How did he "beat" Jordan exactly? I didn't watch it, but considering Marxism is complete and total bullshit through and through, I doubt he actually said anything of value or made any kind of concise counterargument to Jordan. At most he probably said some typical Marxy drivel that got some college kids cheering.
I think you're reading too much into it , to most media outlets the difference between JP and Shapiro or Glen Beck is that JP is not part of a rival media company , they lost nothing by hosting him and that's it
Why would that matter? If they're debating communism and all Zizek is doing is bringing up shit he wrote, that sounds more like a flub on his part than Peterson's, on top of there being no single solid argument in favor of practical communism at all.
I don't think the implication was "Žižek was only bringing up shit he wrote".
This "short shelf life" is probably because Peterson has a rather short list of things that his content is autistically focused on. Once you've binge-watched about 12 lectures from him there's not much more you can get out of it, so you move on. At least that's what happened with me, I started watching his videos when he initially got famous and also showed up to his Queen's University speech back in 2017 but then found myself watching less and less of his content. Incidentally the QueensU speech had the added "entertainment" of antifags banging on the walls of the cathedral-like venue, I think they were trying to scare us but instead they set the mood, I wondered if Peterson incited them himself for that purpose.
To be fair, most of what Zizek writes is intentionally vague and impenetrable.
There's nothing to debate with Zizek because he's a pseudointellectual and thus doesn't play fair, if you want a taste of how many bullshit he believes in, you should read any of the stuff in which he calls Hegel a materialist. Trying to debate him is like trying to beat up a sniper with boxing gloves.
I can't give you a Kiwifarms gold as an idgit sticker, but here you have the closest thing.
A combination of him having appeal among the type of obnoxious fools who usually congregate around self-help gurus, SJWs mad that he's using his psych credentials to reveal that their idiocy is little more than a self-destructive outgrowth of their personality disorders, and the far-right mad that he's a boomer conservative at heart who won't name the Jew. Also it's yet another voice from within the academy saying "The humanities are fucked now, don't believe their conclusions!" which undermines their entire grift, especially when he has enough of an established presence to not be dismissed as some Liberty U crackpot.
I think Hitchens was a far more interesting figure than Peterson. Take away the late-2000s online atheist craze entirely, and Hitchens was still one of the most incisive polemicists of his generation. Remove Peterson from the controversies surrounding pronouns and campus deplatforming however, and all you're really left with is banal self-help advice and performative moralizing. I don't think they're really comparable beyond the fact that they both managed to cultivate an obnoxious fan base. In terms of their intellectual contributions, Peterson is the Žižek to Hitchens' Chomsky.
Peterson may have tried to court media attention for years before he achieved international fame, but I don't think the level of fame he ended up achieving was something he could have anticipated. He certainly took advantage of it after it happened, but I doubt it's something he could have planned.