A wizard, wanted

Step 1: don't do meth!

Dr. Jordan Peterson has an important message for all of us.

 How To Change the World Properly

This was triggered in part by something I read recently by Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan Haidt is the professor of ethical leadership at the NYU Stern School of Business, and he’s been a very astute commentator recently on some of the political battles that have been going on in the social sciences. He has noted, for example, that there is very little political diversity in the views of social scientists, and perhaps even less on the part of people in the humanities. Haidt recently wrote something where he claimed that universities have to decide between social justice and truth. And on the side of truth he puts a philosopher named John Stuart Mill, an English philosopher, who said:

“He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”

And then Haidt juxtaposes John Stuart Mill with Karl Marx, who said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Haidt considers Marx the patron saint of Social Justice University, which is oriented around changing the world in part by overthrowing power structures and privilege. It sees political diversity as an obstacle to action. Mill, on the other hand, according to Haidt, is the patron saint of what he calls Truth U, which sees truth as a process in which flawed individuals challenge each other’s biased and incomplete reasoning, and in the process all become smarter.

Haidt points out that Truth University dies when it becomes intellectually uniform or politically orthodox. This is in part my call, along with Jonathan Haid, for young people to join Truth University.

But there’s a problem, and that is that young people want to change the world. That’s part of what Piaget, the developmental psychologist, called the “Messianic stage,” and there’s some real utility in that. We’re social creatures, and as we construct ourselves and formulate ourselves and bring our own character into being, predicated on our biological platform or biological being, we also simultaneously have to integrate, adjust to, and negotiate with society, which sometimes needs to be changed. The structure of society has to be preserved, but it has to be updated and improved as it moves forward.

Note that John Stuart Mill, who Jordan Peterson asserts is "on the side of truth" is also the original SJW. Do you still seriously doubt that this occult-obsessed addict is a gatekeeping snake?

“Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens should be made in the utmost degree to converge.”
 —John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, 1861

The Wittgenstein hoax

As Miles Mathis observes, this intellectual fraud (PDF link) is even more a priori obvious than the Einstein fiction.

They never tell you in school the interesting or important things about historical figures, but I will. Some of you may know I majored in philosophy and Latin.  I sat in on a graduate-level course on Wittgenstein my senior year, though I found it very tiresome.  I took it only because we had a Wittgenstein specialist in our department, and he was highly regarded—though I don't remember by whom.  Not by me.  We also covered Russell in another class, though briefly.  I always had a sneaking feeling he was big phony, and of course it turns out I was right.  However, at the time I would never have thought to connect either of these guys to the rising Modern art movements of their time, or to Modernism at all.  That is because of the way they are taught—the way everything is taught in college.

IN ISOLATION.

In fact, I wouldn't now say that Wittgenstein and Russell were taught in college; rather, they were promoted.  We were supposed to believe they were important for some reason, though no one ever really got around to saying why.  All the evidence was to the contrary, so everything had to be spun hard.  I now suspect that those promoting them must have been related to them somehow, though I was in Texas.  I can't figure out why else anyone would promote these guys, or find them fascinating enough to study.

To start with, both of them come from fantastic wealth.  Wittgenstein's father was one the wealthiest men in Europe. Karl Wittgenstein was an industrial tycoon who had a monopoly on Austria's steel cartel, and he was a friend of Andrew Carnegie.  He owned 13 mansions in Vienna alone.  But we are supposed to believe his son's fame had nothing to do with that.  It also had nothing to do with being promoted by his professor Russell, a future Earl, who was also from one of the wealthiest families in Europe.

You will say I seem to have lost my usual cheery demeanor, along with my usual levels of pity and sympathy, which is true.  These people will do it to you.  I think you see why I am disgusted by Wittgenstein. It isn't his Jewishness or homosexuality.   It is that he is such an obvious fraud, promoted only because of his money and background.  It is that his bio is such a pathetic lie.  It is that he beat up children and called country people worms and animals.  It is that he used his positions to prey on young men.  It is that he continues to be promoted by his cousins, although they must know all this.  It makes me wish the corona hoax will bankrupt all the universities, and that students will refuse to return to them in the fall, to pay exorbitant amounts to be lectured to online by a series of charlatans, liars, and monsters. 

Keep in mind that the guy wrote one book, one article, and one book review in his entire life. He was too lazy to even bother trying to make the charade look convincing. And that one book was a mere 75 pages of sophistics that consist of seven propositions.

