The event we've all been waiting for...

Devil, will we be splitting a hotel room for this event or booking separately?

Wish I could afford to go. I'd love to watch two great minds hash it out. One might not agree with everything they say but one can easily respect the reasoning they bring behind the thoughts they share. It's preferable to have intelligent people debate vs mobs in violence.

It depends on a couple things.

Do you plan on going full blown Marxist and in an effort to show solidarity with the oppressed working poor, you want to book a $40/night room? Sorry, but those are the kinds of hotels no one steals towels from for a reason...

#ewwww

I'm down with splitting a room, but what's the income disparity between us? If mine is appreciably higher, does this mean I will be expected to contribute more because I can presumably afford more?

Or if my income falls within the 1% of Dawgtalkers, am I expected to subsidize your room 100%, and provide quality lodging, presumably a La Quinta with a hot and cold continental breakfast?



This would be fun to attend. I really hate I wasn't able to go see JBP when he came through North Carolina. It's ok though because I've seen enough of his appearances I can almost deliver his speech myself.


I really do think it's something that people get excited to see two intellectuals have a conversation whether it be these two or others. And I do mean conversation because they aren't events where someone is trying to "win". What will be fascinating about this discussion is that I think these two will have some of the same criticisms of things, but arrive to them from totally different origins.

62 waged, 35 thru capital.

We could go the Marxist route, but my friend it does not involve a hotel. No, it involves finding someone on Couchsurfing.com Maybe seeing if a co-op would take us in for some hours of work. It is in Toronto, so the odds are likely. The socialist way would be for one of us to subsidize the ticket, however we could throw a capitalist spin on it, by making the subsidy a rebate. But my comrade, we live in a capitalist society, so we could live like capitalists. I am fine to stay in a nice hotel, and as you know from my being a Marxist, that stealing minute merchandise from a million or billion dollar company is practically my favorite hobby of all time. However, there will no raiding of the mini fridge, cuz hotels are too strict now, they run a better sting operation there than most police stations do


I think this event will be more funny than fun. I certainly would love to see it, but tickets sold out under an hour, and the only listed ones I saw were $500, apparently a glitch on the site, because tickets were $50+. Now they're reselling for near $500 lol

Yes, I believe they will have a conversation, because they agree on a lot of the peripheral things. What will be interesting is to see how they react to claims against capitalism and communism.

What do you think of the topic btw? Who is happier:People under capitalism or communism? I thought it was an interesting choice of topic. Zizek, being a Lacan enthusiast and a Psychoanalyst, so he believes the field's axiom that people do not want to be happy. I can't speak of JBP, but he doesn't strike me as the type to put a major importance on happiness. Nor does he really strike me as a happy type of guy. What are his thoughts there? It'll be interesting to hear, I'm sure Zizek will take it off the rails in the first ten minutes. It's very hard for him to stay on one topic for too long.

So Trump Tower it is!

This is going to sound weird I think to some of his critics, but I would describe Peterson as a realist with a really dark bent. His baseline is that life is by it's nature is a brutal and tragic experience. This isn't to say he's pessimistic. He doesn't seem to view things in a lense of pessimism or optimism I thinkbecause they implicitly are pre-determined outcomes. His book 12 Rules for Life is about empowering individuals to take control of their own lives. In that empowerment you become equipped to confront and even overcome the tragedy and brutality that life throws at you.

You are correct that he doesn't place much of an importance on "happiness". I think he views it as a largely useless endeavor because happiness isn't something you can really define. If you can't define something, how can you ever really attain it?

This isn't to say he dispenses with the concept of well being. Quite the opposite. In order to find fulfillment, you need to have meaning. We find meaning, according to him, in the adoption of responsibility.

It's the link between those 3 concepts fulfillment, meaning, and responsibility that is what draws people to him.

As for the topic of who is happier: those under Marxism or Capitalism?

It's all relative to your position in either isn't it? If you're on the top of either you're considerably more happy than those on the bottom of either. Now if you compare those on the bottom with each other, you may see one is better off than the other, but they aren't any "happier" because they are still on the bottom.

Peterson is an evolved form of the typical “Obama is a Marxist according to my chain email group!” type that can find a thesaurus to use.

Same schtick, but more of a refined type that at least tries to dress up bigotry as platable.

He's literally never dressed up bigotry to be more palatable LOL

Alright, you're about to make me do this...

Jordan Peterson, disrespectful towards the LGBTQ+ Crowd:
Link

Jordan Peterson, Nazi apologist:

I can keep going down the rabbit hole if you wish. I didn't even mention any of his weird "men are oppressed individuals!" nonsense.

Looks like it's America's time to steal from the Trumps instead of the other way around

Thanks for answering. I didn't think that Peterson particularly cared about happiness, and I would've asserted that had it not felt so rude to an onlooker. Most philosophers worth their weight do little with the idea of happiness. I can think of the Big 3 Greeks noting how horrible happiness is, a fleeting desire at best, at worst a distraction to the world at large.

I might have to read 12 rules for life. Peterson interests me more than anyone else in the IDW, because we come from the same background of psychology. And while he's a clinical psychiatrist, his biggest influence is Carl Jung, who while I don't like more than Freud and Lacan, I can certainly respect. Many of my favorite psychologists have been Jungists. I want to see how he differs from Jungians like Hillman, who also centered life around conflict and how we could live with it, generally speaking.

