Jordon Peterson has genuinely bad and poorly defended ideas imo, but he’s clearly not a racist or bigot. I think his ideas have been inflated in value because of his public (and admittedly very effective) rebukes of inflammed liberals that attempt to label him as a bigot. He’s great at public debate, but he’s a bad intellectual.
Jordan Peterson's rhetoric is just another round of reactionary sophistry, perhaps slightly better than the "A is A" bullshit of Objectivism or the flimflam of Praxeology. There's not enough hours in the day to devote to deprogramming a true believer who in the long run is severely mangled as an intellectual being by internalizing his garbage. There are thousands of such believers.
I was expecting this to be an excoriation of Peterson rather than a rather even-handed overview of his principles. Seemed pretty fresh to me for NYT standards.
You'd really classify this article as even-handed?
>I’d say the lives of young men can be improved more through loving attachment than through Peterson’s joyless and graceless calls to self-sacrifice.
One of the many asinine misrepresentations littered throughout this hit-piece; the entire point of Mr. Peterson's work is to allow people to experience joyful, meaningful life, instead of living in abject misery.
Besides, what kind of activities creating "loving attachment" among men, or women for that matter? Voluntarily associations of like-minded individuals working together towards a common-goal; an expression of their ability to get things done will earn not only the respect of others but, more importantly, themselves.
I think you can find (at least some form of) wisdom in anything. You don't have adhere to anyone's perspective absolutely, but to discard everything he says is equally foolish. Just a thought, I can't help but entertain perspectives different than my own. It's good "exercise" and can solidify your unique individual beliefs.
How is telling people to use their agency and take action to improve their own lives instead of complaining reactionary sophistry? Your criticism seems incredibly off-base.
He actually doesn't reject the premise. He throws around a lot of chaff about other characteristics on which to distinguish people, without addressing the issue that the groups he's ridiculing postmodernists and marxists for being concerned about actually do suffer structural inequality, then ends by saying that he's not obliged to care about the historical circumstances which have favored him in the development of that inequality.
Personally I am a bit on the fence about his arguments as these are complex phenomena, but it is not obvious to me how this is sophistry. Why do you think this is an example of him using fallacious arguments with the intention of deceiving (sophistry)? I'll dig a bit more into why I don't think it is clear.
This is one of a series of lectures where Jordan Peterson argue against the postmodernist and marxist tendency to define people by identity groups, and defining a oppressor/oppressed hierarchy between those identity groups.
The core goal of his argument is to show that this post-modernist thought pattern is similar to marxist thought patterns around identity groups and oppression. He argues that this thought pattern is oversimplified as a person can belong to countless different identity groups, and that identity groups themselves does not properly account for individual differences within the group.
He argues that oppression hierarchies between identity groups are meaningless in describing individual circumstances because it is a univariant analysis that doesn't account for the complexity inherent in the problem.
He argues that this thought pattern was/is a catastrophe in all communist countries where it has been applied and has lead to deaths of millions of people. He also argues that this thought pattern suppress the very mechanisms of free expression and ideal of equal opportunity that has made the western culture successful.
In the end he seems to suggest working hard for equality of opportunity instead of removing opportunity using identity group oppressor/oppressed hierarchies.
I would love to see a well-reasoned counter-argument to this viewpoint.
That full excerpt is an extremely ignorant representation of postmodernism, marxism, and Western culture, and the part I pointed to tops it off by saying he's completely justified in his ignorance.
I have a lot of problems with postmodernism, some of which he raises here, but its motivations can't be understood divorced from colonial politics, which is how he tries to present it here. In many ways, his presentation exemplifies exactly the kind of ignorance postmodernism was developed to combat.
And his claim that Marxism led to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, and that Western liberal values stand in opposition to that, ignores the hundreds of millions of graves Western society is built on (I don't know where the two World Wars fit into his worldview, just for starters), and the enormous economic pressure Marxist countries were under as a result of the aggressive resistance and suppression they faced from Western countries, from 1917 onwards.
> That full excerpt is an extremely ignorant representation of postmodernism, marxism, and Western culture, and the part I pointed to tops it off by saying he's completely justified in his ignorance.
