Jordan Peterson, Satanic Factions, and Anti-trans Memes

Welcome to Sunday Curiosities: the blog series where I bring you the interesting, bizarre, and insightful tidbits I’ve collected over the week.

Jordan Peterson is Incomprehensible

A hilarious video of edited footage from the Joe Rogan show has Jordan Peterson arguing with himself. I was once enamored of Peterson, but I now understand him to be at best boring and at worst incomprehensible and an accessory to sexism, transphobia, and patriarchy. What amuses me about this video is how it is just slightly more indecipherable than his regular videos.

Lucien Greaves on the Difference Between the Satanic Temple and the Church of Satan

Lucien Greaves, founder and spokesperson of the Satanic Temple (an organization I support) wrote an interesting article detailing the differences between the Church of Satan, founded by Anton Lavey, and the much younger Satanic Temple. The two are often confused for each other in the media, but their ideologies are profoundly different. Greaves explores the differences in great detail, and the article will be of great interest to anyone curious about fringe religion. Greaves writes:

The Satanic Temple was founded in 2013 by me (Lucien Greaves) and Malcolm Jarry. It was as much the cause of a schism within Modern Satanism as it was the result of one. The Church of Satan’s failure to manifest itself into a real-world relevant organization and its withdraw from hosting events or maintaining its “grottos” meant that Satanism had all but disappeared from the public consciousness and was hardly taken seriously at-large as a religious identification, rather than a pejorative attribution. From the beginning, The Satanic Temple offered a stark contrast to the Church of Satan’s anti-altruistic philosophy of self interest, stating in our first tenet, “One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.”

ContraPoints brilliantly breaks down an anti-trans meme.

Because I know how hurtful the referenced meme is to trans people, I will not write it in this post. ContraPoints, however, being the degenerate philosopher queen of YouTube, hilariously and persuasively breaks down the meme in all its sordid detail. She offers some incredible insight along the way, clarifying that she did the video because, when a teenager googles said meme, she would rather she be the one to explain it to her, rather than an alt-right ghoul. She states that true acceptance is predicated on true understanding, and therefore we need to understand how and why such memes are inaccurate. The video is long, but worth watching in its entirety.

Please share your thoughts in the comments below, and feel free to send me any curiosities you discover for next week’s installment.

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