Cathy Newman and Jordan Petersen on C4 News

[AssignedPuuurfectAtBirth]

Just on. He was saying that people are different due to ' agreeableness, women being more likely to be so; men less so, hence the gender gap

It's the first time I have ever seen Cathy Newman angry. And he was spluttering a bit, first time for him too, for me, I think.

Watch it on + 1

I agree with some of Petersen's views but he didn't come off at all well here

Well I don't know what to say other than I disagree with the theory. I find it obviously ridiculous.

A Petersen-Paxman interview would not have been gendered, because it's basically two argumentative men and that's the default in society. But, as he said, she is disagreeable relative to the 'default female stereotype' and that makes her a target. And she gets attacked for spluttering here: twitter.com/Some_BlackGuy/status/953523706373931009

What she said was obviously wrong, but whereas Paxman would just repeat himself manfully (literally because he had nothing else to say), and get credit for it, as with Michael Howard, she is deemed vanquished by her male foe because she shows weakness (feminine). If she goes 'male' she gets the 'bitch' comments, and if she's 'female', then she gets the 'inferior' comments.

Hence John Humpries getting paid double, he doesn't have to defy multiple gendered stereotypes to do his job.

You don't know what the theory is about, you object to something that isn't what anyone is suggesting.

I think the Paxman comparison is slightly off on two counts.

First if Paxman had been politely and good humouredly dismantled, there would be lots of people happy to celebrate the fact. It's just that the epithets would be different. There's be less "bitch" and more "jerk", "smug", "come-uppance" and so on. So the content of the gloating would have been different, but the fact of it, no.

Second I think Paxman would have been in similar difficulties to Newman if he had tried the same approach. Paxman interviewed politicians on subjects he knew a lot about - as much as the people he was interviewing. And quite often, the people he was interviewing were keen to avoid giving straight answers - and Paxman knew which questions were going to be uncomfortable for them. But Peterson was a different sort of interviewee. He was being interviewed on subjects that he knows far more about than does Newman (or Paxman) and he's not trying to conceal any of his views. He publishes his lectures on You Tube. Given those structural disadvantages the traditional Paxman "is there any reason why you should not be hung, drawn and quartered you miserable worm" interview approach would have crashed and burned within a sentence.

Newman's problem was not that she's stupid, or even that she wanted to make political points. It's that her strategy for the interview was misconceived. A more open and interested approach would have been better. As if she was interviewing someone who had some new theory about diabetes. She was only going to make a conflict approach work if she had got Peterson to lose his temper. Now there there might be a gender issue. Peterson found her approach uncomfortable, but also mildly amusing. He never looked close to losing his temper. Its conceivable that if it had been a man (say Paxman) across the table, he might have been more likely to lose his temper and less likely to find it amusing. Because it would have been an actual dominance dispute.

Doobigetta : "Double standards in action. Man fucks up debate and looks silly on tv- individual man is considered an idiot. Woman fucks up debate and looks silly on tv- feminism is a deluded concept because women just can't hack it in the big leagues."

Up to a point, Lord Copper. Yes there's some silly sexist gloating. But your comparison overlooks the detail that the defeated female contestant was taking a specifically radical feminist sword to the battle. Almost all her questions were from a "surely is this sexist" point of view. When she lost - was the problem just her, or might it also have been her sword ?

If a male interviewer is ripped to shreds as he repeats prepackaged talking points about, say, the horrors of the NHS is it not possible that the gloating would encompass not merely his personal failure, but the weakness of his ideas about health care ?

I bet Krishnan Guru - Murthy would have been even worse and I'd love to see him taken apart ... Such a pompous arse

Just stating that something is sexist is not a "specifically radical feminist sword".

AssassinatedB : Just stating that something is sexist is not a "specifically radical feminist sword".

Sure. But doing so a couple of dozen times, in response to somethings that aren't sexist, and not offering anything else, well, if it looks like a specifically radical feminist sword, walks like a specifically radical feminist sword and quacks like a specifically radical feminist sword, then you've got to at least consider the possibility that it's a specifically radical feminist sword.

No. Repeating a simple phrase many times doesn't make it a radical feminist "sword". Why do you think it's a radical feminist "sword" to repeatedly suggest something is sexist? What about that is radical/feminist?

lee thank you for taking the time to answer so cogently. Carefully thought out intelligent posts are great.

The reason that Cathy Newman's approach to the interview was misconceived is that she went into the interview believing that her job was to prove Peterson wrong, rather than to examine what Peterson is putting forward.

this is scary. Having followed her post-interview twitter feed and the comments on youtube I can vouch that the comments were not abusive, except for posters telling her that she came off badly in the interview. But hey, don't criticise a woman for doing a bad job, because it's abuse.

"Channel 4 News has called in security specialists to analyse threats made to presenter Cathy Newman "

One would hope that if there were actual threats the security specialists were the ones wth tall hats and blue flashing lights on their cars.

