Cathy Newman and Jordan Petersen on C4 News

I think the link that Marquis linked is very instructive.

As YippeeKiYayMelonFarmer says “everything he says seems reasonable and factually based- his conclusion being that the lefts idea that everyone is the same and environment can produce egalitarian ideals vs the rights idea that if everyone just got off their arse and tried harder they too could be successful, are both equally wrong. I think that’s true, and all the IQ evidence supports that.”

So the defining example that Marquis chose to demonstrate Peterson’s horns and tail actually shows him as a perfectly reasonable, politically middle of the road, reality based person, showing genuine concern about some of the unpleasant facts of life.

As to the company he keeps…..his house is full of paintings of Lenin. He is not afraid of looking at the dark side and engaging with it. One of his admonitions is that you will find the answer where you least want to look for it. So ad hominems bounce right off him. Why would he care if he’s retweeting something from a low level Nazi official ? What matters to him is whether the content is true, false or worthy of comment. Not who made it. Of course if he spotted a tweet by AHitler or JStalin or PPot and recognised the tweeter as a mass murderer I imagine he’d make an aside. But the idea that he has the time to weed his twitter garden by investigating the provenance of tweets and comments is absurd.

Quit the ad hominem stuff and engage with the arguments. Or ignore him if he bores you. The fact that he may once have conversed with Beria does not make him a devotee of Beria. He may have been telling Beria to stop murdering people.

A couple of interesting links on pay equity:

www.oesw.leg.mn/PDFdocs/PE_Report_Summary.pdf
The State of Minnesota's three-decades-long, largely successful effort to eliminate structural pay inequality among thousands of State employees (an interesting counterpart to Scandinavia).

An overview of the literature on pay negotiation - basically women negotiate less because they correctly expect to be penalised as bitchy and pushy when they do: hbr.org/2014/06/why-women-dont-negotiate-their-job-offers

Peterson was not corrected on several accounts:

• failed to address the pay gap: there is no justification that the BBC presenters who do EXACTLY the same job get paid so drastically different amounts. It is due to nothing other than sex

• multivariate analysis surely does show factors other than sex having a role to play in the pay gap. However, many of these factors co-vary with sex. It isn't enough to assert that character leads to, in part, the pay gap when women are socialised to exhibit the behaviour. In the end, it all comes back to having a uterus.

• asserting that hierarchy is natural is no justification of said hierarchy (natural fallacy) and certainly does not preclude the argument that powerful people (white men) use it to their advantage, particularly leveraged in the capitalist paradigm we live in

• reference to rad fems reveals he does not understand the rad fem agenda i.e. liberation is the goal, not equality politics (also CM's weakness)

• the Scandinavian experiment is so widely known, surely CM could have been better prepared? Where there are little to no barriers to women entering all/most professions, why is there such a marked split between the sexes? I am happy, as are most feminists, to accept men and women have different interests. The life of the average women is different from men. Secondly, societal expectations of gender roles are still strong in the Scandinavian countries. You don't go wiping out generations of institutional misogyny over 10 years. But it's great they are trying to change the tune!

My main gripe with this guy and the google exec, is why are they doing this? These very same arguments have been used throughout modern times to justify the status quo. I was watching some 80s footage of Thatcher in Parliament - it is still extremely shocking to see the gender imbalance. This imbalance was justified by all the things Peterson says: women want other things, they don't compete well with other men, they are too nice for politics, they don't want power enough, and so on. So fundamentally I question Peterson's motivation.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/2762217-General-Trans-Discussion-Thread

I first heard about him from reading that thread

There are a million other threads to comment on - not sure why you felt the need to do so on this one in the way you did, but you did.

I can't really bf to read all the posts here, but one thing I'm curious about is how many people here are regular posters in this forum.

It doesn't seem particularly interesting if most are not, as there must be a million other places to read about JP on the internet.

For another "both sides of his mouth" example, just look at the case of Newman herself. Believe it or not, the comment a couple of days ago urging his followers not to harass her was the first time he's ever acknowledged that his followers do this, and told them not to.

This despite the links I shared above, that show that he routinely links to his "enemies" personal Facebook pages etc and essentially sics his followers on anyone he doesn't like (interesting sidenote: doing this is what got Yiannopolis banned from Twitter).

I'd give him credit for that - but it didn't last. This morning we got the other side of his mouth, as he tweeted that there was no proof, clearly she's lying. Guess he won't be reining his army in again in a hurry.

Does he refuse to take responsibility for the actions of his followers, as he rejects the in group identity they have formed with him?

Sure, repeatedly from one side of his mouth he insists he has no idea why all these alt-right types love him and he certainly isn't alt-right himself. But then on the other side, he explicitly endorses a prominent follower (the "gas the kikes" charmer) who is describing a Marxist conspiracy against him. He is feeding the alt-righters, because they are the ones who have given him his YouTube $$$ over the past couple of years.

