The above comic, which presents the "arguments" of Alex Jones' fascism-adjacent sub-moronic lackey PeeJay Watson pretty much verbatim, is by Matt Bors. He's pretty great. Check out more of his work at his website.
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I COULDN'T HELP BUT NOTICE...
It's odd, isn't it?
Lie on a document to get your kid into a better school in a neighboring district, and you might end up getting arrested and cooling your heels in the hoosegow... especially if you're Black!
Spend megabucks in an effort to bend the rules, or sweeten your spawn's CV in an attempt to score them a coveted spot at an Ivy League university, and you, too, might go to jail. Even if you're a celebrity!
But if you create a fraudulent "university" that bilks thousands of people out of millions of dollars in exchange for a big hairy box of Sweet Fuck All, except for the opportunity to be upsold even more worthless "programs" based not on their value, but on how much money you have in your bank accounts, or can get via various forms of credit... and you can become President of the United States of America.
That's how sick, twisted, and generally fucked up things are these days. And it's got nothing at all to do with gay folks, or atheists, or the lack of guns in schools, or whatever stupid fucking bullshit it is that right-wingers believe might help to make things better.
Oh, hey, to all my Canadian friends and family... this Monday, you better get out and VOTE! And you better vote for the Liberal Party if you know what's good for ya!
Heheh... I kid, I kid. But seriously... vote Liberal. Because independent auditors have proven that, when it comes to keeping election promises, Trudeau's record is actually pretty goddamn good.
Behold Jordan Peterson! Champion in the battle against the scourge of Postmodernism! Valiant upholder of Western Values, ever on the watch for creeping Cultural Marxism! Stoic realist, rational and logical down to his common sense-loving core! Behold! ...as he loses his shit while discussing Walt Disney's Pinocchio.
Ah, Jordan Peterson... you've got to hand it to him. He is, hands down, the most successful of the recent crop of Patron pan-handlers, those pseudo-intellectual blowhards who have decided to capitalize on the sizable audience of suckers out there willing to pay top dollar to be told exactly what they want to hear, over and over again.
I mean, who cares if he knows next to nothing about the subject matter that riles him up the most, that being the dreaded bugbear "postmodernism"? It's not like that's his field of expertise, anyway, right? And riling up a few hundred thousand people with inflammatory lies that indirectly feed into other, more destructive narratives about how the world works... it's not like THAT'S ever gone horribly wrong before... right?
Anyway, I'll soon have more for you about why I--and many other, more knowledgeable and even-tempered people--think that Peterson is every conceivable kind of WRONG when it comes to postmodernism. For now, however, I am restricting the rest of this ideological snapshot not to beliefs that he criticizes, but to beliefs that he holds dear.
The nature of Peterson's increasingly toxic fandom being what it is, falling somewhere East of Sam Harris' and just a wee bit West of Stefan Molyneux', I suspect that more than a few of you reading this now are going to be, if not necessarily fans of his, at least interested in what he has to say about a variety of topics, from the dangers of postmodernist political correctness to... actually, that's about it. Well, somebody went and did a little digging on the good professor, and guess what? Yes, as many of you may have already intuited, it turns out this Kermit the Frog-soundalike, pronoun-obsessed professor is off his fucking rocker.
Canadian blogger Nice Mangos begins her epic take-down/overview thusly:
Who is this guy? Well... For those unfamiliar he is a ‘controversial’ conservative university professor, in my own progressive city *sigh*....at University of Toronto.
He's your average conservative Christian, with an added dose of hardcore gobbledygook with the audacity to criticize postmodernists for the same. Step aside Deepak Chopra! There's a new snake oil salesman in town. And this time he's smuggling in extreme conservatism AND atheists love him. Apparently one of the *most requested* guests of all time on Sam Harris' podcast! Their conversations were adversarial to be clear, but still Peterson was in great demand by Sam's audience. So much so, that there were two episodes featuring him.
Gosh, remember when the atheist scene used to ridicule charlatans like Deepak instead of embrace them as some of our favourite intellectuals simply because they ‘trigger’ libtards, and dump on trans people, ‘the left’ and feminism - all the favourite bogeymen of the internet atheist movement! ...resulting in this strange alliance with a man who literally brought himself to tears while reading his own essay which mentioned ‘a loss of faith’.
Goddammit, make atheism great again.
It really amazes me that he criticizes flowery 'postmodernist' language for much of the same type of nonsense that comes out of his own mouth. He rose to fame last year when he had an unbelievable temper tantrum about Ontario’s Bill C-16 somehow taking away his freedoms by protecting trans people from discrimination. He’s been shown to be misrepresenting the law, but his popularity only grows in this climate where facts hold little value, and anything of substance is dubbed 'fake news'.
Peterson has no qualms associating with people on the far far right... he even appeared on a Nazi's podcast. A woman who has literally advocated violence against people of colour refusing to leave the hypothetical ethnostate.
He may very well not be aware of all her views, but googling someone or looking at their social media is the least you can do before appearing on their show and lending them your legitimacy as a professor. If you are this blinded by your hatred of The Left that you're going on Nazi shows to talk about 'Western Civilization'... you probably should not be teaching kids.
As a critic of leftist mumbo-jumbo, its funny he describes the average university class as a postmodern neo-marxist indoctrination cult. He wants to start his own online university scarily enough... He plans to 'cut off the supply to people running the indoctrination cults', i.e., universities. And don't you worry... he's working on a way to differentiate between 'post modern course content' and 'classical course content'.
