Jordan B. Peterson

[Peace]

9 minutes ago, cutenickname said:

"White people" I here feel the need to say, as people bring a strange energy to brown people saying anything that touches on race, I have no quarrel with white people. Most of my friends, most of my neighbors, most of my intellectual, and spiritual heroes have been white people. The man I love is a blue eyed "white looking" Salvadoran/Mexican of Italian, German, and Spanish descent my objecting to white supremacy and centering the experiences of black and brown people is not a declaration of war, cultural Marxism (which isn't real, but I'm not getting into it), or anything else.

You're like one of those radical black activists from the 70's with a white woman on his arm! Kalinga from I'm gonna git you sucka!

 

Edited October 3, 2020 by Peace

[Lilllabettt]

Refusing to use someone's preferred pronouns isn't transphobic. It's impolite but it doesn't communicate fear or hatred of transpeople, merely a rejection of the prevailing gender theory currently used to justify trans activism.

Actually, the sexist offense comes in with trans + allies demands of acknowledgment of gendered pronouns as a thing, a real thing. When in fact gender is a fantasy, a mental fabrication, a figment of imagination. 

Sex on the other hand is a reality, the consequences of sex are real, eg the female body's f***ability, its capacity for menstruation. The Male body's incredible advantage in upper body strength, endurance and speed. 

There is a soldier in my husband's unit transitioned last year, grandfathered in under Obama rules. At the unit Christmas party, this person went out of their way to call attention, repeatedly, to their new gender presentation, eg telling colleagues who spoke coarsely "that's some way to talk to a woman." 

Of course a woman, rather than a transwoman, would never act that way, ever. Not in that setting. A member of the female sex working in the army takes pains constantly not to call attention to their sex so that the differences consequent to their owning a female body are not counted against them.

Just one way in which gender is fake, sex is real, and transwomen are not really the same as women. 

[cutenickname]

35 minutes ago, Lilllabettt said:

Refusing to use someone's preferred pronouns isn't transphobic. It's impolite but it doesn't communicate fear or hatred of transpeople, merely a rejection of the prevailing gender theory currently used to justify trans activism.

Actually, the sexist offense comes in with trans + allies demands of acknowledgment of gendered pronouns as a thing, a real thing. When in fact gender is a fantasy, a mental fabrication, a figment of imagination. 

Sex on the other hand is a reality, the consequences of sex are real, eg the female body's f***ability, its capacity for menstruation. The Male body's incredible advantage in upper body strength, endurance and speed. 

There is a soldier in my husband's unit transitioned last year, grandfathered in under Obama rules. At the unit Christmas party, this person went out of their way to call attention, repeatedly, to their new gender presentation, eg telling colleagues who spoke coarsely "that's some way to talk to a woman." 

Of course a woman, rather than a transwoman, would never act that way, ever. Not in that setting. A member of the female sex working in the army takes pains constantly not to call attention to their sex so that the differences consequent to their owning a female body are not counted against them.

Just one way in which gender is fake, sex is real, and transwomen are not really the same as women. 

It is a perspective. I disagree with your assessment of gender vs sex, but in the practical sense I think refusing to call someone by their preferred pronouns is actually more problematic than simply going ahead and using the desired pronoun while thinking the person is a delusional ninny. Most folks in my experience are delusional ninnies.

Edited October 3, 2020 by cutenickname

[Lilllabettt]

10 minutes ago, cutenickname said:

It is a perspective. I disagree with your assessment of gender vs sex, but in the practical sense I think refusing to call someone by their preferred pronouns is actually more problematic than simply going ahead and using the desired pronoun while thinking the person is a delusional ninny. Most folks in my experience are delusional ninnies.

What part do you disagree with

[cutenickname]

I don't believe in biological determinism. I believe trans-identities are valid. Etc. The usual left of center millennial stuff.

[Peace]

20 minutes ago, cutenickname said:

It is a perspective. I disagree with your assessment of gender vs sex, but in the practical sense I think refusing to call someone by their preferred pronouns is actually more problematic than simply going ahead and using the desired pronoun while thinking the person is a delusional ninny. Most folks in my experience are delusional ninnies.