Lets handle one thing at a time. What are some specific examples of where you think he gets postmodernism wrong and why?
> And his claim that Marxism led to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, and that Western liberal values stand in opposition to that, ignores the hundreds of millions of graves Western society is built on (I don't know where the two World Wars fit into his worldview, just for starters)
Western society has definitely had a lot of external aggression through war and colonialism. However, I think Jordan Peterson is more focused on the war on your own society and its social structures.
Marxism argues that the old ways of organizing society became a block--a fetter--on the potential for further developments in production. And the conflict could only end, as Marx and Engels put it starkly in The Communist Manifesto, "in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."
In order to facilitate this revolutionary reconstitution marxist countries have enforced identity politics in a way that led to the deaths of millions of people and has necessitated policies of thought control where 1/3 of the population spies on the other 2/3 to keep everyone in line.
Because of this I think that although you are making a good point, you are talking about external violence while Jordan Peterson is talking about internal violence inflicted to cause a revolutionary reconstitution.
> and the enormous economic pressure Marxist countries were under as a result of the aggressive resistance and suppression they faced from Western countries, from 1917 onwards.
Communism in practice appears to fail in promoting work ethics and motivation, and that is more likely to be the biggest contributor to the fall of this system. For example, in a study conducted in the former USSR, over 50% of the work force admitted to drinking alcohol while on the job. Furthermore, unbeknownst to the communist party, nearly 40% chose to work a second job privately to attain more wealth. https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/commu...
> In his videos, he analyzes classic and biblical texts, he eviscerates identity politics and political correctness and, most important, he delivers stern fatherly lectures to young men on how to be honorable, upright and self-disciplined.
Well that message is clouded in vague phrases ... not that he cant give examples, but in general its sophist, i guessing this technique allows you engage with a broader audience. I dont think he uses it for lack of evidence, instead he uses it so he can invoke emotions to several different people at one.
I understand criticizing it , as its seen as cunning trick, not strait speak. In reality all good speakers use it, and criticizing it is just jealously usually. Unless you're Orwell and then you would denounce the use of it entirely.
> Jordan Peterson's rhetoric is just another round of reactionary sophistry
Reactionary? As far as I understand it, a 'reactionary' is someone who wants a return of monarchy. There doesn't really seem to be anything in Peterson's dialogue about that. Unless you mean something different by that, and it was just a poor choice of words?
Calling his argument sophistry without any actual reference to them is in and of itself sophistry. Most of what he's saying, once understood, is material that would have been common sense to virtually anyone a few generations ago, and the arguments still stand very strong.
> There's not enough hours in the day to devote to deprogramming a true believer who in the long run is severely mangled as an intellectual being by internalizing his garbage.
Are you going to make reference to any of this 'garbage' or are you simply going to assert this without evidence? Such a brave position to take. I'm sure you think of yourself as the sole voice of reason muchn of the time. So are you suggesting the opposite of Peterson's claims - should young Western men simply shrug their responsibilities and be happy hive-dwelling consumers, the "salad men" as the Japanese call it, continuing to fail at their attempts to build meaningful lives?
You offer no alternative and you don't even admit to recognizing there's actually a crisis. Shame.
I'd love to hear a thoughtful response to him. His lecturing style is, according to his own description, more exploratory than explanatory. He's said before that he's not trying to tell people what to think, rather he's basically just thinking out loud on stage.
This approach leaves a lot of room for disagreement, because of course there will be things left out, scholars not mentioned, and plenty of inconsistencies.
But I've yet to hear a real example of such a disagreement. All I hear is anger and contempt for him.
Agreed, it would be excellent to have someone with opposing views actually have a proper dialectic conversation with him. So far we've only seen rhetorical counter-arguments which accomplish very little - and have in some cases pushed him, out of necessity, into also using a more rhetorical approach.
I'm sure there are some reasonable qualms with some of his views - and further, I'd be willing to bet he'd be willing to explore them with someone who's actually offering an open conversation to discuss their concerns rather than an attack.
It's just not the common approach, especially in public dialogue.
