Oh, god, Peterson is such a fool

I’ll say something more substantial about this later, but Jordan Peterson opened his mouth and said something stupid, and I got slapped in the face with it this morning, and I’m still trying to recover.

Morgane Oger is a transgender woman, and a court ruled that she’d been discriminated against and libeled by Christian flyer that was sent around that misgendered her and made various religious claims condemning homosexuality. This has obviously stirred up the conservative Christians and Jordan Peterson (but I repeat myself). What Peterson wrote is such flaming nonsense I’m going to have compose something to explain cell non-autonomous sex determination — and maybe some disambiguation about chromosomes vs. DNA vs. cells that I would have thought an “evolutionary biologist” like Peterson should already understand.

But then I made a mistake. A terrible awful mistake. I thought I honestly should look a little deeper into what Peterson actually says at length, because I know the first thing that will happen if I criticize that demented drongo is a swarm of his cultists would fall on me howling about how I have to listen to hours and hours of his lectures to understand him. So I tried.

I opened up one of his podcasts.

OH MY GOD.

That thing is 2.5 hours long. Hours of garbage about…this.

Lecture II in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories from May 23 at Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto. In this lecture, I present Genesis 1, which presents the idea that a pre-existent cognitive structure (God the Father) uses the Logos, the Christian Word, the second Person of the Trinity, to generate habitable order out of pre-cosmogonic chaos at the beginning of time. It is in that Image that Man and Woman are created — indicating, perhaps, that it is (1) through speech that we participate in the creation of the cosmos of experience and (2) that what true speech creates is good.

It is a predicate of Western culture that each individual partakes in some manner in the divine. This is the true significance of consciousness, which has a world-creating aspect.

I listened to a half hour of it. It’s word salad delivered in a stream-of-consciousness fashion by a babbling loon who talks really fast. I gave up at around the 37 minute mark when he mentions that he’ll get around to talking about Genesis 1 shortly.

Now I have to get out of the house and go for a walk and spend some time in the gym to clear my head. I pity those people who willingly listen to this gomer at length.

Later. After I’ve recovered.

Holy shit. After reading that drivel by Peterson, read this letter defending him by…Richard Dawkins.

Once upon a time, I would have thought Richard Dawkins would have regarded giving a pretentious, empty-headed twit like Peterson a visiting professorship at Cambridge to be an “ignominious disgrace.” And jeez, whining about selfies is just so old-man-shakes-fist-at-clouds.

OK, now I’ve got to go out the door and away. Maybe I’ll also need to spend some time cooing over spiders to cool off.

Enjoy the new AD-FREE Freethoughtblogs

We’ve snapped the evil capitalist cord. We just deleted all the ad slots on Freethoughtblogs — we hope everything is faster, smoother, and more enjoyable.

Unfortunately, we still have to pay for our server costs, and it would be nice if our bloggers got coffee-money now and then. We’re going to try and figure out as a group how to do all that, so may soon be going the crowd-funding route, or having donation drives, or something. Watch this space, we’ll announce our new strategy soon.

I do have to say that going into the guts of the WordPress machine and savagely murdering all the ad-bot code was one of the most satisfying things I’ve done today. Easy, too.

Now that is a play

North Bergen High School put on Alien as their school play. I am kind of blown away — amazing sets, all from recycled materials, cool costumes, scary story. The kids must have lusted to get a part. Click on the tweet to see more, people were posting video clips.

I am reminded that our Morris Area High School had a fantastic theater department when my two youngest were attending. They put on two plays a year, not of SF spectacles, but one was always a musical, and these kids would just stun you with their talent and enthusiasm. Connlann and Skatje were both deeply involved in the shows — Connlann was a performer, Skatje was into theater tech — and they were so inspired by the work.

Then the school district, incomprehensibly, killed the program and let the teacher who was so good at these things go. That was so stupid and short-sighted. There is such an ignorant focus on just teaching what will help the kids get a job (and STEM benefits from that, unfortunately — so many young people thinking they should do science, engineering, or medicine for all the wrong reasons) that they kill the dreams…and it’s the dream that carries people forward.

39

It’s our wedding anniversary today! It’s a little strange, because we started dating when we were 19, and got married at 23, so most of our lives have been spent together. We’re still happy together so it’s not going to change until the day I die.

We don’t have anything fancy planned. I brought her coffee in bed (but I do that every day! Should I have refused, in order to make it special?) and also…avocado toast. I went all out here. Maybe dinner and a movie tonight. I hope that isn’t too crazy.

Ablation zone found, also identified some firn

We must be approaching Spring, when the weather gets even worse. We had a brief thaw earlier this week, and all this liquid water trickled out from under the glacier covering our lawn, and then flowed across our sidewalk. Then the temperature dropped below freezing again, and is going to stay there for a few days. You know what that means: ice skating rink!

I tried to get into the lab again today, and saw that…and it gets much worse a little further on, where the walkway slopes downward. Decided I’m too old to risk these bones and turned around and went back home. That’s unfortunate, because nothing is more soothing than feeding the spiders. Instead I had to settle for salting down the sidewalk so I wouldn’t be at fault for any student casualties braving the path.

Then I decided I need to hang out with spiders for a bit, so I actually drove to the lab. It was a whole half a block! But it was safer than trying to walk on the ice ramp.

The spiders are fine, thanks for asking. They were hungry and wolfed down a couple of flies each.