Tag: Jordan Peterson

That’s…quite astoundingly creepy.

https://twitter.com/zei_nabq/status/1077694528792989697

It turns out Jordan Peterson thinks you can sue people for uttering opinions.

In June, he threatened to sue Down Girl author and Cornell University assistant professor Kate Manne for defamation, after she criticized his book, 12 Rules For Life, and more generally called his work misogynistic in an interview with Vox. (Peterson previously filed a lawsuit against a university whose faculty members, in a closed-door meeting, argued that showing his videos in a classroom created an unsafe environment for students.) In letters to Manne, Cornell, and Vox, Peterson’s lawyer, Howard Levitt, demanded that all three parties “immediately retract all of Professor Manne’s defamatory statements, have them immediately removed from the internet, and issue an apology in the same forum to Mr. Peterson. Otherwise, our client will take all steps necessary to protect his professional reputation, including but not limited to initiating legal proceedings against all of you for damages.”

But saying his work is misogynistic is opinion, and opinion is protected.

Among the statements Levitt objected to: Manne’s contention that Peterson’s book included “some really eyebrow-raising, authoritarian-sounding, and even cruel things,” as well as her observation that “it doesn’t seem accidental that [Peterson’s] skepticism about objective facts arises when it’s conveniently anti-feminist.” The lawyer and his client were equally unhappy with this line: “I also suspect that for many of Peterson’s readers, the sexism on display above is one tool among many to make forceful, domineering moves that are typical of misogyny.”

So Peterson even wants to sue Manne for expressing an opinion about Peterson’s readers.

So far, Peterson hasn’t made good on his threat to file suit, though neither she, Cornell, or Vox have complied with his requests. “It’s a classic attempt to chill free speech,” Manne says. “Like many of his ilk, what he really seems to be demanding — when one examines his actions rather than words — is to be able to speak free from legitimate social consequences, such as other people talking back.”

Ironies abound, but one is that Manne — a young, untenured scholar who argues that misogyny isn’t about hatred as much as it is about enforcing hierarchies — is being threatened with legal action by an older man who ranks much higher than she does in the professional and cultural pecking order.

And the celebrity order and the 80 thousand dollars a month on Patreon order.

Another irony is that Vox’s Sean Illing wrote that he interviewed Manne precisely because she, “unlike many Peterson critics, actively engaged with his ideas.” Says Illing of Peterson’s saber-rattling, “I found the request absurd and forwarded it to our legal advisers, who confirmed that it was baseless, and then I happily ignored it. We did not alter the piece and we did not take it down.”

Baseless because no you can’t sue people for an opinion you don’t like. If you could we all would have sued Trump into the gutter two years ago.

I saw this awful glib vacuous article about Jordan Peterson by Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic yesterday but it was so crappy I couldn’t face posting about it, so how helpful that Eric Levitz at New York Magazine took it on.

He starts, wittily, by complaining about the way identity politics is crippling the argumentative skills of center-right hacks like Flanagan, which is a good joke because her whole shtick in her piece is omigod identity politics.

Now, they’re content to merely assert their identity as tellers of uncomfortable truths (and don’t you dare ask them to validate that identity, empirically; if a center-right contrarian identifies as unfailingly rational and free of racial, gender, or class biases, then one must accept this as her personal truth). In fact, these “intellectual dark web” browsers have become so defensive of their identitarian ideology, they’ve grown blind to any and all realities that might complicate their worldview.

If this dire assessment of the center-right sounds overwrought, just take a gander at Caitlin Flanagan’s new essay on Jordan Peterson in The Atlantic.

The thesis of the column is simple: For years, a silenced majority had been suffering under the tyrannical hegemony of left-wing identity politics — until Jordan Peterson set their minds free with his devastating rebuttal of that creed’s bogus premises. Flanagan writes that what Peterson “and the other members of the so-called ‘intellectual dark web’ are offering is kryptonite to identity politics”; that Peterson provided her son and his friends with “the only sustained argument against identity politics they had heard in their lives”; and that the left is afraid of Peterson’s ideas because they are “are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind.”

