The other thing that’s built into this law (Bill C-16 see https://openparliament.ca/bills/42-1/C-16/ ) and the surrounding policies is that they’ve changed two legal principles. It’s not ‘innocent before being proven guilty,’ it’s ‘preponderance of evidence,’ and it’s not intent, it’s outcome. Those transformations are so far reaching, it’s almost unimaginable.
I was taught the left represents progress and equality, whereas the right represents stagnation and oppression, and by God and wishful thinking I intend for this to never change!
The emergence of the 'regressive left' wasn't something I expected either, but I think it's important to remember that ideology and methodology are not the same thing.
For example, I've noticed in the last decade or so a lot of people ( many friends ) embracing established science as a religion; no attempt to understand the material, and no interest in the progress of science or it's methodology other than as a stick to try to beat up the perceived opposition to their group.
If you actually go through and read that long article, it's worth a read and I stumbled on to this guy last month and very happy that I did. He goes into detail about why academia especially in humanities and social sciences is wrong. And my feeling at this point is that academia is simply an extension of prevailing ideology that is pushed by the elite. Social science in academia does not really have a basis in truth or fact finding, and Chomsky came out against this decades ago. But it's just a mechanism for educating the masses with the prevailing dogma that the elite want to push. And it seems that this sort of approach is starting to fail... because the masses are no longer listening and becoming skeptical of everything that is being taught because it does not work as advertised.
That's interesting, because in Eastern Europe, the Left can, and sometimes really is, perceived as regressive.
Just an example: during the immigration crisis the leading newspaper in Poland run a series articles on how you can lose your job if you make critical comments about immigrants. This was really reminiscent of the socialist regime not so long ago, where people were rarely killed, but you could easily lose your job (and have real trouble finding another one!) because of just one critical remark. So if you really care about your family, you keep your opinions to yourself. It always amuses me when the media is surprised with the results of the elections then.
There was no such thing. I remember one case when some guy was fired because his employer didn't like his comment on immigrants and that was pretty much all. No one from the left has ever claimed that people should be fired because of their opinions.
I don't mean people are actually being fired, just articles about it, with very clear message: watch out what you say.
I was so surprised I wanted to take a picture of one of these. It was around the time when they called anti-immigrant march organizers "Nazi" and turned off comments for all articles on immigrants, Muslims and Islam.
It's just like Peterson says - if people don't talk to each other, they become enemies.
Regressive left is what happens when you brainwash enough people with extreme socialist philosophy (cough Karl Marx cough), fact-free nonsense such as "the patriarchy" and "female wage gap", and outright lies through social science departments at universities.
In fact, you could call the ideology these people believe in "neo-Marxism" or "cultural Marxism". And this is no understatement: if you love everything the West has to offer now like freedom of speech, freedom of expression, democracy, and capitalism while the ideas of regressives at first sight might look super attractive and they themselves might at first look super friendly, they are not your friends but your adversaries. Because instead of fixing the issues Western civilization has today within the system, they want to figuratively burn it down to the ground and start over, with a system based on Marxist philosophy where everyone is so equal that even when you are suspected of wrongthink you become a candidate for Marxist style reeducation or worse.
History also has factually shown several attempts to start over with a new, "better" system and all had gigantic miserable repercussions. And do not let them fool you into believing they are doing the "right thing" and "this time it will be different". There is a long list of people who thought the same thing and every single time things indeed became different, but worse.
Small addendum: while we can miss the far left and far right like a sore toothache the moderate left and right are not really enemies, they are intellectual counterparts and they need each other. To make actual progress happen for everyone you do not need a "winner", but you need a well thought out inclusive vision which measures up to facts.
Or to make things more concrete: You do not only need the fast young smart startup whizkid entrepreneur kicking a ton of interesting ideas around (the "moderate left") but also the old and wise manager (the "moderate right") who takes these ideas and measures them up based on experience (historical knowledge)
There's absolutely nothing in the text about pronouns, and absolutely nothing about the presumption of innocence. All it does is simply add gender identity to the usual list of things (race, religion, age, sex, etc) covered in hate crime and anti-discrimination laws.