In the interview I saw, Peterson said that he would call someone by their preferred pronouns. I think his main objection was to the law that would require people to use the pronouns.

[cutenickname]

1 minute ago, Peace said:

In the interview I saw, Peterson said that he would call someone by their preferred pronouns. I think his main objection was to the law that would require people to use the pronouns.

I think he was misstating what the law would do, but it has been a very long time since I researched this. I might be wrong.

[Peace]

Just now, cutenickname said:

I think he was misstating what the law would do, but it has been a very long time since I researched this. I might be wrong.

That's possible.

[Lilllabettt]

7 hours ago, cutenickname said:

I don't believe in biological determinism. I believe trans-identities are valid. Etc. The usual left of center millennial stuff.

Oh but its transactivism that posits biological determinism/essentialism! 

The prevailing theory of trans identity is that a female brain develops inside a Male sexed body (or vice versa) , a pathology which causes distress which is then treated by altering the appearance of the male sexed body to match the female brain. (The theory requires the concept of a female brain, ESSENTIALLY different on a biological level from a "male" brain.)

Altering the appearance of the Male body resolves distress by allowing the Male sexed individual to be seen and treated by society as a woman. It's fundamentally an overwhelming brain desire to perform and be seen to perform, a set of traditional gender stereotypes. Basically, gender stereotypes = womanhood, therefore the performance of these stereotypes makes one a woman. The biological determinism of owning a female brain drives the individual to desire to perform the stereotypical gender roles of womanhood. And the performance is the identity. Calling oneself Caitlin, demanding womens pronouns, growing long hair and wearing a dress, makes one a woman.

There is another group of nonbinary transactivism which has a similar brain theory, but a different approach to erasing sex as a concept ... the concept is neutrality... this of course, like all "blind" or "neutral" approaches has the effect of favoring the dominant group (male sexed people) at the expense of the oppressed (females.)

 

[Pooooma]

11 hours ago, cutenickname said:

I think he was misstating what the law would do, but it has been a very long time since I researched this. I might be wrong.

With respect, you are. Nearly every single point you've made about him is something he's publicly addressed. The vast majority of your opinions could only be gotten second-hand or by 15-second clips.

Personally, I think his views on neo-marxism and modern gender theory are pretty solid. I tend to agree with him. His views on religion definitely concern me; his desperate desire to link every Biblical story he can with Jungian archetypes is alarming at best. While I think he uses them well in analyzing secular works, I think he gives them much too much credit.

His commentaries on the Gulags were very interesting to me, as I hadn't heard a perspective quite like his before, since my urban American high school never even touched the subject. At his recommendation, I read "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", and it was definitely a worthy experience. I'd recommend giving that series a listen, as I'm not the best at recapping things. Relative to many of his other lecture series, it's pretty short (I want to say under 3h).

Bill C-16 was rather explicitly designed to compel people to use ideologically-derived vocabulary. Peterson objected, and did so very clearly. He's spent hours upon hours explaining the dichotomy between banning speech and compelling it. I can't honestly see how anyone could object to his stance without being ideologically motivated.

11 hours ago, cutenickname said:

I think refusing to call someone by their preferred pronouns is actually more problematic than simply going ahead and using the desired pronoun while thinking the person is a delusional ninny.

Then I suppose it's a good thing he's said many times that he uses peoples' preferred pronouns if they ask, but he refuses to abide by any legislating mandating him to.
If you want to try and argue, "nobody's forcing you to do anything, and this is just a thinly-veiled excuse for your transphobia!" I can't stop you. I just feel obligated to tell you to reread Bill C-16. Take a trip around my neck of the woods and accidentally misgender somebody. Gee, spend 15 minutes in the high school I attended. Unless you're blinding yourself, your perspective will change pretty quickly.