1. The world is everything that is the case.
2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
3. The logical picture of the facts is the thought.
4. The thought is the significant proposition.
5. Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions.
6. The general form of a truth-function is: {\displaystyle [{\bar {p}},{\bar {\xi }},N({\bar {\xi }})]}[\bar p,\bar\xi, N(\bar\xi)]. This is the general form of proposition.
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

How very.

It's always interesting to read Miles Mathis because he takes the time to dig up and expose the rampant phoniness that everyone with the intelligence to understand these frauds immediately picks up upon reading them. You can't read Wittgenstein or Bertrand Russell without realizing that there simply isn't anything there, which is why pretty much all post-medieval philosophy is literally worse than useless.

Just as most fame and fortune today is manufactured, intellectual fame is mostly fiction, the product of a propaganda machine utilized to manufacture false authorities that will eventually confer more false authority upon future intellectual frauds.

And now, the punchline.

A survey among American university and college teachers ranked the Investigations as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy, standing out as "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations."
- Wikipedia

Ludwig Wittgenstein is what Jordan Peterson would have been without the Internet.

Jordanetics happened

A writer at New Republic wonders whatever happened to Jordan Peterson, the erstwhile self-appointed secular saviour of humanity:

The Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson has been described as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world.” He is an exponent of the Jungian concept of the hero’s journey, in which an ordinary person heeds a call to adventure and goes out into the world to struggle and suffer, only to return with heightened self-knowledge. (He has described himself, without apparent irony, as being “raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta.”) His stern ethos of self-help and bootstrapping has made him a darling of the so-called intellectual dark web, and a gateway drug for countless budding right-wingers who have stumbled upon one of his lectures on YouTube.

So it was something of a surprise to learn, in early February, that Peterson had spent eight days in a medically induced coma at an unnamed clinic in Russia.... If Peterson’s sad story has a moral, it’s that a drug problem is neither a dragon to be slain nor a sin to be ashamed of. It’s a mundane health problem that should be treated scientifically, without heroics.

I tend to disagree. The real moral is this: it is unwise to elevate gammas to positions of leadership, intellectual or otherwise. Peterson always knew he was a fraud, so the psychological shock of being so brutally and publically exposed as an intellectual charlatan was more than he could take without retreating into chemical reinforcement of his delusion bubble, especially when his wife's reported illness deprived him of her maternalesque support.

To say that I was not surprised by Peterson's retreat from the public stage would be an understatement. I fully expected some sort of theatrical dramatics from Peterson, I simply didn't know what form it would take. I was assuming it would probably be some sort of fake overdose on Vitamin C or something equally ridiculous. "Definitely not meth" most certainly exceeded my expectations.

Predictive models. It's all about the predictive models.

The terrible pressure of fame

It's not Jordan Peterson's fault. He's not weak. He's not psychologically broken. Sometimes, definitely not methamphetamine is the only way to cope with the terrible pressure of success and fame:

Fame can send people into a tailspin, and this kind of fame, especially so. Peterson has hundreds of thousands of fans around the world, and they have brought him wealth and renown. He also has hundreds of thousands of enemies, and many of them work in the media. The fans love him for what he says and writes, and for the conviction he adds to it. The enemies hate him for what he is. They put him ever on the defensive. He must prove his innocence, and he can’t. In their company, the issues aren’t salient; he must justify himself. Worse, he must justify himself to people who will never believe that he is justified.

It’s exhausting; it’s exasperating. The people who have challenged Peterson to explain himself, and who then mangle his explanations, seem altogether secure in their position. They have big institutions and left/liberal culture behind them. They will leave the interview unchanged. Peterson, meanwhile, walks away, irritated and uncertain.

I am not sure that these episodes played a large role in his collapse, along with the illnesses in his family and the fatigue of nonstop travel and the medications. But this set-up, crafted by an academia/media juggernaut that demands fealty to dogmas about patriarchy, racism, and gender fluidity, is a unique type of pain. It is dispiriting to sit down with someone for the first time and read in his eyes dislike. It’s singularly frustrating to realize that nothing you say will lift the cloud over your head. And then to maintain your politeness . . . well, Peterson deserves a rest.

It's interesting to note that one never sees this sort of sympathy expressed for Milo, for Richard Spencer, or for any evil white racist sexist homophobe who is pilloried relentlessly by the media. In other words, they're still trying to salvage Jordan Peterson, the Right Answer for Young Men, despite the fact that he is observably a trainwreck of an individual.