Am I missing something here? Is the alt-right staging some Pizzagate-style hysteria-fest again?
Unless people are currently getting karted off by the Canadian feds for not calling older Canadians, "sir" and "mam" or not calling blind people, "visually impaired", I think this guy may be creating an unnecessary panic.
> The other thing that’s built into this law and the surrounding policies […] they’ve changed two legal principles. It’s not ‘innocent before being proven guilty,’ it’s ‘preponderance of evidence,’ and it’s not intent, it’s outcome. Those transformations are so far reaching, it’s almost unimaginable.
From a legal standpoint changing the law in such a way that well-intended social behaviour ("Excuse me miss, did you hand in your term paper on [topic] yet?", said the professor to the female student) would become punishable by law in case the observer of that action was offended is pretty draconian.
The incremental criminalization of speech that people in power want to silence should offend everyone. Almost by definition progress requires challenging an idea that has been generally accepted by those in power with a new idea that is initially generally rejected by those in power. (I'm not saying that all new ideas are progress. Most new ideas are bad ideas. I'm saying that all progress requires a switchover to those few new ideas that turn out to be improvements.)
If those in power, meaning those who can get someone punished, are allowed to establish mechanisms of silencing opinions they don't like by force, you will be limited to hearing ideas that are generally accepted by those with power. That would put a serious damper on progress, no matter who they were, and I'm not aware of any credible study that has concluded that in any situation of conflict between ideas, the ideas of the people with the power to silence their critics by force are usually the more correct.
If you disagree with what someone says, explain why; don't look for mechanisms to silence them by force. And if someone else proposes a plan to criminalize "offensive" speech, oppose them and explain why.
What an inappropriate article for HN. Same old boring 1950s fear-mongering, same old shitty hatred for socialism, same old "American Exceptionalism" bullshit from the 20s. Next.
This interview needs a TL;DR and the interviewee needs to get in a cemetery.
I found it well worth reading. In particular, I thought the following paragraph expressed my own beliefs better than I've previously been able to:
Do you believe that society should draw the line at all when it comes to limitations on hate speech?
No. Hate speech laws are wrong. The question – not a question, but THE question – is ‘who gets to define hate?” That’s not to say there’s no such thing as hate speech – clearly there is. Hate speech laws repress, and I mean that in the psycho-analytical sense. They drive [hate speech] underground. It’s not a good idea, because things get ugly when you drive them underground. They don’t disappear, they just fester, and they’re not subject to correction. I made these videos, and they have been subject to a tremendous amount of correction over the last six weeks. I don’t just mean from my public response, but also partly from the university’s response, partly from a group of friends who have been reviewing my videos and criticizing them to death. This is why free speech is so important. You can struggle to formulate some argument, but when you throw it out into the public, there’s a collective attempt to modify and improve that. So with the hate speech issue – say someone’s a Holocaust denier, because that’s the standard routine – we want those people out there in the public so you can tell them why they’re historically ignorant, and why their views are unfounded and dangerous. If you drive them underground, it’s not like they stop talking to each other, they just don’t talk to anyone who disagrees with them. That’s a really bad idea and that’s what’s happening in the United States right now. Half of the country doesn’t talk to the other half. Do you know what you call people you don’t talk to? Enemies.
I'm glad that there are people standing up for common sense, despite the danger to their reputation, careers, and possibly, if insanity goes unchecked, freedom. There are some disturbingly authoritarian viewpoints that are becoming chillingly widespread in our supposed bastions of liberal free-thought.
"If people think they are atheistic, it means is they are unconscious of their gods.". No it doesn't. Atheists merely reject the various vacuous and frankly ridiculous concepts of 'God' put about by religious authorities (folk whose word we are supposed to take on trust) simply because the evidence for these abstractions amounts to no more than that for fairy stories. Atheists are not stupid people unaware that they are subject to 'unconscious imperatives'.