I don't know or understand where the charges of racism come from. I'm a PoC, and I've never heard him say anything I'd gauge as problematic. I haven't listened to all of his stuff, though (granted, neither has anybody else). The guy has, like, 1500 hours of content publicly available. If anything he said clearly and obviously crossed the line, I have a hunch people'd quote it time and time again, instead of constructing such ridiculous schemes as "he said ___ at one time and ___ another, and if you take those two views on two separate topics and combine them, then assume he also thinks ___ and ___, it's possible one of these statements may have secretly hidden racist undertones." Yes, that's literally the type of justification people may give. If it's not that, it's, "many of his supporters are racists!" Sure, I won't deny that. I'd only say that he's publicly disavowed them numerous times and that you'd be hard-pressed to find a single public figure with no racist fans.

As I said earlier, I'm a PoC. My skin is quite dark and, in certain settings, my voice is rather distinctly African-American. In late high school and for a year or two afterwards, I befriended several "white supremacists"; initially, they were friends of friends, but we eventually grew closer by virtue of proximity. It was extremely intimidating, it often made me uncomfortable, but I would argue it was a net positive; I was able to show them that the views they had on what was and wasn't "black" were disgustingly distorted. I hope I was able to show them that people tend not to be monolithic, but as I've since given up on them, I can't say. It was a very enlightening experience, though. With it and with hindsight, I can say that,

1. The vast majority of them are just edgy social outcasts who feel society has neglected them, so anybody encouraging them to take responsibility and "man up" would seem appealing to them to some degree.
2. The vast majority of them I met had no interest in Peterson's work.
3. Many lumped him in with Ben Shapiro and the like, calling him a "jewish shill" and soforth. To say they like him unilaterally is objectively and patently false. Sure, there may be kekistanis who disagree, but their entire worldview is centered around pissing off as many people as possible and using racist humor as a means of... iunno; I guess I'd describe it as "coping", for want of a better term. They wouldn't be interested in his views because they're "implicitly racist" or "implicitly bigoted," they'd be interested in his work because of point 1 and because they'd see it as counter-cultural.

TL;DR: yeah, you're wrong.

I think this is the first "real" post I've made here, so before I forget, hello!

[Anomaly]

Thanks for the great post, Poooma. I was hoping to get some “heads up” from people who had actually read what he’s written, not just reflect opinions of others.  

I do find his linking religion and “God” to the fundamental nature of animals and broadly to philosophical principles intriguing.  As an ex-Catholic atheist Absurdist, I still find it difficult to argue against points and observations he makes.   His explanations for original sin and free will, along with the nature of evil in Eden are quite surprising and clear.  Especially his use of the yin-yang and Tao philosophy as a parallel.  

 

(And as your first real post...   you’ve set a very high standard!)

Edited October 3, 2020 by Anomaly

[cutenickname]

The last three responses were directed towards me. Two directly and one obliquely. I will address all three. And probably move along, but maybe not, I run pretty hot.

I am going to start with @Anomaly, because it  is the simplest post to respond to. I don't lie often or easily. I expect to appear before Jesus Christ to appear any day or at any hour, either because He has appeared or because I have died and escaped sin. I have read and listened to Peterson not walking away with admiration for him or with a list of proof texts in no way should suggest that I have not. My opinions are not quickly established throw away results of navel gazing and "the media."

 

Edited October 3, 2020 by cutenickname

[cutenickname]

I will respond to @Pooooma next, because his/her response pissed me off and requires less nuance than the response to @Lilllabettt about trans people.

3 hours ago, Pooooma said:

With respect, you are. Nearly every single point you've made about him is something he's publicly addressed. The vast majority of your opinions could only be gotten second-hand or by 15-second clips.

Personally, I think his views on neo-marxism and modern gender theory are pretty solid. I tend to agree with him. His views on religion definitely concern me; his desperate desire to link every Biblical story he can with Jungian archetypes is alarming at best. While I think he uses them well in analyzing secular works, I think he gives them much too much credit.

His commentaries on the Gulags were very interesting to me, as I hadn't heard a perspective quite like his before, since my urban American high school never even touched the subject. At his recommendation, I read "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", and it was definitely a worthy experience. I'd recommend giving that series a listen, as I'm not the best at recapping things. Relative to many of his other lecture series, it's pretty short (I want to say under 3h).

Bill C-16 was rather explicitly designed to compel people to use ideologically-derived vocabulary. Peterson objected, and did so very clearly. He's spent hours upon hours explaining the dichotomy between banning speech and compelling it. I can't honestly see how anyone could object to his stance without being ideologically motivated.

