"I am not willing for someone to waive a moral flag and then tell me what I have to say!"

"Most people find deep meaning in life as a consequence of bearing responsibility for themselves and others, and the heavier the responsibility, the better!

Biology matures women and the responsibility that comes along with that. Men need a catalyst. Taking responsibility (see first paragraph).

What people believe is what they act out. I act as if God exists. It's a matter of action and commitment. A metaphysical reality that's virtually impossible to comprehend. By their fruits, ye shall know them. You risk when you reduce. Human beings have a spark of the divine in them. I talk about what I know and leave the rest alone. I am not going to make statements reflecting a certainty that I don't have."

What is your approach to truth? "I try not to say things that make me weak. I believe you must pay attention to every word you say. Say what you believe to be true and take the consequences."

Why are you afraid of being weak? "It's essentially fear of Hell! If you make yourself weak, and you suffer stupidly because of it, you will become bitter, and after you become bitter you will become vengeful and once you become vengeful there is no limit. You make yourself weak by engaging in deceit. You fail to take responsibility and you torture yourself."

Why are so many on the Left afraid of you? "They have every reason to be afraid. I am not a fan of collectivists. I am not a fan of people who put group identity first. I am not a fan of people who would dare to identify as Marxists after what happened in the 20th century. I am no fan of right-wing collectivists either. The right level of analysis is the individual, and that's what the West got right.

Are you a political centrist? "I am not political! It's a matter of your relationship not only to your conscience but to your soul! I am not willing for someone to waive a moral flag and then tell me what I have to say! That's not happening!"

"We have only one sort of protagonist in our stories, the loner who has an authority problem."

Spengler writes in PJ Media,

...The four-fifths of Americans who think that PC has gone too far do not want to undo the great cultural transformation of the past half-century, which has placed self-esteem at the center of human concerns at the expense of traditional virtues. We no longer wish to do what is good and upright in the eyes of God; who does this God think He is, sitting in judgment over us? We want to be our own little gods and make ourselves into whatever we would like to be. We have, as Justice Kennedy wrote in the Obergefell decision, a right "to define and express [our] identity." That is the purpose of therapy, which asserts that healing comes from within, that man is the measure of all things, and our own sense of self-esteem and well-being is the gauge against which our behavior must be measured.

...The sina qua non of the American character, what one might call American normality, is a highly specific sense of the sacred: That the goal of journey lies beyond any earthly horizon, which sacralizes the journey itself. The core of our character is radically incompatible with the therapeutic. I am gratified that there has been a rebellion against the extremes of political correctness inside the therapeutic camp, and I suppose that we should be grateful for any relief that comes our way. But it isn't who we are, or what we need.

Read more here.

Does the government have a right to compel speech?

Jordan Peterson tweets, "If confirmed, Kavanaugh should step down."

Diasappointing.

Jordan Peterson on IQ, predictors of success, and the relationship between intelligence and virtue

If you are anti-social by the age of four, there isn't an intervention that seems to be effective! Male aggression peaks around the age of 15, then it declines precipitously and normalizes again by the age of 27. So, should we throw all the young multiple offenders in prison until they are 27? No, the worst thing you can do with anti-social people is to group them together!

If your job is simple and pretty much the same every day, then IQ predicts how well you will learn the job, but not how well you do it. But if your job is complex, changing every day, then the best predictor of success is general cognitive ability.

Other predictors of life success are trait conscientiousness, freedom from negative emotion, low neuroticism, and openness to experience.

IQ tests are more psychologically rigorous and reliable than any other phenomenon that has been discovered by social sciences.

The military has been studying IQ since 1919. A law was passed which said that if you have an IQ less than 83 you cannot be inducted into the armed services! Ten percent of people have an IQ of 83 or less.

There is no relationship whatsoever between intelligence and virtue!

Is Jordan Peterson's popularity evidence that Leftism is in decline?

In The Atlantic (of all places), Caitlin Flanagan dares to examine

Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jordan Peterson
The Canadian psychology professor’s stardom is evidence that leftism is on the decline—and deeply vulnerable.

Read it here.

Targeting Jordan Peterson

At The Tablet, Wesley Yang writes about the Jordan Peterson phenomenon.

...Peterson is both an archetypal victim and beneficiary of these polarized times. In less than two years he has become, with the exception of the American president, perhaps the single most loathed person by the journalistic and intellectual classes in Canada and the United States. He has also become, by orders of magnitude, the most widely disseminated lecturer in the history of the world. He is the sole possessor of a personal platform many multiples the size of all his detractors combined. He does not rely on the gatekeepers of the progressive consensus for his livelihood; indeed he prospers precisely by flouting it. It was his very success in managing this feat at the outset that made it urgent to target him, thereby ramping up the cycle of escalation that has made his platform as enormous as it has become.