> One of Jung’s propositions was that whatever a person values most highly is their god. If people think they are atheistic, it means is they are unconscious of their gods. In a sophisticated religious system, there is a positive and negative polarity. Ideologies simplify that polarity and, in doing so, demonize and oversimplify.
I think you've over interpreted the sentence you've quoted.
If you see religion as an alternative to science instead of a philosophy that teaches great values (in its current form, not in the literal reading of the text), as americans often mistakenly (I think this is your point) do, it may seem that way. However men need values and it's hard to argue against the basic concepts of kindness and sharing that christianity teaches. You just have to not take it in a dogmatic way in order to understand mr. Peterson's point of view, I think.
Following the discovery of this post, I did a little digging into this guy. I listened to a whole 2 and a half lecture by him. He doesn't mean a literal omnipotent quasi mythical unprovable creature. He even says something like "a clever thirteen year old boy would know that that's rubbish."
By god, he means a system of ranking values. His argument is that religion is a kind of emergent, distributed evolutionary policy learning strategy that supervenes (if you will) from biological origins. In that sense, heaven is that which delays gratification for greater selection benefit, and hell is that eternal possibility of worsening one's situation. It's an interesting concept.
I'll echo the sentiment of "useless interview", most of it was ungrounded rambling. I wrote a bit on the parts that actually seemed to have ideas going on.
While I can't comment on the bill being discussed (not Canadian and it looks boring), the claims this guy is making about it consist of sweeping generalizations about feminist academics and activists, and a weird obsession with Marxism, something that he also describes using sweeping generalizations, but it's weird because I can't put a finger on what exactly he believes is common among and unique to Soviet nationalist and contemporary social justice discourse.
Of course, the most credibly leftist of the academics he blames for future human rights violations tend to be skeptical of or outright oppose the weird pronouns he hates, typically citing Foucault's theories about language and "medicalization". But rather than engage with something real, he talks about "revolutionary language", a concept that doesn't exist.
The interviewer does make one attempt to reference a real person, Alinsky, but what Peterson responds with makes no sense to me.
I think his point about academia is well represented by this quote, which is presented as an explanation of why all fields but STEM are stupid:
>If you interfere with the mechanism by which people formulate problems, solve them, and negotiate their implementation, then problems accrue and multiply. That’s what a hydra is – cut off one head, seven grow back.
The obvious problem with this line of thinking is that he never clearly specifies the source of interference, whether it's a toxic idea or a group of people. Maybe the bill is one, but it isn't retroactively turning everyone into authoritarian leftists (if we add time travel to the mix, a corrupt academia creating laws that ruin academia does make some sense)
>They have a term – patriarchy. It’s all-encompassing. It means that everything our society is, is corrupt. There’s no line, they mean everything. Go online, go look at ten women’s studies websites. Pick them at random. Read them. They say ‘western civilization is a corrupt patriarchy right down to the goddamned core. We have to overthrow it.’
This is one of the sweeping generalizations mentioned. I think it's sufficient to rattle off the names of some oft-cited feminist writers who believe nothing close to this: Firestone, Butler, Baumgardner.
Speaking of strawman he then proceeds to strawman one of his own arguments by claiming that gender discrimination NEVER existed in the West, and everything done to women was perfectly rational based on economic conditions. It sounds like I'm the one doing the strawman, but he was directly asked the question. That didn't put me in the mood to read the wall of text about intelligence and work ethic and success, guess I don't have the work ethic.
Anecdotally, the authors I mentioned are staples of an undergraduate course in feminist theory. That said, also anecdotally, there isn't much that can be generalized about womens' studies courses because there are so many divergent concentrations around issues and schools of thought.
If the point of the interview was to critique feminism, then I would have supported your opinion.
But even though reading some of his words made me cringe, I find it critically appealing that the main theme is 'We’re teaching university students lies'.
> My primary interest has always been the psychology of belief.