It’s simple, and it’s empty and worthless.

Not once in her (nearly 2,000-word) column does Flanagan define the “identity politics” she’s inveighing against, or so much as summarize Peterson’s argument against them. She does offer some examples of what she considers to be representative of the former: The Nation’s decision to apologize for publishing a poem written in African-American vernacular by a non-black poet; the alt-right’s pursuit of a white ethno-state; and former president Barack Obama — whom she dubs “the poet laureate of identity politics.”

She’s right about the Nation and the poem, he says, but then lots of lefties have been objecting to that move too. The claim about Obama is moronic.

Flanagan would rather attack an imaginary, monolithic left than contend with the actual one. And by positing Barack Obama as an exemplary practitioner of identity politics, she renders her conception of that phrase incomprehensible. Obama literally launched his political career by proclaiming that African-Americans must “eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white” — and that there was “not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” The man’s commitment to a politics of universalism was so emphatic and unyielding, he spent his last year in office lecturing college students about the evils of “political correctness.”

Exactly, and he’s always been about that, to the point that he annoyed everyone when he edited the Harvard Law Review by commissioning so many pieces by conservatives.

If there is a reason that Flanagan associates Barack Obama with identity politics — beyond the fact that he is an African-American who participated in politics — she feels no need to spell it out. For an identitarian contrarian like Flanagan, assertion is sufficient; argument, unnecessary. People from her intellectual tribe recognize that Jordan Peterson is good, and identity politics (a phrase that ostensibly covers the political worldview of most everyone to her left or right) is bad. The fact that a person like her is making this claim is all the substantiation required; because people like her, her son, and Jordan Peterson are capable of perceiving objective reality, unmediated by ideology.

Flanagan actually implies this: She writes that once her son and his friends had digested Peterson’s thought, they found that it was suddenly “possible to talk about all kinds of things—religion, philosophy, history, myth—in a different way. They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology.”

It’s an irregular verb, you see – I see things as they really are, you have an ideology, they have a fanatical ideology.

Here is how Petersen, who never allows identity to color his thought — and perceives ideas from myth, history, and philosophy, directly, unmediated by ideology —assessesThe Feminine Mystique:

I read Betty Friedan’s book because I was very curious about it, and it’s so whiny, it’s just enough to drive a modern person mad to listen to these suburban housewives from the late ’50s ensconced in their comfortable secure lives complaining about the fact that they’re bored because they don’t have enough opportunity. It’s like, Jesus get a hobby.

And here is how such a man perceives the feminine, in general:

You know you can say, “Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine” — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible.

No ideology there, no sir!

Flanagan accuses “the left” of having an “obliterating and irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson” and says there’s no coherent reason for that hatred.

By definition, there can be no coherent reason for anyone’s irrational hatred of anything. But if we take Flanagan’s argument to be that the left has no rational basis for seeing Peterson as contemptible and dangerous, then her argument is absurd.

Peterson argues that human beings do not yet know whether it is possible for men and women to work together without the former sexually harassing the latter, to such an extent that segregated workplaces are preferable. He has stated, point blank, that women who do not want to be sexually harassed at work — but nevertheless wear makeup to the office — are hypocrites. In her essay, Flanagan accuses the left of mendaciously attaching “reputation-destroying ideas” to Peterson. But rest assured, Peterson has attached these ideas to himself:

Perhaps, Flanagan agrees with all of this. Perhaps, she thinks that, “Can men and women work together in the workplace?” is an open question, and that the only reason why women put on lipstick is to trigger thoughts of sex in men’s minds — and thus, if women who wear lipstick to the office get sexually harassed, they bear some responsibility for their own plight. But does Flanagan really believe that it would be incoherent for feminists to detest Peterson on the basis of these views?

Or did she simply ensconce herself in an ideological safe space that shielded these remarks from her awareness?