I am not sure he would be willing to engage with an actual dialectic conversation right now. It would almost certainly expose him as a fraud and destroy a) his credibility in academia (that might already be shot actually) and b) destroy his alt-right lecture tour.
So you're saying Jordan Peterson is a deeply honest classical liberal trying his best to work his way to truth and inspiring millions of people of all sorts of political outlooks to improve their own lives?
This is true for people who make Peterson the end of their intellectual journey. _But this also holds true for any and all philosophies._ Whatever stink you're detecting on Peterson's followers doesn't necessarily translate to his ideas. Terrible annoying assholes can still speak the truth - we have to evaluate Peterson's ideas on their own merits, which at the very least the NYT article attempts.
All that being said I don't really "get" Peterson. I find his YouTube videos to be rambling and incoherent as he wanders and flits between topics that appear to be only tangentially related. (Though occasionally I'll detect some interesting nugget of an idea).
Initially this seemed to my mind to be a weakness and flaw but now I think it's actually the core of this appeal. His style requires listeners to make the connections on their own, to bring themselves into the lecture as active listeners. A searching young man primed by ennui will make those connections and will self-initiate into Peterson's philosophy, the listener will take ownership of the ideas. This contributes to the perceived clannishness of Peterson adherents.
“Moral reforms and deteriorations are moved by large forces, and they are mostly caused by reactions from the habits of a preceding period. Backwards and forwards swings the great pendulum, and its alternations are not determined by a few distinguished folk clinging to the end of it.”
What I see in Jordan Peterson is that he's not espousing an yet-another over-reaction, but a careful examination of ideas that have may have been discarded prematurely.
Jordan Peterson fans are the most tedious and pedantic logic nerds I've ever encountered. Reading his subreddit and his stans on Twitter you'd think his main teachings were (1) Argue dictionary definitions for hours, (2) Never respond to someone's central point, just pick out secondary or tertiary sentences and point out their logical fallacies, and (3) If all else fails, say "that's not an argument" with no explanation.
It's disappointing that he's become a public figure with a fan-base that can be generalized as, well, not great. I found his biblical series very enlightening for someone who has been secular for a long time. And his life advise, while nothing new and not really groundbreaking or relevant for me, is solid for those looking for a foundation of good habits I suppose. I don't really understand the hate, but then again I don't turn mounds into mountains.
(1) You don't care enough about definitions to argue over them until they're settled? How do you expect a discussion to be resolved, then?
(2) You don't care if secondary or tertiary points are illogical? If they're not important, or if the logical flaws can't be fixed, why do such secondary/tertiary points continue to be included along with the central point? It makes no sense to blame Peterson's camp for this in any case. The opposition should fix their damned arguments.
(3) Can you cite an example of a logical argument presented by JP's opposition that is dismissed with "that's not an argument"? Please make sure what you cite is an actual logical/dialectical statement, and not rhetoric/sophistry... that's the typical problem with neoliberal/postmodern/progressive language.
JP's philosophy needs to be attacked on several fronts, most notably his ridiculous attempts to give religion and particularly Christianity a validity beyond mere myth and collections of historical cultural wisdom, such as it was. But the complaints you raise are absurd.
I've only recently watch a few talks by Jordan Peterson, and haven't read the debate around him, but:
> (2) You don't care if secondary or tertiary points are illogical? If they're not important, or if the logical flaws can't be fixed, why do such secondary/tertiary points continue to be included along with the central point? It makes no sense to blame Peterson's camp for this in any case.
When you are discussing social movements the "opposition" is open ended. When you can pluck your examples from literally thousands of arguments and articulations, it's easy to pick out some ill-conceived notion, or simply misinterpret by taking it out of its context.
For instance, I watched a video where he talks about White Privilege (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbDggKqt3KA), and he quotes one seminal piece (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peggy_McIntosh#Invisible_Knaps...), but that essay simply introduced the phrase to many people and opened a conversation. And he points out that some of the items may be class privilege instead of race privilege (though of course he wouldn't say "class" because that's Marxist!) So?
> The opposition should fix their damned arguments.
No one's going to go back 30 years and rewrite the Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack to clarify whatever confusion Jordan Peterson had with it. There's no hope so long as he plays the critic and selects the material he prefers to refute.