> I got interested in ideology, in a large part, because I got interested in what happened in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution in China, and equivalent occurrences in other places in the world. Mostly I concentrated on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
> Part of the reason I got embroiled in this [gender identity] controversy was because of what I know about how things went wrong in the Soviet Union. Many of the doctrines that underlie the legislation that I’ve been objecting to share structural similarities with the Marxist ideas that drove Soviet Communism.
Doesn't this make clear why Jordan mentions Marxism? Why do you say he has a "weird obsession"?
> I can't put a finger on what exactly he believes is common among and unique to Soviet nationalist and contemporary social justice discourse
One of the questions in the article is:
> you wrote that ‘words like zhe/zher are the vanguards of a radical left wing ideology that’s frighteningly similar to Marxism’. Can you elaborate?
It comes off as weird because he claims to see a connection that I don't. As I mentioned, there is no concept of "revolutionary language" in Soviet or general Marxist thought. The connection to pronouns rests on that being a real thing, so there's nothing left to help me see why social justice-themed legislation has anything to do with Marxism in his mind.
From the response to "What do you hope to achieve coming out of this?":
> There’s even an anti-psychology program at OISE [Ontario Institute for Studies in Education]. It started when they got rid of [Ken] Zucker, and you don’t stop with one person. Zucker was a more than credible psychologist. He ran a very good program for people who had gender dysphoria, and he was conservative. Zucker’s attitude was that if you’ve got a kid who is complaining about their gender, you follow them up, and you see what happens, and you derive your conclusions from the research. Eighty percent of them declare themselves as homosexual, ninety percent settle into their biological identity as adults. His logical conclusion is to keep the goddamned surgical knife sheathed, and don’t bring out the hormones too soon. Well that’s all gone – it’s illegal now for doctors to question the decision of a three-year old child that he is a she. And if the parents want to start biological transformation, it is illegal for the doctor to reject that.
Zucker was a hack who's popular with people like this because he believed that not trying to actively force kids not to be trans was morally equivalent to turning them trans, ran his clinic accordingly and gave it a veneer of scientific respectability when the scientific community wouldn't touch it. Just following up and seeing what happens is the mainstream approach he rejected. I had a look at some of his research and every time, there was a huge unbridgable gap between the conclusions he drew - which, naturally, supported his own existing beliefs about trans people - and the actual evidence he had.
This idea that dubious work driven by the researchers' existing anti-trans beliefs is the real science and that anyone who disagrees with it is therefore attacking science is, sadly, fairly common: http://freethoughtblogs.com/atg/2016/08/07/academic-transpho...
This was probably a year or so back and I'm not sure I kept notes, sorry. Think I concluded that Julia Serano had already done a pretty decent job of dismantling his arguments and it wasn't worth doing more.
Rabidly anticommunist idiot rails against treating people with respect, or at least not subjecting them to systemic disrespect and delegitimization, with handwavery and appeals to "cultural Marxism".
> "The idea that women were an oppressed minority under those conditions is insane."
I'll grant him the fact that the conditions for workers in the 19th century and earlier were generally terrible, but it's pretty galling to argue that "workers were treated badly, so gender discrimination is a lie" when the right to own property seperately from their husbands, enter into contracts, or even vote were all denied women before the 20th century. It really gives the impression that he is being intellectually dishonest with his arguments.
Women aren't a minority, so at least half of his statement checks out.
If you want to get a good metric on historical oppression, look at the amount of blood shed it took to escape the yoke of it. Using a US perspective: compare the pain and suffering of the civil rights movement of the 60s to the suffragette's labor at the turn of the century.
I don't think that because one group has a higher status in a hierarchy, or is able to achieve equal status more easily, prohibits the notion that they aren't also opressed by that same hierarchy. In fact, I think one way a hierarchy perpetuates itself is by creating divisions that result in those trapped within the structure saying "well at least I'm not the worst off". (The segregation of unions in the United States was a way of weakening the power of the labor movement, by pitting white workers against black ones, and essentially giving them a better position in the hierarchy. To be black was to be the bottom of the ladder; to be white, even poor and without rights, was to be higher up. All of the major civil rights leaders of the 50s and 60 recognized this, and as a result fought for both legal and economic equality for both non-white and white workers.)
