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What’s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?

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Re: What’s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?

#111

Post by Yetanfou »

DiffEq wrote: post #57
stcredzero wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention scientifically dubious tests of "unconscious bias" used against you as evidence in kangaroo courts -- enshrined into law. That's something that might be in Room 101 in the world of Orwell's1984. Also, enshrining into law of scientifically false statements. (Anyone remember the bit about Indiana doing that with pi == 3?)

Well pi does equal 3 if you round it down.

...and a square looks like a circle if you round it down as well. Doing so does make it lose its essence though, just like rounding down pi does. It is not for nothing after all that the ancients tried all sorts of tricks to find the actual numerical value of the ratio between a circle's radius and its circumference.

Re: What’s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?

#112

Post by upofadown »

jnbiche wrote: post #103
upofadown wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He actually wrote a letter to the administration of his university to state that if he had a trans student he would not be compelled to use their gender pronoun of choice. The admin told him, in so many words, to not be an asshole for no reason. He then published to response on the internet and played the victim. So he more or less had to create a controversy out of nothing. The great majority of people consider the…

> So he more or less had to create a controversy out of nothing. The great majority of people consider the question a matter of courtesy and hold no strong feelings. Well, this is now enshrined in Canadian law, so it doesn't matter much what the great majority of people feel. It only matters how courts will interpret the law.

Not at all, although Dr Peterson has spent a lot of time arguing that it is. In particular, he thinks that a recent addition of gender to anti-discrimination law means something about the sort of gender pronouns you can use. He has not been dissuaded in his opinion by a great number of people with much better qualifications in that sort of law.

Re: What’s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?

#113

Post by jnbiche »

stcredzero wrote: post #104
beat wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people with unusual gender identities understand this, and are understanding and patient with those who are making an effort to respect their wishes. It's those who consciously refuse, or mock their attempts to clarify their identities, that get called out, and they deserve it. Yeah, it's hard for us. Hell, I'm 52. I have a lot of adjustment to do. But I try to do it, because I respect my friends. (Patton Oswald…

So when I hear Jordan Peterson say he's being oppressed by the evil forces of Marxist postmodernism for being asked to use preferred pronouns... But you've never heard that. You've only heard him reject being coerced to do that. He's even on the record as saying he's fine with addressing people as they'd like to be addressed, so long as it's all done civilly. What you're doing is projecting a caricatured position ont…

> A law that empowers kangaroo courts sin't "simply asking nice." A law that empowers those courts to use an unscientific "unconscious bias" test that claims to get into your head isn't "simply asking nice." A law that can result in dismissal from your job isn't "simply asking nice."

I'd like to underline this statement. Making this into a law that will impact employment, sentencing, etc., is not a polite request. It's the power of the state. When that involves a certain way of speaking, or thinking, a lot of us civil libertarian types get very uneasy, regardless of the merits of the issue at hand.

Re: What’s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?

#114

Post by mizzack »

api wrote: post #94
mizzack wrote: post #23

I think the "danger" around Jordan Peterson goes beyond the pronoun debate. Individualism and wariness of ideological collectivism seem to be tenets of what he espouses. No surprise, then, that ideological collectivists are his most vocal enemies.

Why do so many fascists and racists like him then? They're collectivists. (Not necessarily saying Peterson is a fascist or a racist, but that's a separate question.)

From a post elsewhere in these comments:

> Another stand holds that there are only two really important groups: the powerful / powerless, which could also be seen as the "oppressors" and "oppressed." Everyone is supposed to be in one of the two groups. This gets grafted onto identity politics in rather unpleasant ways (IMO).

> So in the pronoun debate, people who are transgendered or non-gendered are the oppressed and need help; everyone who is not "helping" them is the oppressor and must be opposed.

Same thing applies here. Take note of who is applying these -ist labels, and who they are being applied to: anyone in the outgroup.

I would be floored to discover if the majority of these strawmen "fascists" and "racists" are a collective by any definition other than "not on board with the cause."

Re: What’s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?

#115

Post by beat »

jnbiche wrote: post #96
beat wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very simple, really. You use what seems obvious, and if someone corrects you in one-on-one conversation, you finish the conversation doing the best you can to respect their wishes. And if you screw up, you apologize and self-correct. We're not talking about 200 students in this case. We're talking about one on one conversation with one person . That's when pronouns matter. Being unhappy about coercive regulation…

> We're not talking about 200 students in this case. We're talking about one on one conversation with one person. That's when pronouns matter. Professors never engage in one-on-one conversation with their students? And they never refer to their students in the third-person within the classroom? > And using the coercion as justification for not doing it is, bluntly, an excuse. It's turning around and claiming yourself…

I fail to see the distinction between "he's alarmed and outraged that proscriptive laws governing his speech have been passed", and seeing himself as a victim of oppression. But this distinction seems very important to some people, who object to my characterization of him as a self-styled victim of oppression.

