Live Feed and Open Thread: Mass Shooting in Lewiston, Maine

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has been the Managing Editor of Ordinary Times since 2018, is a widely published opinion writer, and appears in media, radio, and occasionally as a talking head on TV. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter@four4thefire. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast. Subscribe to Andrew'sHeard Tell Substack for free here:

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13 Responses

  1. Saul Degraw
    Ignored
    says:

    The suspect was apparently a big fan of people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr, Jordan Peterson, and other peddlers of a combination of male grievance, far right dank memes and conspiracy, and radicalization in general.

    Insert obligatory Onion headline here.Report

    • Pinky in reply to Saul Degraw
      Ignored
      says:

      Jordan Peterson opposes all those things you just listed. This is another “Saul says the opposite of reality” comments.Report

      • DavidTC in reply to Pinky
        Ignored
        says:

        You think Jordan Peterson opposes male grievance?
        https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html

        Doesn’t radicalize?
        https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/youtube-far-right-radicalization-study-877061/

        Or believe conspiracies? Because he has plenty of them about climate change measurements.

        And, he…rather infamously, has a lot of far-right memes made of him…I guess he _himself_ doesn’t meme, so wouldn’t be a ‘peddler’ of it, but Saul did say ‘a combination’Report

        • Pinky in reply to DavidTC
          Ignored
          says:

          I don’t think a person can peddle grievance while telling people that they have the power to change their lives. His message is the opposite of male grievance. He often talks about how men haven’t been told to fix their lives. He also talks against radicalization and the far right, which he sees as a symptom of the decline of masculinity, an excuse rather than a cure. He’s probably a lot of people’s last exit ramp from radicalization, and yeah, when you appeal to broken people you’re going to have some broken fans.

          I don’t know all his views, so I don’t know if he believes any conspiracy stuff, but I’d say that he has the opposite temperament.

          I’d say check him out. It’s not going to be easy, because he’s a Jungian, but there are enough videos that you can get started. I mean, we can both agree that a perceived right-winger isn’t going to get the best review in the NYT or Rolling Stone, and that journalists typically don’t go deep, right?Report

          • DavidTC in reply to Pinky
            Ignored
            says:

            I don’t think a person can peddle grievance while telling people that they have the power to change their lives.

            It seems like that would depend on how he tells them to change their life, aka, what he says about what is wrong with it.

            And he has a lot of very obvious neutral suggestions to help people. Keep your environment tidy, your appearance neat, be generally polite, all these could from literally any self-help person, no one has any issue with those, so let’s skip past those and ask ourselves what he says about _deeper_ problems.

            And it appears that a good chunk of his philosophy is that the world should naturally exist under patriarchy, as men are order and women are chaos.

            To quote him: “You know you can say, ‘Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn’t be human anymore. They’d be something else. They’d be transhuman or something. We wouldn’t be able to talk to these new creatures.”

            He also talks against radicalization and the far right, which he sees as a symptom of the decline of masculinity, an excuse rather than a cure.

            Talking about the decline of masculinity _is_ male grievance. At least, how he does it.

            He’s probably a lot of people’s last exit ramp from radicalization, and yeah, when you appeal to broken people you’re going to have some broken fans.

            LOL. He’s not only the exit ramp, he’s constructed a good chunk of the highway _leading_ to that exit ramp, and if you want to argue that a few people manage to exit at his ramp, whatever, but he’s also made it extremely easy to follow along the path he built and _keep going_ past where he is.

            I don’t know all his views, so I don’t know if he believes any conspiracy stuff, but I’d say that he has the opposite temperament.

            ..his entire philosophy, at a very base level, is full of nonsensical conspiracies, although admittedly most of those are incredibly stupid and have no relevance to anything. In fact, you called him Jungian, and he is…and…you do realize that a lot of Jungian stuff is total gibberish, right? It’s a better _starting place_ than Freud, but it is still gibberish.

            He constantly brings up ancient myths, and then attempts to hang entire structures of meaning on them. It’s basically evolutionary psychology but _even dumber_ because it’s about things everyone knows are false, instead of evolutionary psychology, which is at least about things everyone wrongly thinks are true.

            Or, whatever. We can argue how true Jungian stuff is, (although we really can’t because it’s incredibly vague, it’s sorta the horoscope of psychology, you can bend any archtype to mean whatever you want), but I have no problem with people believing in it. What I do have a problem with is people who take it past ‘Here is how humans often reasoned’ instead ‘And this thing we do is How It Should Be and Why We Should Patriarchy’. The problem is not the _theory_, the problem is ‘putting it into practice’.

            I’ve mentioned this before, when talking about conspiracy theories. It’s why no one has a problem with cryptid theorists…who the heck cares if someone believes in Bigfoot? That does not impact their behavior. That’s completely different than some conspiracy theory that causes them to take horrible political positions or even storm the Capitol building. Or, to get back on topic, that some ancient story reveals ‘archtypes’ about men and women that, in turn, should be used to control how we live today.

            But, yes, he also is a climate change denier _and_ recently has wandered into vaccine denial, or at least sitting _next_ to RFK Jr’s vaccine denial.Report

            • Pinky in reply to DavidTC
              Ignored
              says:

              I’d encourage anyone who’s interested to give Peterson a listen, with the awareness that he’s a complex thinker and it can take a little time and effort.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Pinky
                Ignored
                says:

                And then, after you’re listened to a couple of hour or so of him, feel free to listen to Cody have fun taking him apart:

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSNWkRw53Jo&t=1588s

                Note that video starts with climate change, and then goes into his anti-trans stuff, but the link I provided is where he starts dismantling Peterson’s philosophical nonsense.Report

              • Pinky in reply to DavidTC
                Ignored
                says:

                I’m about 40 minutes in. Can we agree on the following:

                – Peterson uses the lobster example to illustrate the idea that hierarchies have been part of nature for millions of years.
                – If the video’s research is correct about lobsters (and I don’t know either way), it would undermine Peterson’s credibility and his claim about hierarchies.
                – If the video is correct about apes and their hierarchy (and it is, because this is common knowledge), then it restores Peterson’s claim about hierarchies.

                Also, I just got through the part that presents Peterson’s hierarchy as right-wing, but it seemed to be clips of him explaining the different role of the right and left. He’s said that he sees the left side as being too strong in our culture, which is why he’s pushing back, but the video doesn’t seem to make the case that it’s an unbalanced framework. Does it make it further on?Report

              • Philip H in reply to Pinky
                Ignored
                says:

                The man is a misogynist. He states – repeatedly – that the physical world we live in (since it was built by men) wouldn’t exist without women, even though more and more women are entering the trades every day. He can’t see women as even complimentary to men, much less equal, or even superior – which it also turns out they are in many fields of endeavor. And at least on video he comes across as arrogant to the point of being obnoxious. He’s not a serious academic anymore either.

                No thanks.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Pinky
                Ignored
                says:

                I’d also recommend the first 43 seconds of this:

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtZAlhq4iQAReport

    • Chip Daniels in reply to Saul Degraw
      Ignored
      says:

      The Aggrieved Elite who live at the apex of human society and history, yet are insane with rage that *certain* unworthy people have been accorded cultural cachet by other elites.Report

  2. North
    Ignored
    says:

    The tree of the Second Amendment must be refreshed with increasing frequency with the blood of innocents and the nut cases who kill them.

    American gun culture is, easily, the area where I least understand my mother country.Report

  3. Chip Daniels
    Ignored
    says:

    Lets keep telling ourselves that this state of affairs is worth it.

    That even thought our children live in mind-numbing terror and anxiety, at least we have the freedom to own a Bushmaster.Report

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