But I also think you're artificially narrowing your analysis, even on that basis. Consider that until 1970, women in the United States were not protected from rape by their own husbands[1]. How many women must have suffered for lack of equal protection under the law? Now, women still disproportionately suffer from domestic violence even with those protections[2]. Furthermore, in states where access to women's health services is severely restricted as part of the abortion backlash (Planned Parenthood provides a number of different services to women's health, especially in poorer communities), how many suffer now because of the legal burden put on them, as compared to the legal restrictions on men for controlling their own health concerns and access to reproductive medicine?
I don't necessarily accept your metric as "good" or useful, but even taking it as a rubric, the effort to help women achieve the same level of security, education, and economic compensation as men continues, and women continue to face threats of violence and intimidation in prusuit of that, in a way that men, simply put, do not, as a whole.
Accepting your argument for the sake of looking at its logical conclusions -- statistically, women (like homosexuals), occupy a more diverse distribution of economic status, education, and social class than if you group just by race or ethnicity. Because of the history of political and economic inequality falling along the lines of ethnicity in America, efforts to end racial discrimination (both under the law and in economic terms[3][4]) have been starting from a more singularly disadvantaged position, and it has been correspondingly easier for the power structures to relatiate against them[5]. It might be argued that the struggle for equal rights of gays and lesbians was easier because not only were many people in that group wealthier and had more access to the power structure for economic reasons, but the rights they largely won (marriage and parental rights) fit within the structures of society already established. I think to a large extent the same goes for the rights of women: only once they could make the case that they weren't trying to totally upend social norms were they allowed to participate legally and democratically. (But again, how equally can you participate if your education and pay is worse than other groups?)
This doesn't hold up with the blanket statement that they weren't opressed (the "minority" element is a bit of a straw man on the interviewee's part -- blacks in South Africa were far and away the majority, and they had to struggle for decades to be granted equal rights; you wouldn't argue that their opression was somehow "less real" on that basis, would you?)
> My primary interest has always been the psychology of belief. Partly religious belief, and ideology as a sub-category of religious belief. One of Jung’s propositions was that whatever a person values most highly is their god. If people think they are atheistic, it means is they are unconscious of their gods. In a sophisticated religious system, there is a positive and negative polarity. Ideologies simplify that polarity and, in doing so, demonize and oversimplify.
I think the fact that somebody has already been upset enough to summon authorities by an article that says it's dangerous to invoke authority on these sorts of social issues proves the point of the article rather well.
I'm not so keen on that anecdote, it's too similar to "this is why we need feminism" anecdotes, but I'd sooner see penalties for flagging articles you politically disagree with.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadI was taught the left represents progress and equality, whereas the right represents stagnation and oppression, and by God and wishful thinking I intend for this to never change!
There's a deeper issue here, regarding information, legitimacy/authority and scope.
Science should be embraced, just some department (social sciences) aren't as scientific as assumed.
In fact, you could call the ideology these people believe in "neo-Marxism" or "cultural Marxism". And this is no understatement: if you love everything the West has to offer now like freedom of speech, freedom of expression, democracy, and capitalism while the ideas of regressives at first sight might look super attractive and they themselves might at first look super friendly, they are not your friends but your adversaries. Because instead of fixing the issues Western civilization has today within the system, they want to figuratively burn it down to the ground and start over, with a system based on Marxist philosophy where everyone is so equal that even when you are suspected of wrongthink you become a candidate for Marxist style reeducation or worse.
History also has factually shown several attempts to start over with a new, "better" system and all had gigantic miserable repercussions. And do not let them fool you into believing they are doing the "right thing" and "this time it will be different". There is a long list of people who thought the same thing and every single time things indeed became different, but worse.
