Who You-Know-Who Thinks About

[Analytics]

I was reading you-know-who’s blog earlier today, and I was really impressed with his trip to Europe for a few different reasons. First of all, I think it is great that he is traveling--this is what he loves doing, and relative to his means, he’s lived a frugal life during his earning years (e.g. he never had his own car and shared an old minivan with his wife). He did that so he’d be able to do what he’s doing now. I find that inspiring. 100% sincere on that. In all likelihood, this is the healthiest he’s ever going to be, and he should travel now while he can.

Another thing I really appreciate about him is how much he actually knows about stuff, and how that allows him to appreciate where he goes. For example, on June 5 he said:

"The first thing that I noticed, to the left upon entering, was the tomb of Galileo Galilei. This astonished me. But as I continued to walk into the church, I also saw the tombs of Michelangelo, Machiavelli, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, the composer Gioachino Rossini, and, as I thought, the great Dante Alighieri. I was blown away.”

I’ll admit I only know about half of the people on that list, and honestly don’t know all that much about that subset (e.g. I don’t know enough about Galileo to be astonished about where he is buried). His knowledge of so many details of so many people allows him to really appreciate going to places like Santa Croce much more deeply than I can.

I decided to make a list of all of the people he referenced in his blog posts from June 1 through June 18. Not counting references to his family, I counted 234 references to 175 distinct people or groups of people. A “reference” refers to the individual or group being mentioned in a blog post, and still counts as “1” whether the name is mentioned only 1 time or repeated 10 times. I then decided to make a word cloud of these names. In the word cloud, the more frequently a name is mentioned the bigger it is. For example, he referenced Hugh Nibley in 3 different blog posts, but only referenced Caesar Augustus once, so the name “Hugh Nibley” is 3 points bigger than “Caesar Augustus."

Here is a visual representation of who he has blogged about in the first 18 days of June:

[Everybody Wang Chung]

That is a lot of name dropping! He actually discusses the Peterson Obsession Board and Christopher Hitchens more than he discusses God. That's very revealing.

Insecurity and Name-Dropping

At its core, name-dropping often reveals an individual's insecurities about their own status or worth. It's an attempt to bolster their perceived importance by associating with people of higher status. People who frequently name-drop might be seeking validation and recognition they feel they're not receiving based on their own merits. This craving for external validation may stem from a lack of self-esteem or self-confidence.

https://www.alife-welllived.com/blog/th ... s-about-us

[drumdude]

I get the impression Dan has a lot of envy towards Hitch. Hitch traveled more diversely than Dan, Hitch remembered more literature. Hitch published much better essays more often. And Hitch’s ideas were celebrated by millions. He never spoke to a room of 4-5 people like Dan did in Italy.

SeN could accurately be titled “The Christopher Hitchens Obsession Blog.”

[Bond]

I get the impression Dan has a lot of envy towards Hitch. Hitch traveled more diversely than Dan, Hitch remembered more literature. Hitch published much better essays more often. And Hitch’s ideas were celebrated by millions. He never spoke to a room of 4-5 people like Dan did in Italy.

SeN could accurately be titled “The Christopher Hitchens Obsession Blog.”

Hitch's appearances and debates are still watched on Youtube by millions 10+ years after his death. Other famous people die and are forgotten three days later. Who misses Rush Limbaugh? He was replaced the next day by a slew of people spewing the same vitriol but Hitchens will be remembered vividly for at least a couple generations by all the young people he led to skepticism and atheism.

[drumdude]

I get the impression Dan has a lot of envy towards Hitch. Hitch traveled more diversely than Dan, Hitch remembered more literature. Hitch published much better essays more often. And Hitch’s ideas were celebrated by millions. He never spoke to a room of 4-5 people like Dan did in Italy.

SeN could accurately be titled “The Christopher Hitchens Obsession Blog.”