In a time where mainstream media institutions are being discredited by right wing nutjobs, so too are educational institutions. Now, hold on to your kekistani undies, I’m not saying there aren’t ever crazy instances on campus, I’m not saying never criticize universities or The Left. There’s plenty to criticize... but there’s no proportionality… this response, as in idolizing Jordan Peterson, the guy who’s somehow repackaged old school conservatism as something new and hip… as an antidote to 'the left gone wild, drunk on the power of premarital sex, immorality, independent career women and loss of faith'… I mean come on. I've heard this shit before.
I grew up in Saudi Arabia.
And that's just for starters! With links, video clips, and text excerpts a-plenty, Mangos builds a case against Peterson that is utterly damning, next to impossible to refute, and hilariously entertaining to boot. If your personal journey towards philosophical enlightenment were to begin with this blog post... you could do a lot worse, let me tell you.
Keep watching this space, as I'll have more on Peterson--in particular, regarding his bogus, fear-mongering, spittle-flecked screeching jeremiads against postmodernism--in the coming days. Maybe even tomorrow!
In a Facebook post that reached millions of readers in a matter of days, Pastor Joel Tooley describes what he saw when he and his family attended Trump's early campaign 2020 rally in Melbourne, Florida last week. Among the many choice words Tooley used to describe the scene there, yer old pal Jerky's favorite is probably "demonic".
An online fund drive begun by the oft-slandered Muslim American activists Linda Sarsour and Tarek El-Messidi raised tens of thousands of dollars to repair a St Louis Jewish cemetery that had been vandalized by thugs earlier in the week.
Are anti-Democratic political purges coming to Iowa Universities? They are if Mark Chelgren has his way. The Iowa state senator has proposed an "ideological litmus test" in order to create a "partisan balance" based on how Iowa has voted in past elections. In case you're wondering why someone would want party affiliation to supersede actual talent, knowledge, ability, and peer review to get a university job... just look at this fucker, and it all becomes crystal clear.
Speaking of impeachment (and if we weren't, we probably should have been), did y'all know that an official petition calling for Trump to be impeached has crossed the one MILLION signatures threshold? Maybe this is why noted author/historian Ronald L. Feinman is betting that Trump's presidency will be the second shortest in history (he's already surpassed the 31 days of William Henry Harrison), and that he's unlikely to reach the 199 day mark reached by James A. Garfield, and definitely not the 16 months and five days of Zachary Taylor. Hell, even former Ohio Republican judges are now getting in on the "Impeach Trump" bandwagon, pointing out his "dazzling illegalities"!
If you need a reminder as to why all this impeachment talk is not only happening, but absolutely necessary (regardless of what this fucking idiot says), read Rolling Stone's rundown of 18 WTF Moments From Trump's Unhinged Press Conference from a week ago. It's a great outrage refresher.
In particular, insofar as Trump's claim that his White House is running like a "fine-tuned machine", how many of you knew that of 549 key positions that require Senate confirmation, Trump has yet to nominate people for 515 of those positions?
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SUGGESTED READINGS
1. Hey! You think there might be something wrong with our old pal Alex Jones? Maybe he's not getting enough Tasty TangerineTM? or being sufficiently liberal whilst applying his Androcreme Testosterone GelTM? Who knows? All I know is, the footage collected together to make up this video has got me worried about him.
2. How many of the 50 Best Movies of 2016 (as chosen by Paste Magazine) have you managed to see this past year? Personally, I've only seen six of them, and furthermore, I only plan on watching another fourteen, as the others don't interest me. The list also missed a bunch of great flicks, by the way, so I feel like I have no choice but to put out my own Best of 2016 list, preferably before the Academy Awards (but probably not, seeing as they're only two days away). Keep watching this space!
3. If you're a comics fan (guilty) and a superhero fan (guilty), then Kerry Callen's Imagur series "Super Antics" is sure to titillate and delight you. These Silver Age shenanigans had yer old pal Jerky chuckling, and he doesn't even much care for DC!
*** QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Physicians like me have also taken notice of Trump’s bizarre, volatile behavior. Given our experience, we can’t help but wonder if there’s a medical diagnosis to be made. After all, many medical conditions exhibit their first symptoms in the form of psychiatric issues and personality changes. One condition in particular is notable for doing so: Neurosyphilis.”
- Infectious disease specialist Steven Beutler penned a New Republic essay to warn the world that a good explanation for Donald Trump's insane behavior might very well be that his brain is swimming with syphilis spirochetes.
DDD EXTRAS
If you want to learn about some cool and/or weird things that happened on whatever day of history that it happens to be when you're reading this, why not check out our sister-site, Useless Eater Blog? You're sure to find something of interest, guaranteed!
Over at Kubrick U, I've added a bunch of new materials, including a jam-packed edition of Kubrick News In Brief, including interviews and videos and crazy Kubrick-related ephemera and whatnot. Also, I bring you a couple of recent Kubrick-related book reviews, including one for Kubrick Red (by a French Canadian author) and a sample chapter from Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie!
THE TAKEAWAY
All my ritual magick practicing peeps, don't forget that at Midnight tonight, Friday Feb. 24th, we're all coming together to perform a mass ritual working in order to bind Donald J. Trump and all those who abet him. Here are the details. Tonight's will be only the first of many such workings. Be sure to get all the necessary components for the spell before stores close. You'll want to get in on the ground floor on this history-making magick so that, when the inevitable happens, you'll be able to say that you were a part of it all. Plus... involve all your simpatico friends and family, and it should prove to be a real hoot!