Or to make things more concrete: You do not only need the fast young smart startup whizkid entrepreneur kicking a ton of interesting ideas around (the "moderate left") but also the old and wise manager (the "moderate right") who takes these ideas and measures them up based on experience (historical knowledge)
There's absolutely nothing in the text about pronouns, and absolutely nothing about the presumption of innocence. All it does is simply add gender identity to the usual list of things (race, religion, age, sex, etc) covered in hate crime and anti-discrimination laws.
Am I missing something here? Is the alt-right staging some Pizzagate-style hysteria-fest again?
http://sds.utoronto.ca/blog/bill-c-16-no-its-not-about-crimi...
> The other thing that’s built into this law and the surrounding policies […] they’ve changed two legal principles. It’s not ‘innocent before being proven guilty,’ it’s ‘preponderance of evidence,’ and it’s not intent, it’s outcome. Those transformations are so far reaching, it’s almost unimaginable.
From a legal standpoint changing the law in such a way that well-intended social behaviour ("Excuse me miss, did you hand in your term paper on [topic] yet?", said the professor to the female student) would become punishable by law in case the observer of that action was offended is pretty draconian.
If those in power, meaning those who can get someone punished, are allowed to establish mechanisms of silencing opinions they don't like by force, you will be limited to hearing ideas that are generally accepted by those with power. That would put a serious damper on progress, no matter who they were, and I'm not aware of any credible study that has concluded that in any situation of conflict between ideas, the ideas of the people with the power to silence their critics by force are usually the more correct.
If you disagree with what someone says, explain why; don't look for mechanisms to silence them by force. And if someone else proposes a plan to criminalize "offensive" speech, oppose them and explain why.
When they start carting people off, it might be too late.
I'll add, premature "panic" is also common among the left - every conservative candidate is framed as the next Hitler...
This interview needs a TL;DR and the interviewee needs to get in a cemetery.
Do you believe that society should draw the line at all when it comes to limitations on hate speech?
No. Hate speech laws are wrong. The question – not a question, but THE question – is ‘who gets to define hate?” That’s not to say there’s no such thing as hate speech – clearly there is. Hate speech laws repress, and I mean that in the psycho-analytical sense. They drive [hate speech] underground. It’s not a good idea, because things get ugly when you drive them underground. They don’t disappear, they just fester, and they’re not subject to correction. I made these videos, and they have been subject to a tremendous amount of correction over the last six weeks. I don’t just mean from my public response, but also partly from the university’s response, partly from a group of friends who have been reviewing my videos and criticizing them to death. This is why free speech is so important. You can struggle to formulate some argument, but when you throw it out into the public, there’s a collective attempt to modify and improve that. So with the hate speech issue – say someone’s a Holocaust denier, because that’s the standard routine – we want those people out there in the public so you can tell them why they’re historically ignorant, and why their views are unfounded and dangerous. If you drive them underground, it’s not like they stop talking to each other, they just don’t talk to anyone who disagrees with them. That’s a really bad idea and that’s what’s happening in the United States right now. Half of the country doesn’t talk to the other half. Do you know what you call people you don’t talk to? Enemies.
I'm glad that there are people standing up for common sense, despite the danger to their reputation, careers, and possibly, if insanity goes unchecked, freedom. There are some disturbingly authoritarian viewpoints that are becoming chillingly widespread in our supposed bastions of liberal free-thought.
> One of Jung’s propositions was that whatever a person values most highly is their god. If people think they are atheistic, it means is they are unconscious of their gods. In a sophisticated religious system, there is a positive and negative polarity. Ideologies simplify that polarity and, in doing so, demonize and oversimplify.
I think you've over interpreted the sentence you've quoted.
By god, he means a system of ranking values. His argument is that religion is a kind of emergent, distributed evolutionary policy learning strategy that supervenes (if you will) from biological origins. In that sense, heaven is that which delays gratification for greater selection benefit, and hell is that eternal possibility of worsening one's situation. It's an interesting concept.