No, you should ALL be ashamed

Avalanche insists that no one should feel ashamed for being taken in by Jordan Peterson. I very much disagree.

"I am ashamed for liking Jordan Peterson"

Every semi-normal person feels this way after having been taken for a destructive ride by a sociopath. "How how HOW could I have been so blind, not seen him for what he was? I cannot ever trust myself again!"

But there is no shame in being 'used' by a master-user! That would like saying, "I've just learned to play golf -- but Jack Nicklaus just destroyed me on the links! It's because there must be something wrong with me!"

No, you were just WAY outclassed! Ol' Jordie is a (probably literally) insanely talented master at sociopathic manipulation of normal folks. {Raises a rueful hand:} He sure 'got' me!

Sociopaths are not normal, and normal people have no useful defenses against the first one they meet; and often not further ones if they're unfortunate enough to run into another.

Whenever you get 'down' on yourself for not seeing it, remind yourself you had a run-in with a tiger on the veldt -- and got away with with a mere financial scratch! GOOD for you!

The problem is that I told everyone what Jordan Peterson was the moment I started paying any attention to him. I saw through his act at first glance and immediately observed several points of evidence that strongly indicated he had a disordered mind and a deceptive character. Yet four out of five people WHO HAD FOLLOWED ME FOR YEARS reacted angrily and insisted that I had to be wrong, despite the fact that there was absolutely ZERO evidence to support their position. And by zero evidence, I mean none whatsoever. Even the most cursory reading of anything he had ever written, dating all the way back to college, was sufficient to cast doubt on the man. It was one of the strangest things I've observed in the history of the blog.

There is no intellectual defense for that kind of reaction. This is precisely why I say MPAI. Most people are idiots, by which I mean that they are primarily driven by what makes them feel good at the moment, which is another way to say that they are predominately ruled by rhetoric. That is just as true of Avalanche, and the majority of people here - albeit a smaller majority than the norm - as it is of society in general. An idiot, to me, is anyone who believes, contra all philosophy, science, and history, that the truth of the matter is, or even can be, determined on the basis of his feelings about it.

Even when Protagoras says "man is the measure of all things" he is not referring to any one individual man, much less that man's feelings at a particular point in the space-time continuum.

These things are what they are. But don't say there is no shame in them. It's not for the rhetorical to judge or absolve the rhetorical, it is for those who are less susceptible to rhetoric to judge them. There were massive quantities of evidence indicating that Jordan Peterson was a fraud, and yet very, very few of his fans placed any weight on any of that preponderance of evidence, simply because he made them feel good for one reason or another.

If you fell for Peterson, then you should be ashamed and you should admit it to yourself. You should explore the reasons why you did so and why you were susceptible to his con. And you should do so in order to prevent yourself from falling just as readily for the very next fraud to come along. In fact, I would even suggest that the desire to explain away one's feeling of shame is indicative of the very vulnerability that led to the feeling in the first place.

If human history is any guide, many of those who fell for Jordan Peterson will fall for the next person to make them feel similarly good about themselves. Because MPAI.

A narrow escape

Fortunately for humanity, its greatest thinker has survived to think more of the thoughts that no one has thought before. Mikhaela Peterson explains the recent silence of Jordan Peterson:

The last year has been extremely difficult for our family. Dad was put on a low dose of a benzodiazepine a few years ago for anxiety following an extremely severe autoimmune reaction to food. He took the medication as prescribed. Last April when my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer, the dose of the medication was increased. It became apparent that he was suffering from both a physical dependency and a paradoxical reaction to the medication. A paradoxical reaction means the drugs do the opposite of what they’re supposed to. These reactions are rare but are not unheard of.

For the last 8 months he’s been in unbearable discomfort from this drug, made worse when trying to remove it, because of the addition of withdrawal symptoms, stemming from physical dependence. He experienced terrible akathisia, which is a condition where the person feels an incredible, endless, irresistible restlessness, bordering on panic, and an inability to sit still. The reaction made him suicidal.

