Well, he’s a vocal opponent of ‘political correctness’, which means he is punching down at pretty much everyone who would like not to be subjected to misogynistic or racist epithets. He’s a critic of what he calls ‘social justice warriors’, which (again) means he is punching down at woman, at minorities, etc. He has expressed his ‘detest’ for gender-neutral pronouns and, by extension, those who prefer to be called by them. He rejects that the chief cause of gender pay inequity is gender discrimination. He objects to attempts by society to ‘feminize’ men, and argues that masculinity is under attack.
He’s an affluent white male in a position of power and influence who has decided to use that position of power and influence to preach bigotry and defend men. If that isn’t punching down, nothing is.
His views are pseudo-intellectual. He’s the sort of guy who touts religion and traditional gender roles and family models as an antidote to rising chaos in the world, so comforting stuff for the conservative dumb dumb set but completely contradicted by the fact that the places that have largely stepped away from religion and traditional gender roles are also the nicest and best places to live.
He gets dismantled whenever he tries to debate someone serious (e.g. sam harris)
He’s part of the right-wing media ecosphere, so there’s lots of videos of Peterson with Ben Shapiro and the like
For my part, I’ve been enjoying the rich comedy of this situation for weeks. I love it when these right wing snakes have to leave their palace of shitty illusions and actually interact with reality, and when they are the people who pay for their stupidity and egotism rather than the people around them. The fact that Peterson is a psych professor who fell prey to benzo addiction is just hilarious; I’ve had exactly one psych class in my life and even I know that benzos are nothing to fuck around with. It’s in the same vein of humor as Trump getting the Corona virus, or the flat-earther who killed himself in his ram shackle rocket. It’s wonderful when they get outside the bounds of our safe and protected society and slam face first into real things.
I’d say that like so many in the Conservativosphere he’s actually more like a broken record who discovers adulation and income and either convinced themselves they’re great men or run their fingers through bills and decide they’ve found a new career. And sometimes both. There’s a kernel of some kind of insight when they start but they very rapidly expand to encompass far more than they ought in their scope, and the only way they can do this sustainably is to attack or reject their detractors.
It turns out that one of his lynchpin studies he’s quoted for years, that gender difference increases the more egalitarian a society becomes (one he did not do himself btw) is quite likely wrong.
Man, some of you are way harsh against people who don’t line up with your worldviews. I hope you never know the vitrol you are throwing this guy’s way. He wasn’t holding Nazi rallies or anything, he seemed to just question some prevailing academics and got torn apart by the far left and embraced by the far right. My impression is he was acting in good faith, but I’m not really super informed on the nuances of his views.
I only know this name as part of the incel community on reddit that got banned, I think there is still a sub of mouth breathers who think he is the new messiah, it shows up on the front page occasionally.
I think it’s good to question the seemly self serving social fields he was questioning, if you can’t criticize something without being beaten down for it then it’s probably not worth much. For instance, we can point to a general world consensus of climate scientists but I have never seen a generally widely accepted single study that says “This is it, irrefutable proof!”. It IS still a theory, though a generally accepted one. Same with a lot of fields, it’s not productive to attack them with no thought other than self service, but they should stand up to scrutiny.
No, you can’t line your pockets with neonazi cash, tailor your message and your brand to appeal to this market, promote and headline their events and their causes and then roll out the “its just a different opinion” excuse.
When Cathy Newman, a journalist for the UK’s Channel 4, challenged Peterson’s arguments in a televised interview, she received so many death threats that she had to get help from the police. “There were literally thousands of abusive tweets — it was a semi-organized campaign,” she recalled in an interview. “ It ranged from the usual ‘cunt, bitch, dumb blonde’ to ‘I’m going to find out where you live and execute you.’”
It’s just a difference of opinion.
So is National Socialism really when you think about it.
One of my sons got infatuated with Peterson a few years back, he was trying to argue with me and my wife (his mom!) how women are biologically tuned to not succeed in business and sent me a video of Peterson that we dissected so ruthlessly in the first 10 minutes, my son had an “aha” moment.
Peterson puts forth a learned, composed argument and treats it as fact and states so many things as fact, it’s ridiculous. I found it easy to dissect the one video my son posted, and show how he was manipulating / mansplaining shit that couldn’t hold up to any scrutiny, but I have zero interest in looking at any of his other vids.
Kudos to you. That’s one of those parenting challenges I am least looking forward to. It’s a new one for the digital age, but a) it sounds like you handled it well b) you did well enough on other angles raising him that he even spoke to you on the topic. And that second part is the secret that many people miss.
The fact that there are people in this very thread, people who I assume are rational adults and probably pretty educated, who listened to Joran Peterson talk and thought “hey, this is making a lot of sense to me!” is why we, as humans, can’t have nice things.
This isn’t just someone who has strong feelings and disagrees with the mainstream. This is someone who is actively hurting society, and specific people within it.
Good riddance, though I’m sure he’ll be seen as a martyr among his fans and three more just like him will sprout from his dessicated corpse.
I’m so tired of this movie. The protagonist says reprehensible things, someone criticizes him for saying reprehensible things, a third person bemoans that one can’t say reprehensible things without being criticized.
This is the entire anti-political-correctness complaint in one paragraph. Well done.
To be clear:
a) Jordan Peterson is free to say whatever he wants, even if what he wants to say is selfish and privileged and he’s arrogant about it. b) Anyone else is free to point out that Peterson is a selfish privileged arrogant hack. c) The occurrence of (b) is nothing more than the consequence of free speech in a civil society. It is not an assault or an attack or a cancellation or a beat-down or any other such nonsense.
I’d just like to hear people say “He and his ideas should be criticized forcefully until he is no longer taken seriously in the public square” instead of “He should die a miserable death far from his home and family.” Is that too much to ask?