While I can't comment on the bill being discussed (not Canadian and it looks boring), the claims this guy is making about it consist of sweeping generalizations about feminist academics and activists, and a weird obsession with Marxism, something that he also describes using sweeping generalizations, but it's weird because I can't put a finger on what exactly he believes is common among and unique to Soviet nationalist and contemporary social justice discourse.
Of course, the most credibly leftist of the academics he blames for future human rights violations tend to be skeptical of or outright oppose the weird pronouns he hates, typically citing Foucault's theories about language and "medicalization". But rather than engage with something real, he talks about "revolutionary language", a concept that doesn't exist.
The interviewer does make one attempt to reference a real person, Alinsky, but what Peterson responds with makes no sense to me.
I think his point about academia is well represented by this quote, which is presented as an explanation of why all fields but STEM are stupid:
>If you interfere with the mechanism by which people formulate problems, solve them, and negotiate their implementation, then problems accrue and multiply. That’s what a hydra is – cut off one head, seven grow back.
The obvious problem with this line of thinking is that he never clearly specifies the source of interference, whether it's a toxic idea or a group of people. Maybe the bill is one, but it isn't retroactively turning everyone into authoritarian leftists (if we add time travel to the mix, a corrupt academia creating laws that ruin academia does make some sense)
>They have a term – patriarchy. It’s all-encompassing. It means that everything our society is, is corrupt. There’s no line, they mean everything. Go online, go look at ten women’s studies websites. Pick them at random. Read them. They say ‘western civilization is a corrupt patriarchy right down to the goddamned core. We have to overthrow it.’
This is one of the sweeping generalizations mentioned. I think it's sufficient to rattle off the names of some oft-cited feminist writers who believe nothing close to this: Firestone, Butler, Baumgardner.
Speaking of strawman he then proceeds to strawman one of his own arguments by claiming that gender discrimination NEVER existed in the West, and everything done to women was perfectly rational based on economic conditions. It sounds like I'm the one doing the strawman, but he was directly asked the question. That didn't put me in the mood to read the wall of text about intelligence and work ethic and success, guess I don't have the work ethic.
If women's studies teach one thing, does it matter if some feminists believe another? - Their opinions haven't influenced the undergraduate courses.
The obvious reply is "If any statement about feminism require all self-described feminists to be compliant, then there is no such thing as feminism".
Fairly big 'if'.
> Go online, go look at ten women’s studies websites. Pick them at random. Read them. They say..
resfirestar said:
> I think it's sufficient to rattle off the names of some oft-cited feminist writers who believe nothing close to this: ...
My point is that it isn't sufficient to prove a "sweeping generalization" - if WS courses generally teach this then Jordan has a point.
But even though reading some of his words made me cringe, I find it critically appealing that the main theme is 'We’re teaching university students lies'.
> a weird obsession with Marxism
but from the article:
> My primary interest has always been the psychology of belief.
> I got interested in ideology, in a large part, because I got interested in what happened in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution in China, and equivalent occurrences in other places in the world. Mostly I concentrated on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
> Part of the reason I got embroiled in this [gender identity] controversy was because of what I know about how things went wrong in the Soviet Union. Many of the doctrines that underlie the legislation that I’ve been objecting to share structural similarities with the Marxist ideas that drove Soviet Communism.
Doesn't this make clear why Jordan mentions Marxism? Why do you say he has a "weird obsession"?
> I can't put a finger on what exactly he believes is common among and unique to Soviet nationalist and contemporary social justice discourse
One of the questions in the article is:
> you wrote that ‘words like zhe/zher are the vanguards of a radical left wing ideology that’s frighteningly similar to Marxism’. Can you elaborate?
doesn't this address that?