As for the topic:

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how they tackle the concept, because it's so subjective and immeasurable. For Zizek, as a Lacanian, he believes that happiness is a desire like thirst or hunger and it is not concrete. It cannot be sated nor quelled, but fulfilled only for a second. To take it a step further, Pascal believed that people are at their happiness thinking of future happiness. To use Bezos as an example, you know, he's wildly successful, extraordinarily rich, married with children?, he's living the life compared to the rest of us. And yet, he still desires happiness in the form of his neighbor's wife. Now I don't care about adultery and things like that, people can be who they want to be in the private sphere and public sphere and I don't care. So I do not want to get into a debate about the immorality of cheating, just to point out that even for a person "who has everything" they still desire something more. So it seems like a weird debate, because neither capitalism nor communism or socialism can or should sate human desires. Nor do the debators seem to put great value on happiness. So I expect it to go off the rails within the first 30 minutes.

Why would someone who thinks the world is an evil and cruel place care about happiness? I mean isn't happiness just a fools paradise that no person should actually expect to achieve?

Your ignorance on the subject matter betrays you Luke.

Peterson has done a lot of study on the psychology of how the atrocities under Nazism and the Soviet Union came to fruition. Neither of those could have happened on such a scale without normally decent people either helping or turning a blind eye. There was a concerted effort on the part of the regimes to normalize what was going on in order to get the population at large complicit.

If you cared enough to do even the most basic of investigation you'd notice that Peterson's entire criticism of the philosophy and tactics of the the extreme Left and Right are almost exclusively based on a concern that they will ultimately lead to the above mentioned atrocities.

You also would have learned that the family of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the author of The Gulag Archipelago asked Peterson to write a forward for the anniversary edition of the book. I'll let you do a bit of research as to what the book is about. But suffice it to say, a guy who writes the forward to something like that is the last person to normalize or condone such behavior.

Good post

Yeah, if they try to stick to the marqueed premise then it probably will go off the rails. I suspect that it may be more fruitful to discuss the merits of the individual vs. the collective and vice versa. I think these guys may be better geared to discuss the philosophies behind each more so than to try and champion the systems.

There's a lot of "what's never been normal before being normalized now" going on right before our very eyes. I wonder why he isn't warning us about that?

He is. In his criticism of identity politics. In his stance against Canadian Bill C16. In his commentary about the push to characterize all masculinity as "toxic".

Hey BTW CHS, I wanted to give you props on this. Originally you seemed pretty skeptical and maybe even dismissal of Peterson and what he was about. Since then it's pretty clear that you've spent a little more time checking him out and recognizing there is some depth to what he brings to the table. Whether or not they are things you agree with is a separate issue which is fine. There are a couple things I'm critical of him myself.

One of those things I suppose could just be a matter of him needing to be clearer on the subject, but considering how much he's talked about the effort to be precise in what he is saying, I'll say it's fair to not give him the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure you've seen where he pushes back against the standard oppressive patriarchy narrative. I think he brings a solid argument against it. But I do think he comes across as being dismissive, or discounts the impact of how often there are real examples of gender discrimination and how much of a barrier there can be. Personally I'd like to see if there is more to his position on this because I don't think it's sufficient enough.

j/c

It’s unfortunate that some of the best minds on the right like JP are so deeply rooted in religion. I think most leftist are turned off before they ever even read or try to comprehend the messages of guys like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson because of this. While I am not a religious man, I like to think I have the ability to separate their arguments from their ideology and dismiss arguments that are obviously 100% ideologically driven.

At the same time I enjoy principled men who have thought at great length about their own philosophies. This may be a personality flaw of my own but when I hear the screeching leftist rhetoric, I hear parroting, I do not hear independent thought and nuanced opinions like you would expect to hear from people who have done a lot of soul searching on the topics. I see and hear it as more of a “Toe the company line” rhetoric more than I see it as an individual who has come to these conclusions on their own. They see one side as “bad” so they immerse themselves into the other side, no matter how absurd they sound, hey at least they aren’t “bad” (goes for right and left).

I often find myself enjoying things written by leftists which turns on a dime when I hear them start parroting over used clichés unnecessarily. Almost to signal to their base that they are still good and safe to read. Literally like pacifying a colicky baby, as if to say I know I am saying some things that I personally believe you might not like, but its ok, here are your preferred clichés, shhhhh hush baby, its ok.

It speaks volumes that you find one side has such great principles and call other side "screeching leftist rhetoric".

Yes, it speaks volumes. If you actually think one side or the other has the market cornered on logic and principles you're most certainly caught up in identity politics.

Identity politics? I don’t see how you could draw Identity politics from what I wrote. At no point did I cite race, religion or party as a basis to which I drew these conclusions.

I explained that the way you described the two different sides speaks volumes.

Zizek won by KO in the 3rd round.

https://www.dawgtalkers.net/ubbthreads.ph...son#Post1578039

That's the JBP thread, this one is about the debate he had with Zizek.

I think my favorite line of the night was in response to JBP saying that there are always hierarchies in life (Somehow meant to dispute Marxism), Zizek says 'Lobsters have hierarchies, but no authority'.

I'm going to try and get back to the debate over night shift this weekend and give it due attention. I did watch JBP's opening and a little of Zizek's. I do have to say so far my man JBP didn't start off so hot. His points seemed quite disjointed and I'm not fully convinced he prepared sufficiently for this event. That's not an excuse for him, he should own it.