He's decided to engage with social movements. It's why he's popular, he's reacting to something that feels familiar to many people. If he engaged with any specific argument most people wouldn't care what he said, because most people don't care about any specific argument. You can't engage logically with a social movement, because there's no single logical basis, and there's no underlying authority which can be refuted.
In this particular article I find it most interesting that they conclude with a tale of bad happenings to one who, instead of debating his views, "distorted, simplified and restated his views to make them appear offensive and cartoonish." This from an article that chose to characterize the readers of one of his books as, "men who feel fatherless, solitary, floating in a chaotic moral vacuum, constantly outperformed and humiliated by women, haunted by pain and self-contempt." This degree of lack of self awareness and coherence, and in such a brief article, is really disappointing from the NYT.
>This from an article that chose to characterize the readers of one of his books as, "men who feel fatherless, solitary, floating in a chaotic moral vacuum, constantly outperformed and humiliated by women, haunted by pain and self-contempt."
The NYT actually got this right. Jordan Peterson is explicitly targeting his message for that type of men, because he feels that they need it. It applies to everyone, of course, but that's his primary target.
They got it entirely wrong. Peterson has explicitly and repeatedly stated that he never intended to target young men specifically but, since YouTube's audience is predominantly male, supply-and-demand decided the distribution for him.
Edit: the article actually uses the vague term "the implied readers"... which I guess means it's the author's own implication. I have to agree with the above, heavily-downvoted comment above as such baseless speculation appears to serve the writer's agenda over the need to inform the reader.
Those stats are one search away, but I have no point to prove. I am saying, for the record, that this is Jordan Peterson's stated explanation for why his audience is predominantly male, and the assertion that he specifically targeted them is false (unless JP is lying).
I certainly get the impression (though I don't have the data) that JP's clinical practice does not have the same gender disparity, so it is at least plausible that the medium is a greater factor than the message.
I've heard as much of the guy's message as I can tolerate, and he's a friggin misogynist. It's scary that his message resonates with anybody. It's a negative message with its own "axis of evil": Nearly all women, a nebulous group of superior men (pick any: attractive, wealthy, educated, lucky), and modern society in general. It comes off as the rant of a brat upset that women are getting closer to having equal opportunities.
I used to not mind Peterson because he seemed to help out young males find some direction in their life, but then he found out arguing with transpeople about pronouns made him more money so he let himself be adopted by the far-right.
> but then he found out arguing with transpeople about pronouns made him more money so he let himself be adopted by the far-right.
I don't think this is a fair characterization at all. The issue with pronouns is just a microcosm of a larger issue, which is not just the erosion of free speech, but the influx of compelled or forced speech, which is insidious and must be named and stopped early lest it gain more of a foothold.
As for the alt-right - if you're going to make the argument that some group liking their interpretation of what you've said means that you're one of them, you've got an uphill battle ahead of you. It's plainly illogical to assert this.
His political views are literally on the left, he just doesn't think the government should be compelling speech of any kind. It's the slippery slope argument, which I'm sure some people here will argue is a logical fallacy.
From what I can tell, that assessment is unfair. I do not find him to be like the typical knee-jerk, reactionary talking-heads you see on CNN, FOX, MSNBC, etc. His analysis has a broader, philosophical and historical perspective. Case in point:
His takes on postmodernism and the semi-fake concept of Cultural Marxism, while seemingly fancy and erudite, are deeply flawed and stem from bad or non-existent scholarship. That he uses this to flame his fandom is damning in my opinion.
Edit: "The ending quote on that article: Peterson’s attempt to buttress these reactionary positions with readings of contemporary philosophy, now preserved for posterity in the pages of 12 Rules for Life, is not without precedent. But the tendency finds its most thorough realization in his zealotry. Peterson goes beyond Lilla, Chomsky, and Buchanan, arguing that what he calls “postmodern philosophy” is not merely a symptom of social unease, but its cause. By charging this poorly defined discourse of postmodernism with shaping contemporary society and bending the arc of history, he is doing precisely what he has accused his adversaries of doing: imposing a world of ideas upon the actually existing world, one which is more complex than he has the ability to grasp."