In other words is she just as smug as she has always been? Yes she is.

Read the rest of Levitz’s response.

A long and very interesting piece on Jordan Kermit Peterson by a longtime colleague and friend who successfully pushed for the University of Toronto to hire him twenty years ago. He now thinks that was a mistake.

The takeaway: Peterson was always eccentric and intense, but he’s gotten worse, especially since he became a famous guru.

I thought long and hard before writing about Jordan, and I do not do this lightly. He has one of the most agile and creative minds I’ve ever known. He is a powerful orator. He is smart, passionate, engaging and compelling and can be thoughtful and kind.

I was once his strongest supporter.

That all changed with his rise to celebrity. I am alarmed by his now-questionable relationship to truth, intellectual integrity and common decency, which I had not seen before. His output is voluminous and filled with oversimplifications which obscure or misrepresent complex matters in the service of a message which is difficult to pin down. He can be very persuasive, and toys with facts and with people’s emotions. I believe he is a man with a mission. It is less clear what that mission is.

In the end, I am writing this because of his extraordinary rise in visibility, the nature of his growing following and a concern that his ambitions might venture from stardom back to his long-standing interest in politics. I am writing this from a place of sadness and from a sense of responsibility to the public good to tell what I know about who Jordan is, having seen him up close, as a colleague and friend, and having examined up close his political actions at the University of Toronto, allegedly in defence of free speech.

The politics thing is alarming.

I met Jordan Peterson when he came to the University of Toronto to be interviewed for an assistant professorship in the department of psychology. His CV was impeccable, with terrific references and a pedigree that included a PhD from McGill and a five-year stint at Harvard as an assistant professor.

We did not share research interests but it was clear that his work was solid. My colleagues on the search committee were skeptical — they felt he was too eccentric — but somehow I prevailed. (Several committee members now remind me that they agreed to hire him because they were “tired of hearing me shout over them.”) I pushed for him because he was a divergent thinker, self-educated in the humanities, intellectually flamboyant, bold, energetic and confident, bordering on arrogant. I thought he would bring a new excitement, along with new ideas, to our department.

More thoughts on Kermit Peterson and the Times article about him:

Gail Dines:

So decided Jordan Peterson is really a comedian. Subtitle of his latest book is: “An Antidote to Chaos.” The chaos. according to this joker is the feminine and order is the masculine. Question, What would the home look like without women cooking, cleaning, tidying and ordering the home? Question: What would the world look like without women tirelessly working to clean up the messes men make wherever they go? How much worse would poverty, violence, war, global destruction be if women were not at the forefront of bringing some order to the chaos men leave in their path of destruction?

Mad dog Peterson is of no interest to me as an individual. It is the way he has captured the imagination of millions of men that scares the hell out of me. Every so often, a lunatic man comes around that somehow perfectly captures the mood and turns the “chaos” of other lunatic men into a semi-coherent theory that legitimizes their madness, hate and violence.

Soraya Chemaly:

If the boys and men in your life are drinking this rapey koolaid please don’t look away. Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy He says there’s a crisis in masculinity. Why won’t women — all these wives and witches — just behave? Barely laundered misogyny. He packs rooms with disaffected boys and men clinging to toxic norms of masculinity.

Meghan Murphy:

This is one of the most effective take downs of this man’s nonsense. He makes statements he claims are obvious truths that are demonstrably untrue, is inconsistent and unclear in his analysis, but offers angry men self-helpy solutions to their anger, so becomes famous. He tells them what they want to hear: all women will be happy if they simply stop fighting back, and become the mothers and wives they are destined to be. He conveniently ignores the fact that patriarchy has not always existed everywhere, in every culture, and that simply because something currently exists, does not mean it is the most natural or best system. Men who say things that are either vague or simplistic are revered as genius philosophers time and time again.

Clean up your room.

Kermit says don’t be like some damn two-bit do-gooder.

H/t Leonie Hilliard

Jordan Peterson explains the tragedy of why men can’t control women: it’s because they’re not allowed to hit us so it’s all just hopeless, hopeless. It’s fatal for the culture, is what it is.