After several failed treatment attempts in North American hospitals, including attempts at tapering and micro-tapering, we had to seek an emergency medical benzodiazepine detox, which we were only able to find in Russia. It was incredibly gruelling, and was further complicated by severe pneumonia which we’ve been told he developed in one of the previous hospitals. He’s had to spend 4 weeks in the ICU in terrible shape, but, with the help of some extremely competent and courageous doctors, he survived.  The decision to bring him to Russia was made in extreme desperation, when we couldn’t find any better option. The uncertainty around his recovery has been one of the most difficult and scary experiences we’ve ever had.

So: Finally Dad is on the mend, even though there’s a lot of physiological damage that he needs to recover from. He’s improving, and is off the horrible medication. His sense of humour is back. He’s smiling again for the first time in months, but he still has a long way to go to recover fully.

It's more than a little strange, is it not, that a complete stranger could coincidentally happen to anticipate an emotional crisis of this magnitude prior to its occurrence? But setting aside the various possible causes of the crisis, let us simply observe that perhaps one would be, shall we say, unwise, to live one's life according to the philosophy and precepts of a man who is clearly unwell on multiple levels, including the physical, the psychological, and the spiritual.

Stay up for 25 days, lose weight, and feel great!

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Who broke Jordan Peterson?

He's actually breaking down and crying in interviews because he's out of meth someone tweeted mean things at him.

I've enjoyed his work, but Jordan Peterson is lost. He had a horrific mental break during his recent interview with Rex Murphy where he literally cries about getting mean tweets. 

Here is the transcript:

You were asking about courage earlier, you know, um, one of the things that I have watched quite frequently is the way people respond to being mobbed on Twitter.

Yeah.

You know, I've almost stopped looking at Twitter. It's been about three months that I've taken a Twitter hiatus, let's say. I still post... I don't even have my password anymore. I send what I want to post to a third party and they post it because it keeps me out of

An antiseptic distance.

That's right. Exactly. And that's exactly the right way of thinking about it. You know, people, civilized people, and I mean that civilized, social people cannot tolerate being mobbed. Because there's a reason for that, you see. You said, with regards to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, if there's 16 people on one side and one on the other, you might be thinking that the 16 people are right.

More or less.

Right, right! But you think of the situation where you said something on Twitter and a thousand people mob you. Publicly! Your first response, if you're... your first response is going to be to examine your own conscience and see how you transgressed. It's not really much different psychologically... I mean it's lesser... it's not that much different than waking up one morning, coming to your door, and finding a mob of your neighbors angrily aggregated on your lawn! It's a terrible shock for people. It really hurts them! They're often, often, by all accounts, damaged for lengthy periods of time by this.  And their first impulse is to apologize, which is truly the wrong thing to do!

It is.

Well, the right thing to do is to understand that if you haven't done anything wrong, you don't apologize. Now that's very difficult. Very difficult. And to wait. If you wait two weeks, people will come to your defense.

Yeah, they will.

But it takes two weeks for them to get their act together, whereas it takes the activists, who are unbelievably organized, fifteen seconds to mob.

This guy is such a drugged-out emotional train wreck, it's almost not even funny anymore. Almost. Not that he doesn't deserve every single bit of criticism and mockery he receives, because he merits it on the basis of being a complete charlatan who should never have posed as any sort of lifestyle philosopher for young men. He's now quite obviously the frail and weepy shadow of the towering intellectual figure he pretended to be.

And remember, this is the very same man who claimed community doesn't matter, family doesn't matter, and every man should stand on his own, by himself, and without any allegiance to a group identity, because group identities are "pathological". Now he's literally crying in public because others don't come to his defense soon enough when he's legitimately attacked for his charlatanry.

What a pathological liar. What an utter freaking fraud. And, of course, he gets it absolutely wrong, as Captain America explains the correct way to address a howling, wrongheaded mob.

He is not your father figure

A Roosh reader observes that Jordan Peterson's parenting skills have turned out to be more than a little suboptimal.

Peterson's daughter finally confirms she's "separated" from her husband and has been "co-parenting" (not that this is remotely a surprise to anyone who has been glancing at her Instagram etc.)

Not that this is a new thought here but it's rather damning that his daughter has turned out be "attempting to find herself" (in the usual fashion) even with a toddler child and seemingly very supportive and at least somewhat redpilled father. Very disheartening, obviously the fame and attention got to her head a bit but I'm well past the point of seeing Peterson as any sort of personal role model. Having read 12 Rules twice I can tell you there's some valuable proto-morality that can set others in the right direction but "You will know them by their fruits" (Matt. 7:16a).

Perhaps we've seen enough of Peterson's fruits to move on to deeper traditions as a whole.