I've not watched that particular video but weird conspiracy theories about postmodernism, Marxism and Jews have been a strong component of the right in the USA for decades.
What really is the difference between between ex-Googler James Damore and the young man holding the sign saying "Communist Jews behind Race Mixing" in the civil rights era. Both seem like respectable members of their communities. Yet both think that social progress is actually a plot by evil-doers to destroy society because that is what their elders have taught them.
He never argued with anyone about pronouns he was against legislating compelled speech especially when the definition and the interpretation of the law would be delegated to a non elected body outside of the judicial and legislative branch like the Ontario human’s rights commission.
He never refused to call anyone by the pronouns of their choice nor he ever said that he wouldn’t do so.
So Jordan Peterson is very hard to argue and or debate because he is claiming a well researched and established philosophy. Not a lot of people, especially on the internet, can rightly claim to understand the supposed philosophical underpinnings of his work. He is not well researched and frequently conflates concepts to create new concepts that, while appealing to his chosen or unchosen audience, are rooted in a misconception. Here is a great article going into great depth about his failings. Like another poster said, there is not enough hours in the day!
This is so off topic for HN, and such a poster child of a lousy thread for HN, that I'm going to kill it now.
All: If you want to have ideological arguments like this, HN is not the site you're looking for. The idea here is unpredictable curiosity, not battling samenesses.
66 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 90.5 ms ] threadDavid Brooks will forever be David Brooks.
>I’d say the lives of young men can be improved more through loving attachment than through Peterson’s joyless and graceless calls to self-sacrifice.
One of the many asinine misrepresentations littered throughout this hit-piece; the entire point of Mr. Peterson's work is to allow people to experience joyful, meaningful life, instead of living in abject misery.
Besides, what kind of activities creating "loving attachment" among men, or women for that matter? Voluntarily associations of like-minded individuals working together towards a common-goal; an expression of their ability to get things done will earn not only the respect of others but, more importantly, themselves.
Saying that I know something without saying what you believe I know is not helpful in assisting me in understanding what you are communicating.
This is one of a series of lectures where Jordan Peterson argue against the postmodernist and marxist tendency to define people by identity groups, and defining a oppressor/oppressed hierarchy between those identity groups.
The core goal of his argument is to show that this post-modernist thought pattern is similar to marxist thought patterns around identity groups and oppression. He argues that this thought pattern is oversimplified as a person can belong to countless different identity groups, and that identity groups themselves does not properly account for individual differences within the group.
He argues that oppression hierarchies between identity groups are meaningless in describing individual circumstances because it is a univariant analysis that doesn't account for the complexity inherent in the problem.
He argues that this thought pattern was/is a catastrophe in all communist countries where it has been applied and has lead to deaths of millions of people. He also argues that this thought pattern suppress the very mechanisms of free expression and ideal of equal opportunity that has made the western culture successful.
In the end he seems to suggest working hard for equality of opportunity instead of removing opportunity using identity group oppressor/oppressed hierarchies.
I would love to see a well-reasoned counter-argument to this viewpoint.
I have a lot of problems with postmodernism, some of which he raises here, but its motivations can't be understood divorced from colonial politics, which is how he tries to present it here. In many ways, his presentation exemplifies exactly the kind of ignorance postmodernism was developed to combat.
And his claim that Marxism led to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, and that Western liberal values stand in opposition to that, ignores the hundreds of millions of graves Western society is built on (I don't know where the two World Wars fit into his worldview, just for starters), and the enormous economic pressure Marxist countries were under as a result of the aggressive resistance and suppression they faced from Western countries, from 1917 onwards.
Lets handle one thing at a time. What are some specific examples of where you think he gets postmodernism wrong and why?
> And his claim that Marxism led to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, and that Western liberal values stand in opposition to that, ignores the hundreds of millions of graves Western society is built on (I don't know where the two World Wars fit into his worldview, just for starters)
Western society has definitely had a lot of external aggression through war and colonialism. However, I think Jordan Peterson is more focused on the war on your own society and its social structures.