This isn't accidental (like it isn't accidental when Trump or Trump Jr repeatedly retweet white supremacists). That account has thousands of followers and the "gas the kikes" post was made just a couple of hours before the pro-Peterson comment.

Banaji, a scientist who has many times more citations than Peterson, and as primary author too, works mostly on "implicit bias", in other words, the tendency of people to view black people as more criminal, or women as softer etc etc. Her work is well respected and undermines a great deal of Peterson's "theories".

I looked at that one. It seems to me that while her work is well respected the reason she has been criticised is that using implicit bias is biased in itself and undermines the whole idea of her research. If that's the case then I agree with the criticism

I got the flirting comment as a wry tongue in cheek one...and he did ask people to be respectful in their comments .."just words people , these were just words" ..

That whole neo-empiricist crowd of Sam Harris, Stefan Molyneux, Pinker and Petersen are on a continuum with the ethno-nationalists and eugenicists. They're trying to give credence to racial difference in IQ. Utter shit-bags.

I mean, I'm very much on board with the MN Feminism line on trans issues (albeit I do wish we gave as much attention to other important topics - sometimes looking down the topic list is a bit disheartening). But this "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" thinking is SO shortsighted. We do not need to make common cause with sexists - in fact doing so is only going to undermine our legitimate problems with trans issues by making us look bad.

Another great and accessible book that undermines plenty of evo-psych nonsense about gender is Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender", which also exposes very dodgy practices even from such distinguished scientists and academics as Pinker at Stanford and Baron-Cohen at Cambridge.

It's pure sophistry to say that saying "there's no proof of threats" is not accusing C4/Newman of lying.

He is very clearly accusing her of dishonesty.

Agree with HoldMeDown. While trans-activism may be highly problematic, it seems there is an inexplicable obsession on this forum with the issue that is out of all proportion to both other far more important feminist issue and the degree to which it effects women, or people generally, in the offline world. I've hardly known anyone mention it outside of internet fora. More worryingly, this is leading feminists into alliances with some very, very, very dodgy people.

About critical scientific refutation of Peterson's opinions. This might have gotten lost as I've shared a lot of links to him being sexist/ridiculous, but this tweet about Harvard professor Mahzarin Banaji needs to be unpacked:
twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/946860541422714880

Banaji, a scientist who has many times more citations than Peterson, and as primary author too, works mostly on "implicit bias", in other words, the tendency of people to view black people as more criminal, or women as softer etc etc. Her work is well respected and undermines a great deal of Peterson's "theories".

It is, of course, pure coincidence that Peterson is so incensed by her success (not just in gaining tenure at Harvard) while she's not white, not Western, and a woman.

Where has he accused CN of lying about the harassment? I've seen him point out that there isn't any proof made public and that criticism is not the same as threat.

Otherwise it's back to 'so you're saying I'm lying...'

Where did I say I didn't want to debate? I've brought up that today, Jordan Peterson endorsed the views of one of Twitter's notorious anti-Semites outlining a Marxist mainstream media conspiracy against him. He also said that Newman was "flirting" with him and is lying about receiving harassment.

Nobody has any refutation of these points, only pablum about "freedom of speech". The point is that today Jordan Peterson used his freedom of speech to spout lies, anti-Semitism, and misogyny.

Posters can't seem to get over the fact that I'm worried about the alt-right online radicalisation of young men. I've shown the sort of young male following Peterson has attracted, and been told I'm being "unpleasant". I will repeat my initial argument which for all the insistence that "everything should be debated!", was ignored:

If your 17 year old son reads this tweet and does not see it for the pathetic sexism that it is, we have a major problem: twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/953385332367486976

I'm not buying the argument that Peterson is super smart (he's clearly very smart) but when it comes to interactions with CN he's so baffled with the woman-ness of CN he's accidentally stirring up his followers against her.

Just because Peterson goes up against people who are wrong doesn't make him right.

And how quickly we're back to identity politics....

As I said earlier up the thread, I haven't been aware of the rest of his stuff. I don't know what else he has to say about race, ultra nationalism and a bunch of other things. I'll listen to some stuff and see.

But I do know that I enjoyed hearing him question the question, carefully define what he was talking about, seek evidence and refutation and then lay out what that means we can or can't be sure about.

I do not enjoy listening to 'discussions' between people who identify with a particular grouping, ascribe negative motivations to those who disagree with them and therefore go to play the person, not debate the content.

I am not impressed with some of his tweets today. I do understand his frustration with the narrative being imposed on the interview retrospectively. I see he has sort of invited a further interview, although his tone is fairly ungracious IMO. I would have respected him more if he had repeatedly reiterated his original call for courtesy and debate from those who seem to think they're going into bat for him. But I'm not looking for a hero I can worship. I am interested in hearing some different ideas, intelligently debated and moving away from the idea that there is a single socio-political view that forms a universal consensus for 'right thinking people'. Because whatever else, I look at our political landscape in the UK (not just the government) and think there has to be more than this.