Just because he doesn't use the word "oppression" in that context doesn't mean it isn't his broad meaning. Coercion and oppression are more or less interchangeable.

Re: What’s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?

#116

Post by dragonwriter »

jnbiche wrote: post #103
upofadown wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He actually wrote a letter to the administration of his university to state that if he had a trans student he would not be compelled to use their gender pronoun of choice. The admin told him, in so many words, to not be an asshole for no reason. He then published to response on the internet and played the victim. So he more or less had to create a controversy out of nothing. The great majority of people consider the…

> So he more or less had to create a controversy out of nothing. The great majority of people consider the question a matter of courtesy and hold no strong feelings. Well, this is now enshrined in Canadian law, so it doesn't matter much what the great majority of people feel. It only matters how courts will interpret the law.

> Well, this is now enshrined in Canadian law

Well, something is enshrined in Canadian law, but the heat of the debate over whether what Peterson claims Bill C-16 does is a desirable thing for a law to do sometimes obscures the fact that people—including people who are experts in law, which Peterson is not—have challenged his characterization of what the law actually does.

Re: What’s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?

#117

Post by cholantesh »

majormajor wrote: post #34
savanaly wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In everyday life I've never found it to be too inconvenient to be as accommodating as possible to others and communicate with them on their own terms, whether that means remembering to use the pronouns they want or using alternative terminology if they think some word is offensive. I've never had to think about how my outlook might change if all of that got a lot more inconvenient though (if more people start requiri…

It's easy in one-on-one conversations with people you know or have a reasonable way of learning about. It's hard for public or mass communications with people who have rapidly-evolving preferences and sets of things that can cause offense. Peterson sounds like a dick in his methods, but there's a dangerous regressive trend picking up in mainstream circles of treating disagreement as heresy. We've picked up the worst…

>It's hard for public or mass communications with people who have rapidly-evolving preferences and sets of things that can cause offense.

I'm not convinced of this. "Hi all" works as a salutation, in public speaking, you can substitute ladies and gentlemen with lots of far more engaging variants (eg: "Dear friends", "my fellow students" (a favourite of one of my best instructors in college), "distinguished guests", etc), announcers have been using "attention all passengers" and other formal identifiers for a while.

Re: What’s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?

#118

Post by stcredzero »

Erik816 wrote: post #75

What is often lost since Peterson became "famous" after the whole gender pronoun controversy is the quality and depth of his thinking and lecturing that was already available on YouTube. This article starts with that, and explains his popularity as a teacher at Harvard and Toronto. I had been watching his lectures for about a year before the pronoun issue, and his ideas are fascinating and deep. They tie together man…

But that synthesis is complex, nuanced, and requires a lot of time to think about.

You can think of Jordan Peterson as going just a bit farther than Sam Harris, when Sam Harris says that we should learn from religion by practicing things like meditation. Jordan Peterson comes from the position that things like myth and religion co-evolved with human beings and human society. Even if the literal epistemology of religion and myth is dead wrong on the conscious/rational/scientific level, it still contains insights into the nature of human beings' self regulation because of that co-evolution. Often, these things operate at below the level of consciousness, as we would expect such things to, given that they co-evolved with us from a time before sentient consciousness.

Re: What’s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?

#119

Post by beat »

stcredzero wrote: post #104
beat wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people with unusual gender identities understand this, and are understanding and patient with those who are making an effort to respect their wishes. It's those who consciously refuse, or mock their attempts to clarify their identities, that get called out, and they deserve it. Yeah, it's hard for us. Hell, I'm 52. I have a lot of adjustment to do. But I try to do it, because I respect my friends. (Patton Oswald…

So when I hear Jordan Peterson say he's being oppressed by the evil forces of Marxist postmodernism for being asked to use preferred pronouns... But you've never heard that. You've only heard him reject being coerced to do that. He's even on the record as saying he's fine with addressing people as they'd like to be addressed, so long as it's all done civilly. What you're doing is projecting a caricatured position ont…

You're being pedantic. I'm characterizing what he's saying using colorful language of my own, but the principles are the same. He objects to gender pronoun changes because he sees them as postmodernism, he believes postmodernism derives from Marxism, and he sees Marxism as authoritarian oppression. So in Peterson's worldview, the difference between being asked to use ze and zim by someone, and sending Solzhenitsyn to a Siberian death camp, is merely a matter of degree, not of kind.

And I'm quite sure he'd agree with my assessment here.

Re: What’s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?

#120

Post by Yetanfou »

_pvu0 wrote: post #64

Jordan Peterson is not extreme at all. We are just currently in a climate where nuanced opinions and observations are ignored by radical ideologues.

He is not radical but he is outspoken and does not let himself be cowed. This antagonises other outspoken people who have been able to silence a large part of their opposition by labelling them as racist, insert-whatever-identity-phobe, nazi and such. When they tried the same with Peterson by calling him a 'transphobe' their attempts spectacularly backfired in that they drew the attention of the general public to Peterson which quickly gave him a much larger following than he normally would have had.
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