begin again

My mama is in the hospital battling MRSA-complicated pneumonia for the third time in six months; my dad was recently diagnosed with ocular sarcoidosis (probably, we don't know for sure) (other, much worse things were excluded, so it's either ocular sarcoidosis or "a weird, scary, specific thing your body does that doctors can't explain"). Your continued patience is appreciated.

I'm sad I blogged about Jordan Peterson. I would delete the post, if I deleted posts. Peterson's "ideas" and sniveling sympathy for wounded entitlement are so unoriginal as to border upon the cliché; even his name sounds like it came out of an airport paperback. I don't want to get that on me. Watching ostensibly sane adults line up four abreast to excuse the malignancy of this prick, who's kept up nights by visions of feminists & transpeople stealing the magic beans of self-actualization from innocent, kingly North American bigots — just in case it turns out he goes Mainstream — is nearly as excruciating as looking at Cletus Safari photojournamalisms of rusted-out, abandoned steelworks whose blank-eyed degenerate gaze is meant to indict anyone who enjoys flavored coffee. & as though finding yourself at a cultural or economic disadvantage is a quality reason invest in a worldview informed by irrational prejudice, right? This is of course why we all excuse the anti-American animus that exists in Middle Eastern & South American countries that have been excoriated by acts of enlightened Western humanitarian warfare haha just kidding. Also, I initially thought Peterson was LARPing Joseph Campbell for an audience too vapid to read even works of popular academic criticism, but it turns out Joseph Campbell was also an evil racist anti-Semitic prick whose own patriarchate sympathies were only tempered by his belief in the Sacred Feminine. Fuck him too.

It isn't fair for Jordan Peterson to think he has the right to write the story of my (or anyone's) life based on notes he took while observing reading someone's observations of lobsters, or creating psychomaps of fairytales (which are themselves a fallen form of art, irreparably tampered with by paternalistic capitalists who altered their form and function). The fact that some people think he might have a point goes farther than any amount of evo-psych ouija-board "science" to suggest that the Enlightenment's primary achievement was aiding monkeys to understand how important it is to comb their hair. (Or hide it under a powdered wig.)

Tomorrow night I'll be back with a post that has nothing whatever to do with goddamned Jordan Peterson.

of things unknown (but longed for still)

EDIT: Fixed a duplicated link & added a new Jordan Peterson fandom article. Because who doesn't want to read more things about Jordan Peterson's Svengaliesqe hold on White North America's precious reserve of pathetic male morons?

I made a new layout! Sort of! I bought a background at CreativeMarket & stuck a rabbit on it in PS — but Blogger destroyed its children's-book majesty by reducing its resolution, and now it looks like a bunch of wavy blobs on a fuzzy dark blue background. Obviously Blogger is trying to make me give up my love affair with the elderly LJ-style old-timey c. 2008 layouts and choose one of the new ones. YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO TRY HARDER THAN THAT, BLOGGER.

Actually, no it isn't. I'll pick one of the new ones later. I tried them a few months ago & thought they were fine, but also felt they encouraged a surfeit of image posts. Maybe I can make something work for my hectic "once every eighteen months" posting schedule.

I was going to write about Jordan Peterson, last night. Does anybody need me to write about Jordan Peterson? Everybody's writing about Jordan Peterson. He's a brainless prick who makes millions of dollars every year off other, even more brainless pricks. Peterson hates transpeople. He seems suspiciously jealous of housewives. His primary contributions to the Principles of Western Thought are: 1.) women are best served by being receptacles for men's penises and feelings, and 2.) (white) men built the world and deserve to be the exclusive beneficiaries of its wealth & wonders. I think those are very odd concepts to carry into the marketplace: "Hey, gals, queers, and brown people, why not participate in your own oppression? Things would go so much more smoothly that way! Everyone would be so much happier! Especially straight white men, who of course are the only group that in congregation amount to "everybody.'" Then again, I don't make $100K a month in donations from butthurt social media trolls who yearn for the state of holy matrimony so they can have someone to officially oppress, so maybe no one should listen to me.