Hitch's appearances and debates are still watched on Youtube by millions 10+ years after his death. Other famous people die and are forgotten three days later. Who misses Rush Limbaugh? He was replaced the next day by a slew of people spewing the same vitriol but Hitchens will be remembered vividly for at least a couple generations by all the young people he led to skepticism and atheism.

But he said religion poisons everything and I ate a meal last night and survived. So I’m going to tell him he’s wrong every day.

[Gadianton]

But he said religion poisons everything and I ate a meal last night and survived. So I’m going to tell him he’s wrong every day.

ha

[Kishkumen]

Christopher Hitchens is definitely not worthy of all that attention.

[Analytics]

Christopher Hitchens is definitely not worthy of all that attention.

What I find so maddening about it is that despite his obsession with Hitchens, Peterson never addresses Hitchens's actual points. Apparently, Peterson thinks god is Not Great: How Religious Poison's Everything's central thesis is that it is impossible for anybody who is religious to ever do anything that is virtuous, lovely, praiseworthy, or of good report. Apparently, he thinks that if he can find a single example of somebody who is religious being a good person, it proves Hitchens wrong, and that if he can fill up an entire file drawer with such stories, he's really shown how wrong Hitchens is.

But Peterson's hobby of searching for examples of religious people doing good things has nothing to do with Hitchens's actual point; indeed, if Peterson were to actually read the book, he'd find How Religion Poisons Everything has many examples that Peterson could put into his Religion Poisons Everything folder. For example:

When my wife accidentally left a large amount of cash on the backseat of a taxi, the Sudanese cab driver went to a good deal of trouble and expense to work out whose property this was, and to drive all the way to my home to return it untouched. When I made the vulgar mistake of offering him 10 percent of the money, he made it quietly but firmly plain that he expected no recompense for performing his Islamic duty....

If all Muslims conducted themselves like the man who gave up more than a week’s salary in order to do the right thing, I could be quite indifferent to the weird exhortations of the Koran. If I search my own life for instances of good or fine behavior I am not overwhelmed by an excess of choice.

Hitchens, Christopher. god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (pp. 324-325). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[Analytics]

Somebody recently published the following on his blog:

I’m still surprised from time to time at how much the image that has been painstakingly constructed for me over at the Peterson Obsession Board during the past fifteen or twenty years relies on shameless misrepresentation. Consider these three very recent examples...

A third example: A participant on the Obsession Board decided to count the number of times various personal names have been mentioned on my blog during the past several weeks. And he reports that, by far, the single most frequently occurring name has been that of the late Christopher Hitchens. Which, he has allowed his credulous audience to conclude, means that Christopher Hitchens is the major theme of this blog. It reminds me of a comment from Andrew Lang: “Most people use statistics like a drunk man uses a lamppost; more for support than illumination.”

He’s accusing me of shameless misrepresentation? He’s projecting.

A few points. First, according to the statistics I compiled, he drops the names God and Jesus almost as frequently as he drops the name Christopher Hitchens and his fans at the Peterson Obsession Board. My visual accurately depicts this.

Second, the biggest takeaway from the graph is that he talks about a lot of different people. While there are four that he references in the majority of his posts (Hitchens, Jesus, God, and the fan club at the Peterson obsession board, in that order), there are another 170 people he referenced, in just a couple of weeks. That is the biggest takeaway of the graph, and I find it impressive, and it is one of the things that makes his blog interesting, which is one of the reasons people read it.

Third, from the reactions on this thread, exactly nobody has concluded that Christopher Hitchens is the major theme of his blog. Nobody has said as much, and the word cloud I shared doesn’t imply it. What it does imply is that like Pavlov’s dog, every time Peterson hears the bell of a religious person or organization doing something good in the word, he salivates about how that proves that Hitchens is wrong, and decides to post about it, with a reference to Hitchens. This doesn’t mean Hitchens is a major theme of the blog, but it does imply that he thinks about Hitchens all the time.

Finally, in this long post, he mentioned Christopher Hitchens and the folks on this board, but he didn’t mention God or Jesus.

The reader can judge for himself who relies on shameless misrepresentation.