I get what you're saying, but I think you are giving more credit than due; Jordan Peterson's image, like many people that appear on tv, is carefully crafted.
I didn't used to think much negative off him until I saw what his influence was doing to people. For instance a guy living in my street, quit his job (nurse) and didn't go on a $3000 pre-paid vacation, because Jordan Peterson had inspired him to do "the most meaningful thing", which was apparantly a goal to write a top- 10 hit song. Surprisingly this did not pan out and he's gone through his entire savings trying. I'm sure it felt very meaningful. Now, this guy is an idiot, of course, but it's a common theme with people that talk about Peterson starry eyed.
And I suppose you can blame the followers instead of the leader, in a life of brian kind of way for being easily swayed. But unlike brian in monty python's movie, Jordan Peterson actively seeks out for people to follow his rules for life. I think a little pushback against the constant ascribing of positive qualities on jordan peterson is warranted and yes, justified. Particularly when the first advice he gave people was to do his paid test, the second advice was to buy his book and the third was to follow his daughter's diet advice and go all-carnivore.
JBP's image is not carefully crafted and not everyone's is. At no point since he's gotten famous has he made any dramatic shifts in belief or attitude (like Milo or Candace Owens). People who craft their image carefully tend to actually not be that careful at all and you can get a good hard whiff of their narcissism pretty easily, just like how Milo and Candace are so clearly insincere. I'm interested in how you think the "real" JBP differs from the one we see on youtube and occasionally taped interviews?
No one is disagreeing that pushback needs to be made against JBP in some fashion (and not the kind SJWs are hoping for). It's just that he's not a sociopath. Even some asshole lolcows aren't sociopaths, but the second they are a shithead and do something dumb or bad, people forever interpret everything they do in an uncharitable light, and I think only very few people or lolcows should be viewed that way. I keep naming Milo and Candace because I think they genuinely are awful people and they're probably capable of doing much worse things than they've yet been put in the position to do.
I can't really comment on the test, I definitely think that's worth discussing but I'm out of my element on this and I'm not going to call JBP a conman or anything until I know all the details or context of that. From what I understand, he's not the only person involved in its creation, as a research scientist, he stands by it, and charging for psychometric tests is accepted by the psychology community even if it looks sketchy to people on the outside. Funding needs to come from research from somewhere and I doubt even JBP wants to do it all out of pocket. $10 is actually pretty cheap for any psychometric test. Whether it actually has scientific value is not something I have any knowledge of--but it's important to ask, so many such tests are garbage, Myers-Briggs being the most popular offender of junk science.
I actually agree with a majority of your points. I think a lot of really nasty people with lolcow threads getting popular to laugh at (because let's face it, theres a ton of schadenfreud in a scumbag getting roasted endlessly like all those youtube/twitter drama whores) has kind of skewed some people's views on what lolcows are.
Even a lot of the nasty people aren't as nasty as they're being made out to be I won't name names on them because it would start an off-topic argument with... the people dedicated to them, but I think some clearly are even if they haven't done as overt things as others, and again, I'll just point to Chris-chan as an example. He's more amoral animal than nefarious supervillian and we've all seen the bizarrely angry a-logs, though most aren't that extreme. The problems comes from scrutinizing people from every angle while already being hostile to them. But, IMO, it kills some of the comedy when people go too far, I wish people would realize that comedy should come first, lynch mob second. Then there's the people that just make fun of any random quirk they might have when nobody would give a shit outside of a lolcow context, but that's a different issue and at least that puts the comedy first.
Jordan Peterson isn't necessarily malicious. Most people and lolcows aren't. He definitely thinks he's doing the right thing (and in some cases like fighting censorship, he truly is) and he likely thinks his bizarre psychology stuff actually helps people. It doesn't help that his lobsterboys fawn over his every word and insist that he really is helpful, when his insight is usually just bizarre and somewhat antiquated.
I think people need to think of some cows as being in their own category where the subject themselves isn't the cow so much as their fans are, either individually or collectively. JBP is a prime example of that. I don't think JBP is malicious at all. But the JBP tent is a hilarious tent of cringe and verifiable wellspring of unadulterated manchild autism.
I think that's going a little too far. Most highly specialised academics keep to their circle and understand that "normies" won't understand their terminology. But that doesn't make every surgeon, PhD in biochemestry, or even PhD in psychology a lolcow.
The thing about Peterson is that he is actively trying to sell himself as public intellectual figure, and has very little self-awareness that what he says may not cope with "normie" or "scientific" reality. Even if it's not malicious, I do ask myself why he would go on such lenghts to make himself a public figure if this wasn't some sort of power trip for him. Hence, why I think the question about him from the interview about "his success being proof that he found vulnerable men to exploit" is not inappropriate to inquire on.
Look at Bret Weinstein in contrast. Yes, he went on the Rubin Report and was part of the outrage bubble with the whole Evergreen stuff, but the quietly kept to himself and didn't make an international brand out of his 5 minutes in limelight and even if he's a little quirky (hell, I think most of us are), I'm pretty sure he wouldn't get a cow thread.
Many scientists do do this when they can get a spotlight. Dawkins goes on about religion and I think Dawkins is almost entirely correct regarding everything he says there. I'm not going to blame JBP to use the limelight to talk about various things he's interested in. The internet thrust him into it and academics love sharing their ideas--their ideas are their value as a scientist and it's tied to their own feelings of self-worth. JBP has talked a great deal about his pet "Maps of Meaning" nonsense probably even more than the self-help stuff, which is tied to it.
Bret Weinstein wouldn't have caught on the internet anyway. He's too boring. JBP is not so boring, and way better at handling journalists in an interview. If there's one thing JBP genuinely impresses me over, it's how to handle sketchy journalists.
You want an example of a narcissistic self-inserting scientist on youtube, it's Gad Saad. But not JBP.
That's not to say that JBP isn't a moron on many things, the folktales example being prime evidence for that.
JBP can be summarized by understand how his own psychoanalytic stuff is sometimes viewed within modern psych departments: a goofy, cute little thing crafted by another era that somehow found its way to the present.