...that Peterson doesn’t actually hold the opinions ascribed to him doesn’t matter at all to the keepers of the social media consensus. They’ll just keep repeating false claims, based mainly on cherry-picked quote fragments and evidence-free assertions, until they harden into social fact, immune from correction or clarification.

We are living through a time of pervasive rhetorical overkill and genuine fear. In times of extremism, moderation itself can come to seem the greater enemy to those ideologically possessed.

...So what does Peterson actually believe? He has consistently defended the moral position that the “individual is sovereign over the group,” a unique feature of Anglo-American political theory and practice that holds that citizens hold their rights against the state rather than through it, which is inscribed into our founding documents, and helps to account for the remarkable capacity of societies built around its doctrines to accommodate high levels of diversity while remaining democratic. The underlying sovereignty of individuals forces state power to operate against a hard constraint that limits coercion, and gives individuals the means by which to push back.

Read more here.

A new Great Awakening?

Bookworm writes,

...Across the spectrum of genders, colors, and socio-economic status, young people are relentlessly indoctrinated into believing that their country is a greedy, oppressive place, guilty of sins past and present, and that the world is facing an apocalyptic ending as boiling seas rise and inundate parched land.

...The cultural Marxist claim that western civilization is inherently flawed thanks to colonialism, racism, and sexism (all of which are the poisonous fruit of the Judeo-Christian tradition), has battered Western European nations into a suicidal level of intellectual submission.

...The Trump administration is making significant headway undoing the political damage the Obama administration caused, but how does one undo generations of self-loathing amongst Americans? How does one tell young people that this is a great country, with equality of opportunity for those willing to work hard? How does one help the despairing drug addicts break free? How does one get people trained in anger and hatred to stop and look at the blessings around them?

Bookworm recently attended a Jordan Peterson book-signing in San Francisco.

Peterson is a great speaker. He’s the college lecturer everyone dreamed of having: Clear, interesting, energetic, erudite, funny and, above all, honest. This is a man who speaks his truth (and, indeed, one of his rules is “Tell the truth” or, if you’re not sure what the truth is, at least don’t lie). For two hours, with passion and wit, he shared incredibly complex, important ideas with us, riffing through religion, literature, psychology, common sense, and politics. He is a polymath who used his incredibly breadth of knowledge to infuse new life into ideas about self-improvement.

What matters greatly is that Peterson is not offering the cheap and easy self-improvement, self-realization, and self-actualization that characterized the 1970s, and that still haunts the self-help aisle in any library or bookstore. Al Franken perfectly summed up that type of self-improvement with Stuart Smalley’s catch-phrase, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and, gosh darn it!, people like me.” Vapid affirmations are part of what weakened the American psyche, paving the way for safe spaces, triggering, and the politics of perpetual offense.

For Peterson, recognizing that you are an individual worthy of respect is only the beginning. That idea isn’t the end of the self-examination, but only the beginning: Every person inherently being a worthy child of God but it’s after acknowledging this reality that the real work begins. To optimize your potential, says Peterson, you have to stand up straight, organize your surroundings, treat yourself with dignity and respect, choose friends who value and cultivate the best in you not the worst, raise likable children, and have to make yourself a better person every day. These were just some of the messages Peterson gave the crowd.

Peterson ended his talk by telling us two things that transcend the individual and that affect society as a whole: (1) people must do the hard work of making themselves right before they can impose themselves on the world and (2) they must tell the truth or, if they cannot tell the truth, the must not lie.

The first notion is aimed at evil doers — people such as the Sandy Hook or Parkland School killers — who embrace and cultivate their unhappiness and bitterness until it grows to be such a force that they are determined to impose it upon the world. Peterson says that we have an ethical obligation to fix ourselves and not become that person.

I see this concept as consistent with Dennis Prager’s insistence that happiness is a serious problem. As a religious man, Prager believes God gave humans the unique ability to think their way to happiness. In this we differ from animals, who can only react to their immediate circumstances. Because we have this special gift, it is wasteful and disrespectful to God, to ourselves, and to those in our orbit, not to cultivate it. Only when you have squared yourself away ethically, when you have optimized your abilities and your values, should you start trying to manage the affairs of others.

The second notion Peterson raised is that truth is the dividing line between order and chaos. Peterson begins with the first words in the Bible because, separate from its religious meaning, the Bible also represents the core Western myth around which we’ve built our culture (the same culture that the Left seeks to destroy). In Genesis’s first chapter, God confronts chaos, speaks truth (“light,” “sky,” “water,” “land”), and by doing so creates order and meaning in the world.

Lies are chaotic. Truth is clarifying. To the extent that we speak the truth, we align ourselves with reality and order. This is why, Peterson says, it is so important that we have free speech. Government coerced speech too often forces people to live in world of lies, lies that will inevitably collapse, bringing the system down with them. These lies also force people into moral contortions that pave the way to Auschwitz, the Gulags, and the re-education camps. Government has the power to invade the most inviolable core of every individual. That is the fundamental evil of Marxism. At least, that was my takeaway.