Then I suppose it's a good thing he's said many times that he uses peoples' preferred pronouns if they ask, but he refuses to abide by any legislating mandating him to.
If you want to try and argue, "nobody's forcing you to do anything, and this is just a thinly-veiled excuse for your transphobia!" I can't stop you. I just feel obligated to tell you to reread Bill C-16. Take a trip around my neck of the woods and accidentally misgender somebody. Gee, spend 15 minutes in the high school I attended. Unless you're blinding yourself, your perspective will change pretty quickly.

I don't know or understand where the charges of racism come from. I'm a PoC, and I've never heard him say anything I'd gauge as problematic. I haven't listened to all of his stuff, though (granted, neither has anybody else). The guy has, like, 1500 hours of content publicly available. If anything he said clearly and obviously crossed the line, I have a hunch people'd quote it time and time again, instead of constructing such ridiculous schemes as "he said ___ at one time and ___ another, and if you take those two views on two separate topics and combine them, then assume he also thinks ___ and ___, it's possible one of these statements may have secretly hidden racist undertones." Yes, that's literally the type of justification people may give. If it's not that, it's, "many of his supporters are racists!" Sure, I won't deny that. I'd only say that he's publicly disavowed them numerous times and that you'd be hard-pressed to find a single public figure with no racist fans.

As I said earlier, I'm a PoC. My skin is quite dark and, in certain settings, my voice is rather distinctly African-American. In late high school and for a year or two afterwards, I befriended several "white supremacists"; initially, they were friends of friends, but we eventually grew closer by virtue of proximity. It was extremely intimidating, it often made me uncomfortable, but I would argue it was a net positive; I was able to show them that the views they had on what was and wasn't "black" were disgustingly distorted. I hope I was able to show them that people tend not to be monolithic, but as I've since given up on them, I can't say. It was a very enlightening experience, though. With it and with hindsight, I can say that,

1. The vast majority of them are just edgy social outcasts who feel society has neglected them, so anybody encouraging them to take responsibility and "man up" would seem appealing to them to some degree.
2. The vast majority of them I met had no interest in Peterson's work.
3. Many lumped him in with Ben Shapiro and the like, calling him a "jewish shill" and soforth. To say they like him unilaterally is objectively and patently false. Sure, there may be kekistanis who disagree, but their entire worldview is centered around pissing off as many people as possible and using racist humor as a means of... iunno; I guess I'd describe it as "coping", for want of a better term. They wouldn't be interested in his views because they're "implicitly racist" or "implicitly bigoted," they'd be interested in his work because of point 1 and because they'd see it as counter-cultural.

TL;DR: yeah, you're wrong.

I think this is the first "real" post I've made here, so before I forget, hello!

1) Him having publicly addressed them doesn't mean I am derelict in some way by not finding his addressing them particularly convincing. We disagree.

2) Peterson serves as something of an apologist for patriarchy. Generally, I'd expect conservative Catholics to rather like that. Not that the Church herself is particularly pro-patriarchy, but the nature of religion is conservative, generally Jesus folks try to hold on to and preserve paradigms even after they have proven false or dangerous (this is a social critique of the Christian "mood," not a doctrinal statement).

He sees male dominance of women and gender/sex-based inequalities as having their origins in nature. He argues that while there might be lingering misogyny, the primary differences in outcome between men and women are the result of certain innate kinds of gendered intellectual postures/potentials, rather than structural bias that keeps women out of certain positions/fields. You are free to disagree with me, but it is no way dishonest (intellectually or otherwise) to feel that this is a sexist position.

