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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 nev

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 onto him. For my own part, a lot of my frustration is the loud and sincerely meant (if wrongheaded) declarations of victimhood by the privileged, simply for being asked to be nice to others. A law that empowers kangaroo courts isn'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 hear a comfortable, privileged person complaining about how he's a victim. He doesn't claim he's a victim. What he claims is that the law is a potential abridgement of freedom. You could make a claim that Lindsey Shepherd claims to be a "victim" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpFUvfAvKs4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpFUvfAvKs4 -- but then you'd be presenting evidence that Dr. Peterson's assertions about the law are correct. And when he doubles down and says people shouldn't get to choose their own pronouns, their own identity, and instead society should choose for them? Then he's a hypocrite. And an asshole. A coworker at my work announced her transition, and everyone just started using the feminine pronoun. Everyone was civil about it, and everything was fine. (And I am certain that she was happier and a more vibrant and complete person for making the change.) Again, you are misrepresenting his position. More accurately, a person exists within society (and hopefully a community) and identity is something which is effectively negotiated between the person and society. It's the parties who are being emotionally dishonest, playing games with emotional blackmail, and being crappy people who are "being assholes." From where I'm sitting, it's a lot of emotionally imbalanced trans "activists" who fit that description. Jordan Peterson gets mail from trans people, the majority of whom are supporters or sympathetic to him. Their collective position is that they just want to not be singled out and live their lives in peace.

jnbiche 9y ago
> 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.
- beat 9y ago
  I'm a civil libertarian myself. It makes me uncomfortable. But people seem hell-bent on missing my point in order to correct me for God forbid equating coercion and oppression. My actual godddamned POINT is that, whatever the logical merits of Peterson's position coming from him, the practical effect is for a hundred thousand red-pill assholes to share excerpted clips around, and thinking it means that a wise philosopher agrees with their joy in being mean to people over their gender identity.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    No matter what position you pick, some gaggle of idiots on the Internet are using it as a pretext for being a dick. A lot of the acrimony coming from the Right is a reaction to others doing it using pretexts from the Left. The solution is to have reasoned dialogue. If you follow Peterson's message, he seems to have explicitly decided to minister to lost young clueless right-wing men, by urging them to clean their rooms, and live worthwhile, responsible lives. In fact, I remember the video where he talks about becoming aware that so many of his followers were effectively Alt-Right, and seeing him hesitate, then say he didn't know what to make of that. He also talks about the mechanisms by which a crowd can suborn a speaker, so I think he's actively fighting against that. thinking it means that a wise philosopher agrees with their joy in being mean to people over their gender identity It seems to me that a lot of people did exactly that, coming from the far Left, in the name of Intersectionality. It was also done with racial identity. (Google "Feminist Cringe" & "Dartmouth College Library Activists")
    - beat 9y ago
      Oh, undoubtedly. There's no small amount of tribalism and moral sadism among the SJWs, using these sudden shifts in vocabulary as an excuse to berate people they didn't like in the first place. Which in no way means intersectionality is a Bad Idea. Intersectionality is a major advance in the understanding of oppression. I hope Peterson can actually wake up some of his red-pill followers, and do more harm than good in the long run. But for now, he really needs to apply that intellect to dealing with something he wasn't ever prepared to deal with - being a symbol of intellectual authority to a movement that stands for things he no doubt despises.
beat 9y ago
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.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  I'm characterizing what he's saying using colorful language of my own, but the principles are the same. No. It's one thing to advocate that everyone should be nice and say "hello." It's an entirely different thing to advocate for a law that says you will be dragged before a kangaroo court for failing to say "hello," where a scientifically dubious "test of unconscious bias" will be used as evidence of your guilt. Either your bias is showing, or you're missing the distinction. 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. If you study the detailed legal history of the Weimar Republic, then you'd be prone to agree. The Nazis didn't have to change the Weimar laws a whole lot, because the Left-leaning Weimar republic left loopholes in the law that basically amounted to, "...unless the state deems it for the common good." If you let "activists" erode due process and create "crimes" of "unconscious bias," then you are creating legal means for people to engage in the sorts of accusations which sent people to the Gulag. The Magna Carta and particularly Habeas Corpus came about because laws which were about one thing were abused out of poltical expedience.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > It's one thing to advocate that everyone should be nice and say "hello." It's an entirely different thing to advocate for a law that says you will be dragged before a kangaroo court for failing to say "hello," where a scientifically dubious "test of unconscious bias" will be used as evidence of your guilt. And it's yet another thing to criticize a law for saying that when, in fact, the law says nothing of the sort.