...Since I’m not shy, I approached a group of three people — a long-haired, swarthy man in a suit; a computer programmer type; and a gender fluid person with a buzz cut — and said to them, “Hi, I notice you’re all younger than I am and I’m wondering what attracted you to this event.” What all three had to say was that they were drawn to Peterson because he is a polymath who relies on myriad sources to help make sense of the world, because he offers genuinely useful advice for them to improve their lives, and because he speaks the truth.

...Which brings me to the hopeful view that I have after attending. He and Rubin are interested in freedom, individual rights and free intellectual inquiry. They bring humor and respect to their show, and that will always win out. The regressive left that Peterson is not shy of condemning has fear, intimidation, censorship and the denial of common sense and individual experience on their side. When you have freedom, happiness and humor on your side you will win.

...I was witness to a spiritual revival that is reaching out to people across the political, social, racial, and gender categories that currently divide Americans. In a riven society plagued by self-doubt, self-loathing, and existential despair, Peterson and other members of the “Dark Web” offer the possibility of individual salvation.

Read more here.

12 Conservative Principles

Maybe young people have been talked to about rights enough for about the next fifteen decades!

Tell the truth. Take responsibility!

Cultural appropriation is a tremendously ill-defined pathological concept.

The ten most powerful journalists in Canada have told Jordan that they censor themselves. They are afraid to say and write what they think! They also told Jordan that they were being censored by their editors.

He's for individual responsibility, so he must be stopped now!

Jordan Peterson (Channel 4 News via YouTube)

Clara Fox reports at National Review,

Canadian professor Jordan Peterson has been tarred as a racist for ridiculing the concepts of white privilege and white guilt.

...He argues that the victim-status mentality can lead (and often has led) to genocide. He refers to the treatment of the so-called kulaks in the Soviet Union in the 1920s: “They were the most productive element of the agricultural strata in Russia. And they were virtually all killed, raped, and robbed by the collectivists who insisted that because they showed signs of wealth, they were criminals and robbers.”

...During the Q&A portion of a lecture Peterson gave in Los Angeles in January, a man in the crowd asked how Peterson responds to those who say he is starting a cult. His short answer summed up his philosophy nicely: “Can you have a cult of individuals?”

Read more here.

Got him!

As Jordan Peterson puts down Leftists for their "compassion-masking uselessness," a lefty challenges him again and again in this interview by someone named Jonathan (I didn't catch his last name because of his Canadian accent). Jonathan says to Jordan, "You don't have any sociological imagination!" "You don't have any vision of how the world ought to be or any sense of how we get there! You just want people to tidy their room! When you go into the political and sociological realm, you express this enormous latent rage. I wonder if that is because you don't know the material as well in those realms?" In reply Jordan mumbled something about iterations. See if you understand, and, if so, please help me!

"The city of God"

Jordan Peterson:

I don't think people understand how radical and transgressive the universities actually are.

The vision of the Left: "We're one execution away from Utopia!"

If you think of yourself as the victim, then you don't think of yourself as the oppressor! (and you haven't even begun your journey on the road to wisdom!)

Fix yourself!

Dennis Prager does a brief interview with Jordan Peterson

Canada is like the US if you chopped off the extremes. We're middle of the road, says Jordan Peterson. Jordan believes we are becoming unmoored. There is an epidemic of nihilism, cynicism, depression and resentment. People are "not well situated" with regard to what they think is right and wrong.

He wrote his current Amazon best-selling book, Twelve Rules for Life, "to enable people to reunite with the best of their traditions."

Face the world with courage! Confront the world forthrightly! Stand up straight and stop slouching!

Prager asks, "Do you regard yourself as essentially secular or essentially religious? Jordan: "religious, but I'll make the case secularly whenever that is possible."

A driven man overcomes addictions to excel in his chosen field

"It is not easy for the opponents of truth to have a battle with truth!"

James Damore gives his first interview since being fired by Google. And guess who is the interviewer? Dr. Jordan Peterson noted evolutionary psychologist who was banned from Google's YouTube for a while! Why was Damore fired? "Perpetuating gender stereotypes!" He observed that the culture at Google tries to silence any dissenting view. "I don't know how they expect to silence so many engineers and intelligent people!"

What does Damore want? "Open discussion, so the ideologues can't just have their way!"

Dr. Peterson warns him that "When someone causes trouble, the first response of the media and public is to jump on you and allege "there's something wrong with you." But Damore has no history of trouble-making. Peterson advises him to "steel yourself," stay calm and composed like you are in this interview." "You are not the kind of person who can be easily transformed into a villain!"

Peterson then goes point-by-point through the document that got Damore fired from Google.

Do you have a child who tries to provoke you? How do you get him to control himself?