Cathy Newman and Jordan Petersen on C4 News

It's almost like Feminists don't like the idea of an intelligent man trying to make young men better themselves.

At least the tide is turning after years of unchecked nonsense.

Part of the interest for me is that he's requiring time and thought and nuance. I'm so tired of people expecting us to agree with their position as expressed in 140 characters.

exactly nauticant there's nothing that sets my alarm bells ringing like someone telling me "watch this 40-minute YouTube video to understand my argument!!"

No thanks!

Yes, it's reading the comments below each of his tweets that really alarms me and that's where my warning about young men is coming from. These are young white middle-class men in their late teens and early twenties.

I'm not sure what to make of exhortations to view loads of videos on the Internet so that we can get to understand things in the right way. When I look at other groups suggesting that, I often step back in alarm.

I followed Peterson on twitter a year or so ago when he first came to notice with the campus pronoun debate. I stopped last year as was uncomfortable with a lot of his followers- constant unpleassnt sexist remarks from them and i saw him do nothing to reign any of them in.

I’m still interested in what he has to say and wish him well on the forced speech aspect - i just can’t follow him when i see the knuck draggers he attracts.

I'll share the reddit link again, more prominently, as among the piss-taking of him and his acolytes (well needed when you're dealing with this level of cultish following) there's also the detailed refutations people have been asking for:
www.reddit.com/r/enoughpetersonspam/

I would be very worried about a teenager reading the way he speaks about Newman (the "flirting" comment and the attacks this morning).

IMO a 17 year old should be able to see that for the sexist bullshit that it is.

Thanks for that link HoldMeCloserTonyDanza. Assuming he's as smart as he believes he is, there's no way he would not understand how that will fire up his followers.

However much he might say interesting things, some people seem to be very selective in their critical thinking in going along with what he's saying.

There's absolutely nothing casual about my comments about your son. The radicalisation of young men online is one of the biggest things we should be worried about and Jordan Peterson is a gateway to the alt right. I'm not saying that to attack you or him. if you want to be offended and pull up the drawbridge that's your business. All I am saying is that is his alt-right fan club is frightening and I would be incredibly worried about a young man getting sucked in.

He has spent all morning attacking her.

Read his most recent tweets, he has completely backed away from asking his followers to stop harassing her and returned to denying such harassment exists.

twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/953385332367486976

I'm baffled that this sexist moron has received such a warm welcome on the feminist board, of all places.

Holdmecloser I haven't seen him attack CN on twitter he asked for any abuse to stop. Can you post anything to support your claim?

As for indoctrinating young men (well he seems to have indoctrinated a few women in that case) I think that teaching critical thinking and fighting for free speech is quite the opposite myself

I have learned so much from the women on this board who have really challenged my thinking, but I have begun to find I am coming here less often as the same theories which I broadly agree with, are no longer challenging me, and often not challenged in any meaningful way (not counting the MRA ploppers who cant sustain an argument beyond, you're all haterz) so I'm actually really excited by the challenge JP brings to this, and I want to grapple with the challenge to my feminist thinking. I don't know where I'll end up with my view on his position, I may get to a point of frustration with his lack of analysis of women, and put this down to misogyny, I don't know, but I'm welcoming the challenge.

I completely agree with this. I think for me the challenge is how to turn (feminist) theory into practise and how to successfully challenge and win the current battle we face with the issue of transgender rights. If that means reading up about Nazism, listening to a lecture about the Old Testament or reading Gulag Archipelago then that's what I'll do because I'm hungry for a bit more now. History has a lot to teach us

The problem with wanting endless scientifically-cited refutations of Peterson is that his legion of alt-right and "who me? I'm never alt-right! how very dare you" fanboys have the patience to spam gish-gallop YouTube videos at you eternally. Not wanting to engage with the gish-gallop does not mean you don't have a scientific basis for disagreeing with him.

To be honest, after watching him and his army of young male idiots spam reddit endlessly for years (even Reddit's sick of him now, which tells you something!) I'm past earnest refutations of his work. I'm more about mocking him tbh: www.macleans.ca/opinion/is-jordan-peterson-the-stupid-mans-smart-person/ (spoiler alert: he is)

To be clear, Jordan Peterson is not a neo-Nazi, but there’s a reason he’s as popular as he is on the alt-right. You’ll never hear him use the phrase “We must secure a future for our white children”; what you will hear him say is that, while there does appear to be a causal relationship between empowering women and economic growth, we have to consider whether this is good for society, “‘’cause the birth rate is plummeting.” He doesn’t call for a “white ethnostate,” but he does retweet Daily Caller articles with opening lines like: “Yet again an American city is being torn apart by black rioters.”

His attacks on Newman on Twitter are sickening, to be honest. Completely denying she's in any danger, which is of course just putting her in more danger.

The fact he spoke about trans issues does not make him my ally, any more than Donald Trump is women's/feminism's ally because he banned trans people from the military.

I'd be incredibly worried if my teenage son was a fan of his. I'm not concern trolling there. They are so vulnerable to online radicalisation and Peterson's tedious YT videos are a classic gateway.

On 'agreeableness' : The problem with this is that not only is it a survival mechanism for women, it also begs the question, what would the results be if women stopped behaving in an 'agreeable' manner.