He also advocated enforced monogamy as a way of dealing with the vitriolic and broken young men called incels. My understanding of revelation says that sex belongs to marriage, but I can not in conscience say that I think in 2020 policing women's sexual choices

3) Re: Bill C-16.  It does not criminalize refusal to use a person's correct pronouns it protects trans people from hate speech. Now it is possible that you don't like the concept of hate speech, but the bill doesn't criminalize anyone's desire to be a refusenik on the matter of someone else's gender identity and has not been interpreted as doing so. It grafted  trans people in with other protected classes regarding incitement to violence and dehuminization (both of which were already concepts under Canadian law, but this bill allows for prosecution as a hate crime). A priest preaching the Church's understanding of gender/sex, a University professor who is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, an obese old man who insists on calling someone by male pronouns despite their feminine gender presentation are not the target of this law nor prosecutable under it. It is dishonest to keep saying they are. Go read the bill and listen to what mainstream commenters have said.  This is per the Canadian Bar Association.

4) I explicitly stated that I do not think Jordan Peterson is a racist. (Though ironically the racists seem to think he is, but this is a result of his sloppy rhetoric and use of terms like "traditionalist" [which outside of Catholicism is a buzzword used by a certain species of racist] to describe himself.) I described him as a fellow traveler of racists. I gave a longish dissection of what his conceptual opposition to thinks like "social justice" and collective action can look like. Feel how you need to about.

5) Your "black voice," your high school,  and your okay-ness with chilling with Nazis are things I best not comment on. Not because I cannot comment on them, but because I should not.

also @Pooooma Welcome to Phatmass!

[Pooooma]

2 hours ago, Anomaly said:

Thanks for the great post, Poooma. I was hoping to get some “heads up” from people who had actually read what he’s written, not just reflect opinions of others. 

Thank you!

 

2 hours ago, Anomaly said:

(And as your first real post...   you’ve set a very high standard!)

Thanks again! I won't live up to it.

[cutenickname]

@Lilllabettt

8 hours ago, Lilllabettt said:

Oh but its transactivism that posits biological determinism/essentialism! 

The prevailing theory of trans identity is that a female brain develops inside a Male sexed body (or vice versa) , a pathology which causes distress which is then treated by altering the appearance of the male sexed body to match the female brain. (The theory requires the concept of a female brain, ESSENTIALLY different on a biological level from a "male" brain.)

Altering the appearance of the Male body resolves distress by allowing the Male sexed individual to be seen and treated by society as a woman. It's fundamentally an overwhelming brain desire to perform and be seen to perform, a set of traditional gender stereotypes. Basically, gender stereotypes = womanhood, therefore the performance of these stereotypes makes one a woman. The biological determinism of owning a female brain drives the individual to desire to perform the stereotypical gender roles of womanhood. And the performance is the identity. Calling oneself Caitlin, demanding womens pronouns, growing long hair and wearing a dress, makes one a woman.

There is another group of nonbinary transactivism which has a similar brain theory, but a different approach to erasing sex as a concept ... the concept is neutrality... this of course, like all "blind" or "neutral" approaches has the effect of favoring the dominant group (male sexed people) at the expense of the oppressed (females.)

 

I admire your thinking here. You have provided a radical feminist critique of the idea of gender politics. I am not a terf, but the critiques of gender in and of themselves made by radical feminists are interesting, I don't see anyone pursuing the logic though in any way other than trying to police trans bodies and identities.

Biological sex is a binary, this is true in a meta way, but anomalies and ambiguities to this state exist in nature. Children are born with ambiguous genitalia, mixed genetic profiles, etc It doesn't strain my credulity to think that some people are born with brains that fit better into stereotyped feminine/masculine roles despite being possessed of a physicality that is the opposite of those inclinations.

I believe gender is mostly a learned performance. For whatever reason whether it is a physically and medically sourced condition or not there are people who are people who have a deep desire to express themselves as gender x despite being born biologically y. We are all to an extent engaged in some kind of performative acting out when it comes to this stuff.

My husband and I enjoy performing maleness and are quite good at it. My mother performs femininity with all the sassy intensity of a drag queen. For some people the gendered performance (our culture expects and rewards these performances) they are best at and that results in less stress is opposite to the one they are biologically assigned.

As to non-binary people, they eschew labels, but most non-binaries are still engaged in some kind of socially necessary performance.

The issue for me is one of how one treats people. Even if gender is mostly performative (though we all know brain differences exist), I do not feel like a competent authority to tell someone which performance they should engage in or to police how they choose to do gender.

If you could tease out how this is oppressive to women I would be interested.