Don’t Be a Patsy: An Open Letter to Jordan B. Peterson

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I have read the book and I liked it. Here is a not a so good letter.

I want to explain why I took my video down, beyond its more obvious flaws: pretension, sloppy thinking, witlessness. I came across a couple of YouTube videos of Peterson on Fox and Friends, Fox News’ morning show. They are very difficult to watch. They flatter him, fawn over his credentials, and he smiles and looks as comfortable as Jordan Peterson ever looks. But what he fails to realise is that they have him on because they know if they push the right buttons he will say exactly what they want him to say. To use parlance Peterson won’t like, they ‘trigger’ him. All you have to do is show Peterson a left-wing ideologue, preferably a college professor, and watch him go. ‘The post-modernists this’, ‘the Marxists that’. It happens every time. But that’s not real the problem. We’re all susceptible to a bit of flattery; we all have triggers. It’s that for years Fox News has broken one of Peterson’s 12 rules, and to my mind, his cardinal rule, and he doesn’t call them on it. He plays along.

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Neil Griffiths — Review 31

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‘No Amount of Screaming Would Have Helped Us’

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Today’s needull is review of two novels based on apocalypse like scenarios. The authors use this scenario to look at some philosophical questions.

The novel really becomes remarkable when Helle extrapolates philosophical debate from the dire situation. The conversion of matter into fundamental particles, as the men face their own deaths, is hinted at obliquely when the narrator watches the blazing chair: ‘You can no longer tell that the thing that is burning there was once a chair’, giving him hope that his essence may survive somewhere in the universe. The book ultimately questions why mankind shoulders on in the face of such futile odds: ‘All in all, we don’t much care for this world any longer. But still we continue diligently to take one step after another into it.’

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Jude Cook — Review 31

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Working the Phones

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A book review for a lazy Sunday. A book about working in a call center! We get to know the story on the other side of pesky calls.

Working the Phones leads us through the various circles of hell that is the modern call centre. We begin with the experience of starting in the call centre. Here we are introduced to a regimented work environment based on zero hours contracts in which workers can be sacked on the spot for offences. In what makes painful reading Woodcock describes the monitoring of work, what he calls ‘computerised Taylorism’, after the Taylorist organisation of the production line. Each call is recorded and can be played back to check infractions and failures. These recordings form a source of anxiety and guilt, a record of success and failure that generates a culture of confession and contrition, if you want to keep your job. The emotional costs of call centre work come to the fore. These include the costs of trying to ‘smile down the phone’, to project positive emotion, to improvise on pre-scripted encounters to ensure the human touch, and the exhortations of managers in ‘buzz sessions’ to enjoy what is obviously soul crushing work.

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Benjamin Noys — Review 31

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