There is amongst JP's talks and lectures a fair bit mixed in about how men deal with disagreement and how ultimately if there isn't agreement it can be dealt with through violence. He also says that this means that men and women do not know the 'rules of engagement' when disagreeing with each other. I think his point was that men ultimately deal with disagreement through violence if necessary and woman do not.

This resonates with me as I work in a male dominated industry, and now I manage mostly men. I also have 2 sons. It has taken me many years to figure out how to deal with disciplinary issues I have with men successfully, and I have changed my behaviour accordingly.

When dealing with an angry het up man it does occur to me that a man dealing with the situation would possibly have faced violence in my position (I've seen it happen). It strikes me that I have changed my behaviour towards dealing with these situations, and one way I do that is by not considering the possibility that my 'disagreeableness' will end in violence, as if I was to consider that I would not be able to carry out my job properly. I would probably back down / avoid the situation.

This goes against my natural instinct which is to fear an angry man, as I have been subject to male violence in the past. Added to that the daily relentless reporting violence towards women by men. It's a reality to me that my interactions with men are far more likely to end in violence than my interactions with women

I do not find it anywhere near as stressful to deal with females possibly for this reason. I know that this is an issue for other women in my industry and the ones that do make it tend to be accused of 'acting like a man', which quite oddly is used as an insult towards women by men. I'd like to hear more about that from JP.

Also in one of JP's lectures he said that in any group of men and women there will be more in common amongst men + women than men + men or women + women. I find that very interesting but it wasn't explored too deeply.

I find his stance against the Canadian government and his fight against 'compelled speech' regarding the trans / pronouns issue to be both compelling and brave. It seems to be a hill he's prepared to die on and I find it interesting that he has chosen to fight so publicly to the point he is prepared to lose his license as a clinical psychologist of over 30 years.

It's interesting that he has not once in his many interviews / talks on the compelled speech issue he does not mention any feminist arguments that support his case. On the one hand he seems to be critical of female agreeableness and on the other calls some disagreeable women raging harpies. It seems like he is contradicting himself somewhat there

Just catching up with this and have just seen the whole interview.

I have never been so embarrassed of an interviewer. Not ever. Peterson came across as brilliantly intelligent. Newman came across as utterly thick.

He had research and evidence. She had a desire to be offended or try to catch him out, and she failed with every single response.

I'm a woman and a feminist and I cringed each time Newman responded to very specific things he said with random "so you think x" then when he had clearly said "I think y".

Newman should quit interviewing intelligent people like him until she learns to actually listen to what is being said to her, and then respond to that and not her crazy deluded interpretations.

YippeeKiYayMelonFarmer

As to intellectual bonding between mother and son, I recall seeing Pride and Prejudice on my mum’s desk when I was about fourteen. I instantly concluded that it couldn’t possibly be worth reading – how could it be if my mum was interested in it ? Eventually I got round to reading it when I was about thirty and I loved it. I read it again every five years or so and it still makes me laugh.

Personality test – I think I found a link to this on the Graun. Seems OK.

personalitylab.org/tests/bfi2_self_pol.htm

I think JP has a pretty extensive professional experience of women from his clinical and consulting practices– both high end career gals and people with serious problems. And there’s no reason to doubt that he follows his own advice – “listen, you might learn something.” He’s extremely well read, so he’ll have jumped into as many fictional ladies’ heads as are offered. And he’s married and has a daughter. So I imagine that as an external observer, he’s in a pretty high percentile for understanding women. But he’s still only an external observer. What I’m doubting is whether any man, however intelligent and open, can really get to the bottom of what it feels like to be a woman. I know this marks me as a pretty evil sexist in some folk’s eyes, but as I say I’m not neurotic so who cares.

So I think I’m just saying – I doubt that Peterson can do as good a job for women as for men. Which – if I’m right – would a shame.

In any event I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect him to have cracked women as well as men – it’s taken him 30 years of thought to get where he is now, and he’s hardly slacker. For all his relativity stuff, Einstein couldn’t get his head round quantum mechanics. Can’t expect the same bloke – or blokette – to crack everything.

As to solutions to female disadvantage I have nothing helpful to say myself. Peterson claims no magic wand either. Here’s a clip I offered a few posts back :

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p4RvLiS-3I

But – and I know it doesn’t answer your question at all – I’m sure he would say that if you want to design social reforms that help women overcome the disadvantages that biology has presented them with, in areas of life that have traditionally been dominated by men, it couldn’t hurt to try to find out as much as possible about what those disadvantages are.

I'm quite disturbed by the tentative emergence of what can be called an Alt-Right feminism which offers surreptitious sympathy to essentialist - and sometimes even racist and eugenicist - ideas. (Anne Marie Walters is a prime example of this phenomenon). Whatever valid issues you might have with the transgenderist movement, Petersen is a nasty piece of shit. The fact that he gives race and gender essentialism a respectable, intellectual face makes him if anything more insidious than the likes of Richard Spencer, who are at least more up-front about what they believe.

Please be aware of feminism's shift to the right. It is a tendency that is there and has been so since the likes of Margaret Sanger.

I said earlier - i quite like CN and i do feel a bit sorry for her. This whole hoohaar must be very humiliating for her. Problem is she did bring it on herself by the way she conducted the interview - she tried to trip him up and humiliate HIM. It was interesting and entertaining though and i felt they had a mutual respect by the end. I wonder if she’s learned anything from all this and on watching it all back what her views are on his points.

I like him actually, he has guts to say what others don't