So she's lying about it? Or exaggerating and treating normal robust criticism as abuse? Wow. She must be very cross about coming out worse from the interview.

How was that scary lucy

im assuming that you are not privy to all of her online interactions

Her twitter feed may well be perfectly benign but as far as i can see they were not just talking about twitter

I think lucy was scared assassinated

So to be fair she is probably very able to spot exaggeration

There's a fabulous interview (well circulated on line) where Paxman is dismantled by a Plaid Cymru economist. Very satisfying.

Only mildly satisfying. Paxo wasn't proved wrong (though I suspect he was wrong) because the Plaid guy himself didn't have the precise figures on hand to deliver the coup de grace. And it was really just on a rhetorical detail rather than the dismantlement of a substantive argument.

Even so, nice to see Paxo getting a good kick in the backside.

I think it is scary when a supposedly respectable newspaper can deliberately label a figure they disapprove of - JBP is emphatically not alt-right but now readers of the paper will think he is.
Obviously I haven't seen all of her social media, but none of the hundreds of tweets that I have seen were abusive, just that she didn't do a good job. And we haven't seen any evidence of anything else. Looks like CN is part of the snowflake generation.
MP Debbie Abraham's has received a similar number of tweets , after she made a frankly stupid tweet (especially from a Shadow Cabinet member) about JBP. All of them calling her out on being, well, stupid. I'm anticipating her saying that she's been been abused. Which she has, in a way, but if you act unintelligently, you have to expect people to tell you that. Like CM

I think it is scary when a supposedly respectable newspaper can deliberately label a figure they disapprove of - JBP is emphatically not alt-right but now readers of the paper will think he is.

The Graun respectable? Good one. This is how marxists deal with oppressors : you don't debate or negotiate with them, you destroy them. Thank fuck they don't have the power they had in Russia 100 years ago. Peterson has mentioned in the past how tough it is to find someone to have a proper debate with. I believe he refers to them as the ''ideologically possessed''.

As for the interview, it seemed like she didn't understand a single word he was saying. I'm not talking about agreeing with him but just simply understanding his position. She simply talked at him, was unwilling to listen for a single second and treated his not as an individual but as a ''component'' of the oppressing class (straight, white, middle class male). A Borg like entity, if you will. People like her don't see individuals, they only see classes : oppressors and oppressed (though once you add in the intersectional nonsense the whole thing becomes a complete clusterfuck). He was ''on trial'' for holding a different opinion on things he's researched his entire academic life as a scientist (top clinical psychologist and ex Harvard professor) while her whole argument was based on her feelings and her distorted view of the world based only on identity politics and societal conspiracies. Like a geologist trying to explain a creationist that the Earth is a lot older than 6000 years. You could see how frustrating it was for him. It was so satisfying to watch her brain almost explode from the cognitive dissonance overload around the 23 minute mark. These people are like software, they can only do one thing they've been programmed to do. When faced with the unknown she just went into ''ERROR! ERROR!'' mode. Then she threw the lobster and their ''society'' at him , hoping to embarrass him but he easily outclassed her once more.

And perhaps she should have started the interview with the words of Jeremy Irons' character in ''Margin call'' : Maybe you could tell me what you think is going on here. And—please—speak as you might to a young child. Or a golden retriever. It wasn't brains that got me here, I can assure you of that!

BTW, his book is at number 2 right now on Amazon (mind you it's pre-orders only AND and it comes out at the same time with the Trump book). The times are indeed a-changing and I for one can't fucking wait.

Cathy Newman was an absolute joke, but then Channel 4 have always had a regressive liberal agenda. When you get someone in who knows what they're talking about, those with left-wing "we're all the same" derangement syndrome lose their minds because they can't deal with the facts of reality.

I couldn't find a single thing Petersen said that I disagreed with. Not only that, it wasn't like it was only his opinion - it was based on years of research and facts.

Aw, bless, LeeMoore thinks that radfems are the only women who notice that some things men say are sexist and point that out.

My granny does that and I don't think she knows who Andrea Dworkin is.

That link someone posted about the Nordic gender paradox is incredibly relevant to the whole discussion. The fact that the most feminist countries on the planet have such ''terrible'' outcomes compared to far more traditional places can't be ignored (female bosses, STEM grads, pay gap etc). When men and women have the closest we have to free choice, they make the most stereotypical decisions associated with their gender. Another thing it doesn't mention is that nordic women have one of the highest part-time employment rate in the world. These countries are the happiest on Earth in every survey, year after year. The experiment has been a great success (even though it was a failure for the biology denialists).

Breathlessimperfections- "The times are indeed a-changing and I for one can't fucking wait"

• i really hope this is the case.

AngryAttackKittens - if your granny's having hallucinations, you should check that she's actually taking her meds and not spitting out her pills when you're not paying attention. Also watch out for UTIs.