The thing that really bothers me about Jordan Peterson — aside from the fact that he lives at the top of the slipperiest slope in the Whole Universe, at the bottom of which lies Death — is that he doesn't seem to have any command of the material he's claimed authority over, and nobody cares. He's like the Dan Brown of mythography. He's much, much worse than Dan Brown, actually, who embodied the sacred blood of the Living Lord in the person of a female cryptographer. That's not nothing. That's letting your little light shine, is what that is. I apologize to Dan Brown (although the attempt to use the female body as the unsullied seat of holiness is neither a feminist nor a novel practice; but I really do appreciate the effort). Peterson despises "postmodernism," and blames it for unlawfully shaking the monkeytree of white male privilege — but postmodernist deconstruction is the only lens through which his viciously absurd characterizations of world myth could actually work. "Superordinate" mythological artifacts, bro? Where the fuck did they come from?

Peterson thinks "chaos" is female, and that order & hierarchy are male. What the fuck does that even mean? When he refers to some property or group of properties as "chaos," does it mean "that abundance of formless biological constituents from which life emerges, in the womb and in the wild"? Or does he mean "feminists holding signs and shouting at me"? I think that distinction could be important. I also have a problem understanding how men can qualify as agents of order when Peterson also believes they have to be coaxed out of committing violence by having continual legal access to women's slimy untrustworthy vaginas at all times. Despite their innate competence and command of order, apparently, men are not fully in control of their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. They are, you might say, not as fully human as women, whose natural impulse is to tame our innate chaos and become silent supportive infant-fondling agreeable housewives. Now, I’m no professor, but even in its deformed native context that shit looks like it’s exactly ass-backwards.

It’s magical thinking of the most objectionably fanfictional order to suggest that any group of people embody chaos as a function of biology, of course, but if we’ve absolutely got to do it, the only choice for the job is men. Women’s bodies operate like clockwork. We are attuned to the moon and the tides. When we’re healthy, we work as well as a calendar — a decaying and artificial construct men devised to count the days we mark naturally with our bodies. Our wombs are advanced ecosystems that are so stable they can (and do) grow people. Men, on the other hand, are an ad hoc arrangement of hormones and impulses; there's no male birth control available because male bodies don't operate in regular, predictable cycles. Men are agents of violence and destruction. Men are incapable of avoiding physical harm even when they want to; their protuberant genitalia damage vaginas even during consensual sex. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Jordan Peterson.

I'm in my feelings, a little. I don't actually think men are innately chaotic, of course. I don't think women are sacred microcosms of the planet. I don't think men and women are even fundamentally (or practically) different, to be honest. I do think that if enough men insist on making women their enemies, we will have no choice but to destroy them. 😘

Here are some other people who have written about Jordan Peterson, professionally and/or humorously:

• The Intellectual We Deserve @ Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson
• Current Affairs’ Comparative Mythology Exam @ Current Affairs, Lyta Gold (fave)
• Is Jordan Peterson The Stupid Man’s Smart Person? @ Maclean's, Tabatha Southey
• Jordan Peterson, the obscure Canadian psychologist turned right-wing celebrity, explained @ Vox, Zack Beauchamp
• Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy @ The NYT, Nellie Bowles
• Wonksplainer: Who Is Jordan Peterson And Why Is He The Worst? @ Wonkette, Robyn Pennacchia (h/t BBB)
• Jordan Peterson Somehow Worse Today Than Yesterday @ Wonkette, Robyn Pennacchia (h/t BBB)
• Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism @ NYR Daily, Pankaj Mishra
• Reconsider the Lobster @ The Times Literary Supplement, Kate Manne
• The religious hunger that drives Jordan Peterson’s fandom @ Vox, Tara Isabella Burton (ETA)
• Two Ways Of Responding To Conservatives @ Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson (ETA)
• Jordan Peterson’s Flimsy Philosophy of Life @ Psychology Today, Paul Thagard (ETA)

& here are a couple of Crooked Timber posts (one of which links to Beauchamp's Vox article, and maybe also to Bowles's piece in the NYT, I can't remember). Crooked Timber is great, actually. Lots of straight white men there. Probably hardly any of them are even rapists.