Marxism argues that the old ways of organizing society became a block--a fetter--on the potential for further developments in production. And the conflict could only end, as Marx and Engels put it starkly in The Communist Manifesto, "in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."
In order to facilitate this revolutionary reconstitution marxist countries have enforced identity politics in a way that led to the deaths of millions of people and has necessitated policies of thought control where 1/3 of the population spies on the other 2/3 to keep everyone in line.
Because of this I think that although you are making a good point, you are talking about external violence while Jordan Peterson is talking about internal violence inflicted to cause a revolutionary reconstitution.
> and the enormous economic pressure Marxist countries were under as a result of the aggressive resistance and suppression they faced from Western countries, from 1917 onwards.
Communism in practice appears to fail in promoting work ethics and motivation, and that is more likely to be the biggest contributor to the fall of this system. For example, in a study conducted in the former USSR, over 50% of the work force admitted to drinking alcohol while on the job. Furthermore, unbeknownst to the communist party, nearly 40% chose to work a second job privately to attain more wealth. https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/commu...
> In his videos, he analyzes classic and biblical texts, he eviscerates identity politics and political correctness and, most important, he delivers stern fatherly lectures to young men on how to be honorable, upright and self-disciplined.
I understand criticizing it , as its seen as cunning trick, not strait speak. In reality all good speakers use it, and criticizing it is just jealously usually. Unless you're Orwell and then you would denounce the use of it entirely.
Reactionary? As far as I understand it, a 'reactionary' is someone who wants a return of monarchy. There doesn't really seem to be anything in Peterson's dialogue about that. Unless you mean something different by that, and it was just a poor choice of words?
Calling his argument sophistry without any actual reference to them is in and of itself sophistry. Most of what he's saying, once understood, is material that would have been common sense to virtually anyone a few generations ago, and the arguments still stand very strong.
> There's not enough hours in the day to devote to deprogramming a true believer who in the long run is severely mangled as an intellectual being by internalizing his garbage.
Are you going to make reference to any of this 'garbage' or are you simply going to assert this without evidence? Such a brave position to take. I'm sure you think of yourself as the sole voice of reason muchn of the time. So are you suggesting the opposite of Peterson's claims - should young Western men simply shrug their responsibilities and be happy hive-dwelling consumers, the "salad men" as the Japanese call it, continuing to fail at their attempts to build meaningful lives?
You offer no alternative and you don't even admit to recognizing there's actually a crisis. Shame.
This approach leaves a lot of room for disagreement, because of course there will be things left out, scholars not mentioned, and plenty of inconsistencies.
But I've yet to hear a real example of such a disagreement. All I hear is anger and contempt for him.
I'm sure there are some reasonable qualms with some of his views - and further, I'd be willing to bet he'd be willing to explore them with someone who's actually offering an open conversation to discuss their concerns rather than an attack.
It's just not the common approach, especially in public dialogue.
All that being said I don't really "get" Peterson. I find his YouTube videos to be rambling and incoherent as he wanders and flits between topics that appear to be only tangentially related. (Though occasionally I'll detect some interesting nugget of an idea).
Initially this seemed to my mind to be a weakness and flaw but now I think it's actually the core of this appeal. His style requires listeners to make the connections on their own, to bring themselves into the lecture as active listeners. A searching young man primed by ennui will make those connections and will self-initiate into Peterson's philosophy, the listener will take ownership of the ideas. This contributes to the perceived clannishness of Peterson adherents.
—Sir Charles Petrie, THE VICTORIANS
(2) You don't care if secondary or tertiary points are illogical? If they're not important, or if the logical flaws can't be fixed, why do such secondary/tertiary points continue to be included along with the central point? It makes no sense to blame Peterson's camp for this in any case. The opposition should fix their damned arguments.
(3) Can you cite an example of a logical argument presented by JP's opposition that is dismissed with "that's not an argument"? Please make sure what you cite is an actual logical/dialectical statement, and not rhetoric/sophistry... that's the typical problem with neoliberal/postmodern/progressive language.