This guy gets it.

Peterson made millions writing a book telling people how to live. But look at how someone turns out that had all the benefit of his advise 24/7.

No one who has read Jordanetics will be even remotely surprised by this. Jordan Peterson has been a terrible parent since he was passively permitting other children to mistreat his daughter at the park. The fact that a lot of young men have been looking up to Peterson as an ersatz father figure promises more than a few additional disasters in the future.

UPDATE: Seriously suboptimal.

She shows a screenshot of her prescription history. Two of those prescriptions are used to treat herpes.

Jordan Peterson is a mirror

He reflects back to the insufficiently aware precisely what they want to see:

You can pretty safely judge someone's politics from his attitude toward Jordan Peterson.  We on the right listen to see if he makes sense.  That's because our attitudes are shaped by reality.  Leftists, unimpressed by reality and anticipating something they don't like, shout him down.  Media interviewers stumble over their own assumptions, struggle with their biases, and leap to conclusions rather than grasp that the world is complex and simplistic answers just don't cut it.  As a result, they regularly end up looking shallow, uninformed and foolish.

Clearly this gentleman of the Right has not listened closely enough to Jordan Peterson or he would realize that Mr. 12 Rules for Meth does not make anything that even remotely approximates sense. Not that his Christian fans have noticed that he's not on their side.

In a joyful ceremony, Christian leaders gathered to grant Jordan Peterson the status of honorary Christian. Though the Canadian professor has never identified as a Christian and does not attend any church, a vote was taken and the decision was made unanimously that Peterson had earned his salvation and could be drafted into heaven by popular vote.

On kicking a man when he's down

They say you shouldn't kick a man when he's down. But that's completely wrong. It's a lot harder to kick a man in the head when he's still standing.

The victory of the secret king

A Peterson cultist named Dan Poynton wants me to know that he won another imaginary argument with me. No, make that TWO imaginary arguments!

I interacted with you & your youtube watchers a while back re one of the many Peterson videos you've made, which you will have probably forgotten.

I just want you to know that I know what you're up to. You blocked me from making comments. Apart from this obviously being an admission that you'd lost any argument between us, I also thought it was extremely cowardly. And I admit, with your obvious intelligence and strength of character,  I was really shocked. I mean, why would you block an obviously lesser-IQ individual like myself, who was interacting with both you and your fans with civility and informed/considered posts? Totally unnecessary and I was never expecting such an early admission of defeat on your part.

Anyway, I've stopped listening to you recently, because I realise your material is actually quite "evil" (to use your word), and my attraction to it is not a healthy thing. However, I can't resist anything you put out re JP, because your derangement and anger over this man is first-class entertainment. And I've realised that you've become so deranged now (re this issue, not with many others, about which I have often enjoyed listening to you) that you've almost abandoned logic altogether.

Below is my post, which I presumed only you would see, but perhaps you didn't:

There is now no doubt: Vox Day is an utter idiot. In his deranged Peterson fury, he's incapable of even saying anything logical. I've enjoyed Vox's other stuff at times, but the man is just another high-IQed idiot who specialises in fallacious rhetoric (despite his lofty claims to the contrary).

However, I actually believer you CAN'T be so stupid as to not realise this. You're an intelligent guy, Vox. You're deliberately misleading your fawning fans with rhetorical - and often completely false - polemic, and this is dishonest and displays your obvious lack of integrity.

You'll no doubt now block my email address - don't worry, I don't care, and it will only be a further admission of your dishonesty and derangement.

I just think it's funny that he insists I'm the dishonest, angry, deranged one when Jordan Peterson is in rehab for drug addiction barely a year after he claimed he wasn't taking any medications due to his magic diet.

If I ever run for Emperor of Man, my platform will include mandatory euthanasia for gamma males at the age of 18, with a second round at 25 just in case we missed any of them. I expect I'll win 100 percent of the female vote with that policy.

He took his damn pills

I knew Jordan Peterson was going to find life difficult in the aftermath of Jordanetics, but it now appears that he took his own advice a little too enthusiastically:

Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and anti-political-correctness crusader, has checked himself in to rehab in New York, his daughter has revealed.

The “12 Rules for Life” author has sought help trying to get off the anti-anxiety drug clonazepam, his daughter Mikhaila Peterson said in a video posted to her YouTube account Thursday.

