an incurious bigot with a blinkered worldview

Yeah, that about sums it up. He has to go for the low-hanging fruit to shine intelectually. This is why he built his entire career on dunking on young earth creationists, it's something where he can wield his entire academic expertise against people who've built their view of evolution by walking backwards from the assumption that the biblical measurements for Noah's Ark must be taken literally.

So let's see what's going on here

"Is a lion a type of dragon?"

"YES!"

what the actual fuck

Vulgar Materialism versus Confused Idealism, love to see it.

There are dragons everywhere for those who can imagine

Peterson is doing the exact sort of postmodernism he rallies against, isn't he? He always does this, he circled around something that almost had a point, that has a tinge of reality to it, but he swirls around in desultoey psuedo-philosphy jargon so that he never has to be pinned down as saying one thing or another.

Actual philosophers will define and redefine their terms, especially if they know they're using the terms in ways that aren't standard. Like Delueze/Guattari make it explicitly clear that rhizomatic and arborescent are not botanical terms and aren't referring to literal trees, even though they're borrowing biological terms. Foucault uses the term archaeology in a non-standard way too, but he knows he's doing that.

I haven't watched this whole thing and I probably won't, but it sounds like Peterson just wants to say that the immaterial is a real thing, that meta-analysis refers to genuine Platonic forms in the ether. Otherwise what is he even saying. He's saying dragon is a shorthand for "threat" and that biology is something like "human capacity." So he's almost got a point in that the conception of a dragon is biological in the sense that human biology has cooked up the concept of a dragon out of various threatening features to us as humans. It's a big monster made of the things that would kill us, and our conception of what kills us is informed by our biology and surroundings. Different cultures have had different ideas of monsters that had to do with animals they found threatening. But he's shouting over how the other two aren't accepting his exact terminology, even though he's failing to define his terms?

You could probably do a cool analysis on how early myths/legends had a lot of fierce beasts who attack humans, but now more of our monster ideas are more human-shaped. Like back then you had monsters like trolls or minotaurs, but now monsters are like zombies and vampires. You could make a cool point about how our more primal fears have become more like fears relating to our class and social position, like zombies representing mass unrest or vampires being upper class bloodsuckers.

Hey look I explained how one could talk about dragons in biological terms without shouting at Richard Dawkins or looking like my brain got scrambled on benzos

Are we watching their afterlife? They both clearly hate being stuck with the other one, and an eternity of this seems like just the thing for the gods of Olympus to decide on.

Dawkins was a big one of the first round of public atheists that realized white privilege is more powerful than God. He then had a long career answering thr simplest questions for the least informed people. That did not prepare him for a battle of the minds

As every Riddle'Thar adherent know, every cat is essentially a dragon and vice versa.

Dawkins is a pigheaded fascist and racial supremacist, he made his bed with these freaks, he can lie in it.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that categories and abstractions are real in some sense. It's a weird view, but I think it has merit. The right question to ask, though, is "what makes your proposed abstract object worth treating as if it were real?" The utility of things like this comes from the predictive power you get from treating them as real: "the economy" is an abstract composite object in much the same way seems to think "dragon" is, but we get a lot of predictive and explanatory mileage out of tracking it as an individual thing. What predictive utility does talking about dragons get us beyond what we get from talking about, say, a predator? I can make up all sorts of objects--let's track the object that consists of the union of all pennies minted after 1982 and the left half of . That's a "legal" object in about the same sense that the economy is, but there's nothing interesting about it: picking it out doesn't enhance our ability to predict or understand the world. "Dragon" in the sense that he's trying to use it is like that.