jnbiche 9y ago

> 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.

beat 9y ago
I'm a civil libertarian myself. It makes me uncomfortable. But people seem hell-bent on missing my point in order to correct me for God forbid equating coercion and oppression. My actual godddamned POINT is that, whatever the logical merits of Peterson's position coming from him, the practical effect is for a hundred thousand red-pill assholes to share excerpted clips around, and thinking it means that a wise philosopher agrees with their joy in being mean to people over their gender identity.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  No matter what position you pick, some gaggle of idiots on the Internet are using it as a pretext for being a dick. A lot of the acrimony coming from the Right is a reaction to others doing it using pretexts from the Left. The solution is to have reasoned dialogue. If you follow Peterson's message, he seems to have explicitly decided to minister to lost young clueless right-wing men, by urging them to clean their rooms, and live worthwhile, responsible lives. In fact, I remember the video where he talks about becoming aware that so many of his followers were effectively Alt-Right, and seeing him hesitate, then say he didn't know what to make of that. He also talks about the mechanisms by which a crowd can suborn a speaker, so I think he's actively fighting against that. thinking it means that a wise philosopher agrees with their joy in being mean to people over their gender identity It seems to me that a lot of people did exactly that, coming from the far Left, in the name of Intersectionality. It was also done with racial identity. (Google "Feminist Cringe" & "Dartmouth College Library Activists")
  - beat 9y ago
    Oh, undoubtedly. There's no small amount of tribalism and moral sadism among the SJWs, using these sudden shifts in vocabulary as an excuse to berate people they didn't like in the first place. Which in no way means intersectionality is a Bad Idea. Intersectionality is a major advance in the understanding of oppression. I hope Peterson can actually wake up some of his red-pill followers, and do more harm than good in the long run. But for now, he really needs to apply that intellect to dealing with something he wasn't ever prepared to deal with - being a symbol of intellectual authority to a movement that stands for things he no doubt despises.

beat 9y ago

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.

stcredzero 9y ago
I'm characterizing what he's saying using colorful language of my own, but the principles are the same. No. It's one thing to advocate that everyone should be nice and say "hello." It's an entirely different thing to advocate for a law that says you will be dragged before a kangaroo court for failing to say "hello," where a scientifically dubious "test of unconscious bias" will be used as evidence of your guilt. Either your bias is showing, or you're missing the distinction. 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. If you study the detailed legal history of the Weimar Republic, then you'd be prone to agree. The Nazis didn't have to change the Weimar laws a whole lot, because the Left-leaning Weimar republic left loopholes in the law that basically amounted to, "...unless the state deems it for the common good." If you let "activists" erode due process and create "crimes" of "unconscious bias," then you are creating legal means for people to engage in the sorts of accusations which sent people to the Gulag. The Magna Carta and particularly Habeas Corpus came about because laws which were about one thing were abused out of poltical expedience.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > It's one thing to advocate that everyone should be nice and say "hello." It's an entirely different thing to advocate for a law that says you will be dragged before a kangaroo court for failing to say "hello," where a scientifically dubious "test of unconscious bias" will be used as evidence of your guilt. And it's yet another thing to criticize a law for saying that when, in fact, the law says nothing of the sort.