“I’ve never seen my dad like this,” the 27-year-old diet blogger said in the eight-and-a-half-minute video. “He’s having a miserable time of it. It breaks my heart.”

The elder Peterson, 57, began taking the addictive medication to deal with stress from his wife’s battle with cancer and other health problems earlier this year, his daughter said.

Whatever the truth might be, it almost certainly isn't what Peterson has been telling his daughter or anyone else. Remember, he is an inveterate liar and this is within the time frame in which he was still publicly going on about the health miracles of his new diet, upon which he never, ever cheats. My guess is that the stress of knowing tens of thousands of people have learned that he is an unmitigated fraud has been constantly eating away at his fragile psyche ever since the book came out last year.

Yes, his wife is ill, but since he's a narcissist that's not likely to be a significant factor in the state of his mental health. Just look at how he has successfully made his own wife's cancer all about him. And no, I'm not even a little bit surprised by either the addiction or the resort to rehab; things will almost certainly get worse over time because Jordan Peterson can't be cured by pills or rehab or Jungian psychotherapy. He needs to repent and to confess and to stop lying all the time. He needs Jesus Christ.

It is informative, however, to observe that all of those wicked individuals who have attempted to push a completely false narrative about Owen Benjamin's psychological health somehow managed to completely miss Jordan Peterson's breakdown even though I anticipated its inevitability more than a year ago.

• It's not an insult to observe that Jordan Peterson is mentally ill or that his mental illness has significantly influenced his worldview, his philosophy, and his most recent book. To the contrary, it is a highly pertinent fact. One does not need a PhD in psychiatry or anything else to observe that someone is crazy or to observe the effects of that craziness. Jordan Peterson isn't wandering through the night with a knife in his hand muttering "don't be evil" to himself, he's doing an intellectual version of that by weeping on stage with a mic in his hand as he begs people to not be too ashamed to take their prescribed medication.
• May 4, 2018
• More and more people are becoming aware that Jordan Peterson is not only a liar, he is a complete lunatic who should be in a padded cell for his own protection.
• August 31, 2018

Of all the words of screen and pen

The most painful are these:

Vox was right again.

Jordan Peterson is a sanctimonious crybaby

And you can absolutely quote me on that, in whatever voice you like. He's such a ridiculous whiner as well as being a profoundly non-philosophical fraud.

This week, however, a company called notjordanpeterson.com put an AI engine online that allows anyone to type anything and have it reproduced in my voice. It’s hard to get access to or use the site, at the moment, presumably because it is currently attracting more traffic than its servers can handle. [NOTE: As of August 23, this website posted the following announcement: In light of Dr. Peterson’s response to the technology demonstrated by this site, which you can read here, and out of respect for Dr. Peterson, the functionality of the site will be disabled for the time being.]

A variety of sites that pass themselves off as news portals—and sometimes are—have either reported this story straight (Sputnik News) or had a field day (Gizmodo) having me read, for example, the SCUM manifesto (hypothetically an acronym for Society for Cutting Up Men), a radical feminist rant by Valerie Solanos published in 1967. Solanos, by the way, later shot the artist Andy Warhol, an act, driven by her developing paranoia. He was seriously wounded, requiring a surgical corset to hold his organs in place for the rest of his life. TNW takes a middle path, reporting the facts of the situation with little bias but using the system to have me voice very vulgar phrases.

Some of you might know—and those of you who don’t should—that similar technology has also been developed for video. This was reported, for example, by BBC, as far back in July of 2017, who broadcast a speech delivered by an AI Obama, that was essentially indistinguishable from the real thing. Similar technology has been used, equally notoriously, to superimpose the faces of famous actresses on porn stars, while they perform their various sexual exploits (you can find this story covered, for example, on The Verge, Jan 24, 2018). Movies have also been reshot so that the main actor is transformed from someone unknown to someone with real box office draw. This has happened, for example, to Nicolas Cage, primarily on a YouTube site known as Derpfakes, a play on the phrase “Deep Fakes,” which is what the video recordings created fraudulently by AI have come to be known. More recently Ctrl Shift Face, a YouTube channel, posted a video showing Bill Hader transforming very subtly into Tom Cruise as he performs an impression of the latter on Dave Letterman’s show. It’s picked up four million views in a week. It’s important to note, by the way, that this ability is available to amateurs. I don’t mean people with no tech knowledge whatsoever, obviously—more that the electronic machinery that makes such things possible will soon be within the reach of everyone.