JP's philosophy needs to be attacked on several fronts, most notably his ridiculous attempts to give religion and particularly Christianity a validity beyond mere myth and collections of historical cultural wisdom, such as it was. But the complaints you raise are absurd.
> (2) You don't care if secondary or tertiary points are illogical? If they're not important, or if the logical flaws can't be fixed, why do such secondary/tertiary points continue to be included along with the central point? It makes no sense to blame Peterson's camp for this in any case.
When you are discussing social movements the "opposition" is open ended. When you can pluck your examples from literally thousands of arguments and articulations, it's easy to pick out some ill-conceived notion, or simply misinterpret by taking it out of its context.
For instance, I watched a video where he talks about White Privilege (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbDggKqt3KA), and he quotes one seminal piece (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peggy_McIntosh#Invisible_Knaps...), but that essay simply introduced the phrase to many people and opened a conversation. And he points out that some of the items may be class privilege instead of race privilege (though of course he wouldn't say "class" because that's Marxist!) So?
> The opposition should fix their damned arguments.
No one's going to go back 30 years and rewrite the Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack to clarify whatever confusion Jordan Peterson had with it. There's no hope so long as he plays the critic and selects the material he prefers to refute.
He's decided to engage with social movements. It's why he's popular, he's reacting to something that feels familiar to many people. If he engaged with any specific argument most people wouldn't care what he said, because most people don't care about any specific argument. You can't engage logically with a social movement, because there's no single logical basis, and there's no underlying authority which can be refuted.
The NYT actually got this right. Jordan Peterson is explicitly targeting his message for that type of men, because he feels that they need it. It applies to everyone, of course, but that's his primary target.
Edit: the article actually uses the vague term "the implied readers"... which I guess means it's the author's own implication. I have to agree with the above, heavily-downvoted comment above as such baseless speculation appears to serve the writer's agenda over the need to inform the reader.
Uh. Doesnt youtube have like billions of users at this point? Do you have any stats demonstrating that more men use youtube?
I certainly get the impression (though I don't have the data) that JP's clinical practice does not have the same gender disparity, so it is at least plausible that the medium is a greater factor than the message.
And your source for that assertion is?
I don't think this is a fair characterization at all. The issue with pronouns is just a microcosm of a larger issue, which is not just the erosion of free speech, but the influx of compelled or forced speech, which is insidious and must be named and stopped early lest it gain more of a foothold.
As for the alt-right - if you're going to make the argument that some group liking their interpretation of what you've said means that you're one of them, you've got an uphill battle ahead of you. It's plainly illogical to assert this.
Postmodernism and Cultural Marxism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLoG9zBvvLQ
https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/01/23/postmodernism-not-ta...
Edit: "The ending quote on that article: Peterson’s attempt to buttress these reactionary positions with readings of contemporary philosophy, now preserved for posterity in the pages of 12 Rules for Life, is not without precedent. But the tendency finds its most thorough realization in his zealotry. Peterson goes beyond Lilla, Chomsky, and Buchanan, arguing that what he calls “postmodern philosophy” is not merely a symptom of social unease, but its cause. By charging this poorly defined discourse of postmodernism with shaping contemporary society and bending the arc of history, he is doing precisely what he has accused his adversaries of doing: imposing a world of ideas upon the actually existing world, one which is more complex than he has the ability to grasp."
What really is the difference between between ex-Googler James Damore and the young man holding the sign saying "Communist Jews behind Race Mixing" in the civil rights era. Both seem like respectable members of their communities. Yet both think that social progress is actually a plot by evil-doers to destroy society because that is what their elders have taught them.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRlQquk...
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTcWkHj...
(Links via Google as some of the images are hosted on rs isn't sirescele rating "the good old days")
He never refused to call anyone by the pronouns of their choice nor he ever said that he wouldn’t do so.
Go to ~9:30 in this video: https://youtu.be/O-nvNAcvUPE
He claims that he wouldn't use preferred pronouns even if there was no law mandating it.
I'm not condemning this choice, just pointing out the falsehood.
https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/01/23/postmodernism-not-ta...
All: If you want to have ideological arguments like this, HN is not the site you're looking for. The idea here is unpredictable curiosity, not battling samenesses.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html