay.

I once found myself within touching distance of Russell Brand’s partially exposed bum.

I didn’t though.

X

Scroll up, and you will see me agreeing that Russell is not to be criticised for being right-wing. I said he is to be criticised for being another click-chasing "free-thinker" who has more fears about his own waning relevancy than he does about the impact of amplifying those who think that women can't wear make-up without being hypocritical if they don't want to be sexually harassed at work. That's valid; he is free to use his platform for that debate if he chooses, we are free to dislike him for it.

I don't know how many times I can clarify that I agree that it's inaccurate to characterise Russell as right-wing, but that it's valid to dislike him for amplifying some of the most toxic strains of the modern-right on his platform. 

This is the bottom line: even if you have six reasonable people on a big platform successfully arguing against one man who thinks that women shouldn't wear make-up if they don't want to be sexually-harassed, then the social effect is not to defeat the one man, but to normalise his views as a benign "topic of discussion", just "differing beliefs", an amoral wall where we should "respect both sides". And it's not. It's a clear moral line; one that makes it reasonable to dislike those who platform the people who cross it. I'll say it again, because it bears repeating: we are not here to open our minds so wide that our brains fall out. I'm not saying Russell should be banned ("cancelled", for those who get an erection over buzz-words), but explaining to you why many people have gone off Russell in this whole "brave, all-sides, free-thinker" phase. It's valid, even if you don't agree. 

I mentioned Andrew Tate, who is another far-right lunatic and a perfect case-study in how much these people derive power by the willingness of others to platform them. Since various social medias decided they didn't want Tate on their apps, (cancel culture!!) his relevance has plummeted, and he's now appearing in that graveyard of both American and British culture, the long-form interview with Piers Morgan. In a way, I admire the likes of Tate and Ben Shapiro, because at least they have the courage to display themselves in full view; in a sense, they're the Slitheen that lurks behind the salt-and-pepper-beard and intellectual-word-salads of Peterson. More and more, though, he finds himself unzipping the skin to reveal the goo beneath...



On a list of conversations I'm not eager to have, "How can we say if correlating lip stick use to sexual-assault-at-work crosses a moral line or not?" has to be down there with ranking the S-Club-Seven albums; in fact, that's my point. Platforming the Petersons of the world makes wonderful people like us (although I'm slightly superior on accounts of my haircut), have to have these ridiculous conversations about moral lines that should be clear to anyone who doesn't reckon Harvey Weinstein was a misunderstood bloke. Hearing the views of these people is an unfortunate necessity, platforming them is quite another. I'm not too arsed if you don't have a problem with it, but it's understandable why others do.