It’s hard to imagine a technology with more power to disrupt. I’m already in the position (as many of you soon will be as well) where anyone can produce a believable audio and perhaps video of me saying absolutely anything they want me to say. How can that possible be fought? More to the point: how are we going to trust anything electronically-mediated in the very near future (say, during the next Presidential election)? We’re already concerned, rightly or wrongly, with “fake news”—and that’s only news that has been slanted, arguably, by the bias of the reporter or editor or news organization. What do we do when “fake news” is just as real as “real news”? What do we do when anyone can imitate anyone else, for any reason that suits them?

And what of the legality of this process? It seems to me that active and aware lawmakers would take immediate steps to make the unauthorized production of AI Deep Fakes a felony offense, at least in the case where the fake is being used to defame, damage or deceive. And it seems to be that we should perhaps throw caution to the wind, and make this an exceptionally wide-ranging law. We need to seriously consider the idea that someone’s voice is an integral part of their identity, of their reality, of their person—and that stealing that voice is a genuinely criminal act, regardless (perhaps) of intent. What’s the alternative? Are we entering a future where the only credible source of information will be direct personal contact? What’s that going to do to mass media, of all types? Why should we not assume that the noise to signal ratio will creep so high that all political and economic information disseminated broadly will be rendered completely untrustworthy?

I can tell you from personal experience, for what that’s worth, that it is far from comforting to discover an entire website devoted to allowing whoever is inspired to do so produce audio clips imitating my voice delivering whatever content the user chooses—for serious, comic or malevolent purposes. I can’t imagine what the world will be like when we will truly be unable to distinguish the real from the unreal, or exercise any control whatsoever on what videos reveal about behaviors we never engaged in, or audio avatars broadcasting any opinion at all about anything at all. I see no defense, and a tremendously expanded opportunity for unscrupulous troublemakers to warp our personal and collective reality in any manner they see fit.

Wake up. The sanctity of your voice, and your image, is at serious risk. It’s hard to imagine a more serious challenge to the sense of shared, reliable reality that keeps us linked together in relative peace. The Deep Fake artists need to be stopped, using whatever legal means are necessary, as soon as possible.

This guy doesn't even believe in the Divine, so to what "sanctity of your voice and your image" is he referring? He doesn't even believe in group identity or taking pride in one's direct ancestors, he's the most famous advocate of individual uber alles since Ayn Rand, so what is this "sense of shared, reliable reality that keeps us linked together" to which he's suddenly appealing.

If you didn't grasp that Jordan Peterson is an intellectual fraud before, his call to outlaw synthetic speech and make it a felony offense should more than suffice.

Personally, I love synthetic speech. I've been wanting to design games around it since 1996.

Approved opposition and the fake speech platforms

An Idka commenter is dubious about the new "free speech" social media sites:

Just saw a video with the Parler CEO. Only watched a few minutes because it feels off enough to be uncomfortable and the pattern is so clear. There is a lot of wizardry here – the weird hypnotic rhythm, the micro-expressions not really matching the surface conversation, the selective framing, Alex Jones going too far at times… This would be the Turning Point wing of the fake right – the prominence of Candace Owens isn’t subtle.

It looks targeted to whatever is left of “traditional” civnat conservatism. Mostly Boomers at this point, I’d assume. The fake framing is that “the system” is real, the base problem is “censorship”, “the left” has gone too far, and we need to get back to what America looked like on t.v. in the Reagan era. It’s basically discourse in the fake academic sense as fly paper. Incidentally, I’d never really noticed the crazy eyes/oversized mandible that is common on deranged globohomo women.

The most disappointing thing about it is how obviously inverted it is. Right down to the veiled decadence of the homosexual host. It’s like there was an Owen sketch called The Cuck and the Sodomite, only not funny.

He's right to be dubious. Parler and Thinkspot are exactly analogical to the Intellectual Dark Web. They are fake opposition to the mainstream, approved alternatives created to allow those who are shaky in their loyalties to the Narrative to feel as if they are standing against it without actually doing so.

Notice, in particular, the way these "upstart new platforms" are being treated very, very differently than the likes of genuine alternative platforms such as BitChute, Gab, Fediway, Mastodon, and Infogalactic.

Breitbart News recently spoke with the CEO of upstart social media platform Parler about the company’s plans and what makes Parler different from Big Tech’s social media platforms. Breitbart News will begin actively posting on its official Parler account in the near future.