A representative of that strange creature, Woman, does a profile of Jordan Peterson in the Times.

Mr. Peterson, 55, a University of Toronto psychology professor turned YouTube philosopher turned mystical father figure, has emerged as an influential thought leader.

Not to be confused with an intellectual or scholar or thinker. He’s more like Jim Jones.

The messages he delivers range from hoary self-help empowerment talk (clean your room, stand up straight) to the more retrograde and political (a society run as a patriarchy makes sense and stems mostly from men’s competence; the notion of white privilege is a farce). He is the stately looking, pedigreed voice for a group of culture warriors who are working diligently to undermine mainstream and liberal efforts to promote equality.

Along with Sam Harris and Dave Rubin and so on – the brightly lit “Intellectual Dark Web.”

He lets the writer, Nellie Bowles, hang out with him for two days.

He does not smile. He has a weathered, gaunt face and big furrowed eyebrows. He has written about dogs being closest in behavior to humans, but there is something extremely feline about him. He always wears a suit. “I am a very serious person,” he often says.

He sounds unbearable already.

Wherever he goes, he speaks in sermons about the inevitability of who we must be. “You know you can say, ‘Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn’t be human anymore. They’d be something else. They’d be transhuman or something. We wouldn’t be able to talk to these new creatures.”

Says the guy from the sex that is not represented as being chaos. It’s always fascinating to see people breezily explain why other people are consigned to inferior categories while they float above in the gilded empyrean.

[H]e was radicalized, he says, because the “radical left” wants to eliminate hierarchies, which he says are the natural order of the world. In his book he illustrates this idea with the social behavior of lobsters. He chose lobsters because they have hierarchies and are a very ancient species, and are also invertebrates with serotonin. This lobster hierarchy has become a rallying cry for his fans; they put images of the crustacean on T-shirts and mugs.

The left, he believes, refuses to admit that men might be in charge because they are better at it. “The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence,” he said.

In other words that men, all men, men as such, are better than women, all women, women as such. Yes, he’s right, we don’t want to “admit” that, partly because it’s obviously not true.

Rather than making an argument he babbles about myths.

“It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp. Yeah,” he says. “Why?”

It’s a hard one.

“Right. That’s right. You don’t know. It’s because those things hang together at a very deep level. Right. Yeah. And it makes sense that an old king lives in a desiccated tower.”

But witches don’t exist, and they don’t live in swamps, I say.

“Yeah, they do. They do exist. They just don’t exist the way you think they exist. They certainly exist. You may say well dragons don’t exist. It’s, like, yes they do — the category predator and the category dragon are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists. What exists is not obvious. You say, ‘Well, there’s no such thing as witches.’ Yeah, I know what you mean, but that isn’t what you think when you go see a movie about them. You can’t help but fall into these categories. There’s no escape from them.”

Or from animated mice and rabbits and whatever Goofy is, too. Those stories and animations really exist. Therefore, patriarchy is best.

Bowles mentions Alek Minassian and the ten people he killed.

Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners, Mr. Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married.

“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end.

But being forcibly married will make them all ecstatic, for sure.

“Half the men fail,” he says, meaning that they don’t procreate. “And no one cares about the men who fail.”

I laugh, because it is absurd.

“You’re laughing about them,” he says, giving me a disappointed look. “That’s because you’re female.”

Because he’s a Thought Leader, he didn’t call her a bitch. You know he was thinking it though.

But aside from interventions that would redistribute sex, Mr. Peterson is staunchly against what he calls “equality of outcomes,” or efforts to equalize society. He usually calls them pathological or evil.

He’s like the new Ayn Rand, but hotter.

Bowles sits in on a paid-for Skype conversation with one of Peterson’s acolytes.

At one point in the discussion, Mr. Peterson, who had been relatively quiet, becomes heated on the topic of women who find marriage oppressive.