"revolutionary language" possibly means soviet language reform?:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=stqV47DuteoC&pg=PA103
> There’s even an anti-psychology program at OISE [Ontario Institute for Studies in Education]. It started when they got rid of [Ken] Zucker, and you don’t stop with one person. Zucker was a more than credible psychologist. He ran a very good program for people who had gender dysphoria, and he was conservative. Zucker’s attitude was that if you’ve got a kid who is complaining about their gender, you follow them up, and you see what happens, and you derive your conclusions from the research. Eighty percent of them declare themselves as homosexual, ninety percent settle into their biological identity as adults. His logical conclusion is to keep the goddamned surgical knife sheathed, and don’t bring out the hormones too soon. Well that’s all gone – it’s illegal now for doctors to question the decision of a three-year old child that he is a she. And if the parents want to start biological transformation, it is illegal for the doctor to reject that.
This idea that dubious work driven by the researchers' existing anti-trans beliefs is the real science and that anyone who disagrees with it is therefore attacking science is, sadly, fairly common: http://freethoughtblogs.com/atg/2016/08/07/academic-transpho...
can you elaborate? which papers?
Peterson makes specific claims an comments. Respond to those - He clearly doesn't think this framing is correct.
> systemic disrespect and delegitimization
'respect' is subjective, and as such dangerous to write into legislation.
In this case "delegitimization" is defined as any sort of disagreement or failure to abide by another persons views and wishes.
I'll grant him the fact that the conditions for workers in the 19th century and earlier were generally terrible, but it's pretty galling to argue that "workers were treated badly, so gender discrimination is a lie" when the right to own property seperately from their husbands, enter into contracts, or even vote were all denied women before the 20th century. It really gives the impression that he is being intellectually dishonest with his arguments.
If you want to get a good metric on historical oppression, look at the amount of blood shed it took to escape the yoke of it. Using a US perspective: compare the pain and suffering of the civil rights movement of the 60s to the suffragette's labor at the turn of the century.
But I also think you're artificially narrowing your analysis, even on that basis. Consider that until 1970, women in the United States were not protected from rape by their own husbands[1]. How many women must have suffered for lack of equal protection under the law? Now, women still disproportionately suffer from domestic violence even with those protections[2]. Furthermore, in states where access to women's health services is severely restricted as part of the abortion backlash (Planned Parenthood provides a number of different services to women's health, especially in poorer communities), how many suffer now because of the legal burden put on them, as compared to the legal restrictions on men for controlling their own health concerns and access to reproductive medicine?
I don't necessarily accept your metric as "good" or useful, but even taking it as a rubric, the effort to help women achieve the same level of security, education, and economic compensation as men continues, and women continue to face threats of violence and intimidation in prusuit of that, in a way that men, simply put, do not, as a whole.
Accepting your argument for the sake of looking at its logical conclusions -- statistically, women (like homosexuals), occupy a more diverse distribution of economic status, education, and social class than if you group just by race or ethnicity. Because of the history of political and economic inequality falling along the lines of ethnicity in America, efforts to end racial discrimination (both under the law and in economic terms[3][4]) have been starting from a more singularly disadvantaged position, and it has been correspondingly easier for the power structures to relatiate against them[5]. It might be argued that the struggle for equal rights of gays and lesbians was easier because not only were many people in that group wealthier and had more access to the power structure for economic reasons, but the rights they largely won (marriage and parental rights) fit within the structures of society already established. I think to a large extent the same goes for the rights of women: only once they could make the case that they weren't trying to totally upend social norms were they allowed to participate legally and democratically. (But again, how equally can you participate if your education and pay is worse than other groups?)
This doesn't hold up with the blanket statement that they weren't opressed (the "minority" element is a bit of a straw man on the interviewee's part -- blacks in South Africa were far and away the majority, and they had to struggle for decades to be granted equal rights; you wouldn't argue that their opression was somehow "less real" on that basis, would you?)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape_(United_States_la...
[2]: http://ncadv.org&#x...
I'll always use an excuse to link Scott Atran:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ijmBd69878
https://aeon.co/essays/why-isis-has-the-potential-to-be-a-wo...
(and before we get into the Sam Harris/Scott Atran debacle - I think it's largely irrelevant to the insight you can draw from Atran's work)