Darkstream 383: Jordanetics Rule 06

This is where you can discuss tonight's Darkstream if you wish, which addressed the sixth of Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life.

Leave Jordy alone!

The YouTube community is rising to the defense of the beleaguered Jordan Peterson:

 Hi Darkstream,

Your video Voxday Darkstream 04.25.2018 The Problem with Jordan Peterson was flagged to us by the YouTube community. Upon review, we have placed restrictions on how the video will be shown. Please note that your video will continue to be available on YouTube.

Video content restrictions

We believe in the principles of free speech, even when that speech is unpopular or potentially offensive to some viewers. However, YouTube doesn't allow hate speech or content that promotes or incites violence. In some cases, flagged videos that do not clearly breach the Community Guidelines but whose content is potentially controversial or offensive may remain up, but with some features disabled.

Your video will be shown after a warning message. In addition, certain features such as comments, sharing, thumbs up, and suggested videos have been disabled. Your video is also ineligible for monetization. 

Peterson-Zizek: the verdict

I thought a few of these comments concerning the recent Peterson-Zizek debate were informative:

Peterson got ass raped on every argument vector he tried to use. It's like a 110 IQ was trying to take it against a 150 IQ.

I know nothing about Zizek, but you may recall that I eventually concluded Peterson tops out around 120. But you can probably imagine how well a debate with me would go.

How are debates won? Does the person that doesn't have a comeback during it lose it even thought he was right? Is it all about talking to yourself in your room for week thinking "I should've said that when he said that!"

Can you spell Gamma?

Peterson failed at the very first step: literature research. I mean, why am I even surprised? I don't know.

Of course he sabotaged himself. That's what Gammas who fear defeat do in order to give themselves an excuse. They weren't really trying, you see.

I'm watching it right now. 30 minutes in and it is as if Peterson is a freshman in Physics who tried to read Griffiths to then go on and debate a Professor on the subject. It's ridiculous that he would think that even appropriate. But I guess that is what happens when you have so little respect for the subject. He should maybe question his own behavior. Why does he think he can take on an expert in a field where he is a layman? Instead he is trying and failing to lecture us on the behavior of people that he does not know about because he never bothered to acquiesce himself with them.

Hey, it worked for him in his Bible lectures. The difference is that he was addressing people who didn't know anything about it either and they weren't given the opportunity to talk back.

Also a very funny thing happened when Jordan Peterson said that Marx was not making a simple argument, but his manifesto was a call to a 'bloody, violent, revolution'... hundreds of leftists in the audience started cheering and clapping. Peterson was shocked, not used to this kind of reaction, he went quiet for a few seconds then went like... uhhh? ok?...

If Peterson wasn't a leftist himself, he would have understood this as a genuinely pathological example of group identity. How very strange that, for once, he did not call it out and criticize it.

Jordan Peterson humiliates himself

Like most of his fans at the Peterson-Zizek debate, The Guardian is unimpressed with the Canadian Charlatan:

Peterson’s opening remarks were disappointing even for his fans in the audience. They were a vague and not particularly informed (by his own admission) reading of The Communist Manifesto. His comments on one of the greatest feats of human rhetoric were full of expressions like “You have to give the devil his due” and “This is a weird one” and “Almost all ideas are wrong”.

I’ve been a professor, so I know what it’s like to wake up with a class scheduled and no lecture prepared. It felt like that. He wandered between the Paleolithic period and small business management, appearing to know as little about the former as the latter. Watching him, I was amazed that anyone had ever taken him seriously enough to hate him.

He said things like “Marx thought the proletariat was good and the bourgeoisie was evil”. At one point, he made a claim that human hierarchies are not determined by power because that would be too unstable a system, and a few in the crowd tittered. That snapped him back into his skill set: self-defense. “The people who laugh might do it that way,” he replied. By the end of his half-hour he had not mentioned the word happiness once.

I read part of the transcript. It was actually worse than The Guardian describes. As I noted in Jordanetics, Jordan Peterson knows nothing about Marxism despite the way in which he blathers on about "Marxist post-modernists". But at least he read The Communist Manifesto in preparation for the debate!

But that's a fitting epitaph for Jordan Peterson's career as a public pseudo-intellectual: "I was amazed that anyone had ever taken him seriously." His fifteen minutes are already ending because even his biggest fans are beginning to see through his act.