“So I don’t know who these people think marriages are oppressing,” he says. “I read Betty Friedan’s book because I was very curious about it, and it’s so whiny, it’s just enough to drive a modern person mad to listen to these suburban housewives from the late ’50s ensconced in their comfortable secure lives complaining about the fact that they’re bored because they don’t have enough opportunity. It’s like, Jesus get a hobby. For Christ’s sake, you — you — ”

Worth every penny of the $200 for 45 minutes.

“Jordan’s exposed something that’s been festering for a long time,” says Justin Trottier, 35, the co-founder of the men’s rights organizations Equality Canada and Canadian Centre for Men and Families. “Jordan’s forced people to pay attention.”

Mr. Trottier made headlines when his group called the anti-manspreading subway initiatives sexist. Their musty space hosts events in which men discuss the prejudices they perceive against them. One of their group’s main goals is “waking the police up” to female-perpetrated domestic violence, Mr. Trottier says.

Now, “there’s more acceptance of what we’re trying to do,” he says.

Oh lord. I know him slightly. He used to be the Executive Director of CFI Canada, and he was at the Ottawa conference in 2012. Peterson is an older Justin Trottier.

There are now regular Jordan Peterson discussion groups. The one in Toronto meets once a week at a restaurant called Hemingway’s and is run by Chris Shepherd, who used to be a professional pickup artist who coached men on how to get laid fast at a club but is now a dating coach.

Mr. Shepherd first encountered Mr. Peterson in a viral video of the professor getting yelled at by campus activists. Watching the stoic professor take on righteous liberal anger touched Mr. Shepherd.

Of course it did. Rape-advisors (aka pickup artists) are such an embattled population these days.

A few comments on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/997489897777827842

trying to come up with a tweet about jordan peterson thinking that him being asked to respect people's pronouns will lead to tyranny while also being of the opinion that "enforced monogamy" is a-ok but i can't think of anything as funny as just saying it

— Shaun (shaunvids on bsky) (@shaun_vids) May 18, 2018

https://twitter.com/helenlewis/status/997517533056991232

Incisive, beautifully reported profile of phony-baloney masculinity guru Jordan Peterson: https://t.co/C7I3ihh0Yw

— Emily Nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) May 18, 2018

Here, @NellieBowles writes a superb profile of Jordan Peterson: https://t.co/bgxNdyYrjr There’s the stuff he says to her that is obviously headline-generating, such as this soulless and (in his case, ideologically hypocritical) “enforced monogamy” stuff 1/x pic.twitter.com/IkaXQyfJfq

— Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99) May 18, 2018

It turns out Jordan Peterson isn’t just a man of facile deepities, he’s also a man of noisy threats.

Jordan Peterson joins the club of macho writers who have thrown a fit over a bad review.

The New York Review of Books, which is famous for drubbing high-profile authors, was particularly harsh on Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson in a review published online on Monday. Surveying 12 Rules For Life, Peterson’s new book, critic Pankaj Mishra warned that the self-help guru “may seem the latest in a long line of eggheads pretentiously but harmlessly romancing the noble savage,” but that he draws on a tradition of writers like Carl Jung who were prone to—as the headline put it—“fascist mysticism.”

Peterson’s elegant but forceful response:

You arrogant, racist son of a bitch Pankaj Mishra: How dare you accuse me of "harmlessly romancing the noble savage." That's how you refer to my friend Charles Joseph (https://t.co/uF5XV2DVXx), who I've worked with for 15 years? https://t.co/s8fqE1M7D7

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) March 20, 2018

Apart from everything else wrong with that response, there’s the oddity of (apparently) treating “noble savage” literally rather than as a reference to a very familiar literary/philosophical trope originating with Rousseau. Mishra doesn’t mention Charles Joseph, so “That’s how you refer to my friend Charles Joseph?” is mystifying.

Then he expands on the point.

And you call me a fascist? You sanctimonious prick. If you were in my room at the moment, I'd slap you happily. https://t.co/sC3Lc9Hhlu

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) March 20, 2018

Who wouldn’t want to learn timeless wisdom from that guy?

