https://quillette.com/2018/10/31/on-god-and-politics-comparing-zizek-and-peterson/
From a psychoanalytic standpoint, one might say God refused to any longer play the role of the Holy Father, deciding it was time for his creation to mature and live on without him. Žižek believes the deep lesson of this parable is that God sacrificed himself to the world so that people could be truly free; that it was now up to each individual to decide what to do with their life without moralizing interference from beyond. A true Christian community is one that takes this lesson seriously, and works to further God’s project of emancipation across the globe for all individuals. For Žižek, this of course means engaging in left-wing advocacy to free all from the oppression of capitalist ideology. It also means moving away from the substitute idols of identity politics, which offer false hope of a new transcendent horizon of meaning in lieu of the divine.
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/helen-lewis-jordan-peterson
Meetup quote 27:50
A new documentary coming out on him. https://www.shuthimdownfilm.com/media/
Part of this is clearly publicity. If you raise the funds to do a documentary you want to have it splash as large as possible so you rider the wave and the biggest waves we’ve got right now are the increasingly polarized culture war. If you’re on the left you are a communist looking to replay the scripts of Chairman Mao and Stalin, lock her up! If you are on the right you are a white power neo-nazi. There is no middle. There is no nuance. Everyone you meet on the street killed Jews or killed political enemies. Amazing how nice they can be at the store.
I’m told this documentary isn’t a hit piece but whether or not it isn’t you’d better have a trailer that revs up the machine.
JBP hit a nerve again with his twitter account. It was a tweet criticizing anti-semites but the response was “you lay spider eggs and then you’re surprised to be surrounded by spiders…” https://paulvanderklay.me/2018/10/30/jbp-three-bracket-tweet/
Have you ever tried to have a conversation with someone who catastrophizes? Every blemish is skin cancer, every belch food poisoning, every candidate is Hitler or Stalin.
Jonathan Haidt’s work has noted that culturally we have sown this. You win by building a following and the easiest way to build a following is to paint a group as evil and rally your base. Someone who disagrees isn’t simply wrong, they are evil and must be… But so far we have stopped short of declaring what must be done with the evil ones because once you go there the options get increasingly dark, cruel and limited. You must disempower them by taking away their vote. You must isolate them by taking away their voice. You must save the future from them by taking away first their freedom and then their life.
Anyone who catastrophizes need cognitive behavioral therapy which helps them gain a more accurate assessment of risk. They learn to stop indulging in their fears. Our political climate has no such therapist, or perhaps the patient simply wants to live within their drama.
The most remarkable and hated thing about Jesus was his refusal to kill or even marginalize his adversaries. Christianity said that the emperor was placed on his thrown by God. Bear in mind what kind of autocrats they were talking about…
Tiberius. Tiberius, by all accounts, was a sex addict. In his case it’s not even likely that these were just scurrilous rumours spread by his worst enemies: we have the incriminating evidence of the mosaics in his palace at Capris. If you ever go to a “sexaholics anonymous” meeting you will quickly discover that sex addiction often crosses gender lines. It has nothing to do with sexual orientation, but rather with seeking the largest possible pool of sexual partners and experiences.
Caligula. Caligula was severely messed up. Half of his family and their political allies were murdered under the reign of Tiberius, largely because the house of Germanicus enjoyed ever increasing political influence as Tiberius’ popularity waned. Caligula was groomed by Tiberius from a young age at the aforementioned pleasure-palace in Capris. His sexual activity was erratic and seems to have included incest. Today, we would see Caligula as a trauma victim, similar to pedophiles whose pedophilia is caused by their own sexual victimization as children.
Nero. Nero seems to have been a somewhat effeminate boy who was pushed into an ultra-masculine role in an ultra-masculine society by an overbearing mother. He’s the perfect stereotype of a homosexual as presented within homophobic literature: angry, smothered, frivolous, spoiled-rotten, effeminate, intensely narcissistic and lacking in self-control. If there is anything to the Freudian tropes, Nero is their poster-boy.
(this from Melinda Selmys)
The world doesn’t change that much. pvk
Leadingchurch.com 