Nesrine Malik pointed out the mismatch:

The dissonance is comical in a Judd Apatow movie kind of way, where a human oxymoron is the punchline. Jordan is The Angry Guru, The Pissed-Off Yogi, The Totally Untogether Psychiatrist. A fragile authority who spends his time dishing it out but just can’t take it. A brittle ego who exhorts his fans to find peace by accepting that life is tough – while losing it completely every time he steps barefoot on a metaphorical piece of Lego. A tragic physician who cannot heal himself. It’s so jarring. Reading Jordan is, according to the writer Hari Kunzru, “like being shouted at by a rugby coach in a sarong”.

How about if Judd Apatow makes him the next Seth Rogen, and then we could all forget about him.

Jordan reminds me of the youngish Muslim preachers who became all the fashion in the Arabic-speaking world after the proliferation of satellite TV in the 90s. They just wanted youth to live a better life by following the simple rules of submission to the natural order of things – the pain was in fighting it. These preachers, always men, and always appealing to other men to shoulder their responsibilities, had the preternatural calm of the faithful but when challenged, the temperament of the hysterical. They derived their status from the hierarchy, and so once it was questioned, they were all fire and brimstone. They had little intrinsic value to offer, and even less original thinking.

I think we’ve found a match!

H/t Maureen

A few days ago the Guardian reported the abuse Cathy Newman of Channel 4 was getting in the wake of her interview with Jordan Peterson. A couple of days later it reported that Peterson had “expressed his dismay at the fallout from the encounter.” It then went on to quote what he actually said (i.e. tweeted) and that was well short of “dismay,” in my view, and he went on to say but it wasn’t misogyny.

A controversial clinical psychologist whose interview with a Channel 4 news presenter resulted in her being subjected to a barrage of online abuse has expressed his dismay at the fallout from the encounter.

Cathy Newman’s interview with University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, who was promoting his new book 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos, went viral after Channel 4 posted the full 30-minute footage online last Tuesday. It has been watched almost two million times on YouTube and attracted nearly 50,000 comments. Many are highly critical of Newman, who declared on Twitter that she had “thoroughly enjoyed” the “bout” with Peterson, considered one of Canada’s leading intellectuals. A large number of the comments criticised Newman’s approach to the interview, accusing her of being a “social justice warrior” with a preconceived and misplaced grasp of Peterson’s views.

Jordan Peterson is “considered one of Canada’s leading intellectuals”? Really? Wasn’t he just a not particularly famous academic until the pronouns war?

Ben de Pear, editor of Channel 4 News, told his Twitter followers that Newman had been subjected to “vicious misogynistic abuse” after the interview and that the broadcaster had drafted in security specialists to carry out a risk analysis as part of their duty of care to her.

Mike Deri Smith, deputy head of digital at Channel 4 News, tweeted that a quick search had revealed more than 500 comments calling Newman a “bitch”. Peterson, who is interviewed in today’s Observer magazine, said that when he became aware of the abuse allegations he “immediately tweeted ‘if you’re one of those people doing that, back off’, there’s no excuse for that, no utility’.”

That’s what I’m saying is well short of “dismay.” It’s not dismay, it’s just saying stop doing that, it’s not useful, there’s no excuse for it. It’s good that he said it but let’s don’t exaggerate how impassioned he was about it.

He said the experience had left him trying to put himself in Newman’s position. “There is no doubt that Cathy has been subjected to a withering barrage of criticism online. One of the things I’ve been trying to do is to try to imagine what I’d do if I found myself in her situation and how I would react to it and understand how it was happening. But they’ve provided no evidence that the criticisms constituted threats. There are some nasty cracks online but the idea that this is somehow reflective of a fundamental misogyny and that’s what’s driving this is ridiculous.”

So he failed in his attempt to put himself in Newman’s position, because he left out the part about being a woman as opposed to a man. It makes a difference.