Jordan Peterson

[Perimental]

dl-tube.com/watch?v=UFwfJVv9P34#.Wvvtj8Hnqjk.link

Thoughts on this man......

He,s being interviewed on BBC2 now

That's true enough teacup regarding bullies.

but I would say that experience has taught me that some people who would like to bully can be seen off with a firm comeback, so non violent aggression can be useful in those situations.

Thoroughly agree that that the problem lies with the bully not the victim though. It's just that in the real world those people will pop up, so it's useful to have strategies for dealing with them.

He says transwomen aren't women

Do you think that men would size up other men to see if they could fight them if the possibility of violence was off the table all together.

Is it not a Self fulfilling prophecy, I worry you might be sizing me up to fight me so I size you up back.

He points out women can have babies.
He will use kind pronouns though.
Feminists use feminism as a collective idealogy.

Having a firm comeback doesn’t have to be aggressive though, we have humour to diffuse aggression and you can set a boundary without it being aggressive or violent.

At what point does it become acceptable to resort to violence to resolve a conflict then road?

I think this misses the point. He's made no endorsement of men and violence, he's just holding up a mirror to how people view men.

It's possible to despise violence and agree with him.

I also don't read his comment as limited to a war of words, despite him saying 'talking'. I read it as when a conversation goes badly sideways. If it were just words, and I had to give you an example, I think most people would want to see a man take a swing at someone who had mocked a disabled child, for example.

I agree that this comment could be to reinforce male violence, but I don't disagree it.

I always like the Mumsnet ‘did you mean to be so rude?’ for diffusing bullies,

A feminist is trying to get a word in.
She says everyone gains from equality.
Jordan hates the term outcomes.

I think most people would want to see a man take a swing at someone who had mocked a disabled child, for example.

No, I really wouldn’t.

And asking at what point it’s acceptable to use violence does not miss the point at all.

You say you wouldn’t respect someone who used it straight away, and you wouldn’t respect someone who didn’t use it at all. So there must be a sweet spot where is acceptable to use violence. Where is it?
We all have to live in this world together, I would like to discuss the boundaries.

I would quite like to live without fear that men just might start hitting each other to defend their or anyone else’s honour in case other men don’t respect them.

I think that would be shit for everyone

Teacup my sweet spot for violence hasn't been tested so I couldn't say in all honesty. Did you read it as limited to verbal spats only? Curious to know.

To be fair, you are a woman (I think?) on a feminist chat board so I wouldn't include you in my 'most' calculation.

Dr. Peterson didn't say "a man who couldn't fight", he said who "wouldn't fight". Raising Dr. Stephen Hawking as an example to undermine his point doesn't work. It's also important to distinguish between saying something is and saying something should be. Dr. Peterson is talking about a real phenomenon which is the underlying threat of physical confrontation. To condemn him for observing it is not right and, imo, results from not believing in the phenomenon - thus interpreting his observation as a proposal. One you find offensive.

There is an underlying presumption of physicality in most conversations between men. As he says, there is the progression of "we talk -> we argue -> we push -> we become physical". The existence of that final step echoes down the chain and inclines people to follow those initial steps. I'm sure everyone recognizes the tendency for online conversations to rapidly progress to insults and attacks faster than face to face. The threat of it becoming physical has been removed. Or as Robert E. Howard wrote over forty years ago: “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”

Now one can like or dislike that but it's incorrect to say Dr. Peterson is advocating it. It's something most men will acknowledge we do on some basic level all the time.

Now when it comes to women, he's again talking about an observable behaviour. Lets dispense with the implication he's unable to argue with women as he's done so effectively on countless occasions. What he's saying is that for most men, that last step is missing. And we know it's missing. We don't feel that we could strike a woman and I believe what he's saying is that this can and does wrong foot a man. Like missing a step. Men essentially feel trapped at the first couple of steps when a woman progresses to step three because they've been brought to a place where they see no way out of it. The ability to constrain things to argument is missing. As he says in the sentence that some have omitted but which is part of the same quote: "If we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is" (i.e. with men). He's saying men don't understand how to deal with a woman that goes beyond civil discourse, unlike how we do with men. And there's truth to that. We mostly struggle with that. Often we simply retreat from the confrontation because we can't see how to handle it. We're being pushed but we don't feel able to push back.

I've been there. I'd expect most men to know what I'm talking about, too. Hence the final part of Peterson's quote where he begs for "sane women" to protect him from "crazy women".

No I didn’t just read it as limited to verbal spats.

We all have to live in this world together so we have created a system with which we can deal with spats and unreconcilable disagreements which doesn’t depend on the brute strength of the person.
It’s not perfect and it definitely could do with improving but at least it takes in to account that there is more to justice than just who is bigger.

Just because something is observable doesn’t mean it’s innate.

ginandbearit nailed it earlier with his anecdote about the biker gang. No direct confrontation but the behaviour still manifests. It's a strong general rule.

In fact, one of the fastest ways a woman can start a fight between two men is to indicate she thinks another man would win a fight with the first where that man disagrees. I.e. to move things almost instantly to step three or four.

Just because something is observable doesn’t mean it’s innate.

Do we have any parents here? It's probably a long-shot but if we could find some people who have raised boys and girls...

We all have to live in this world together so we have created a system with which we can deal with spats and unreconcilable disagreements which doesn’t depend on the brute strength of the person.
It’s not perfect and it definitely could do with improving but at least it takes in to account that there is more to justice than just who is bigger.

Gosh, that's a much rosier portrait than I'd paint about men's tendency towards violence.

Mind you, I live equidistant to 2 football stadiums and have a non-restricted parking zone so I'm a bit of an unwilling student in male violence.

Just because something is observable doesn’t mean it’s innate.

I agree, but the evidence seems to support innate here.

The anecdote about the biker gang proves nothing.

You can argue it the other way.

Men have been socialised to believe that women are interested in big strong men so behave a certain way around them.

Nature vs nurture. No one knows the definitive answer.

At risk of flogging a dead horse, but it does add context.

Peterson has referred more than once to the biblical phrase 'the meek shall inherit the earth'.

He goes into some detail that this is actually a mistranslation and results in a completely changed meaning.

We interpret the word 'meek' as quiet, gentle, submissive, whereas the original word that it replaces doesn't translate properly but means something like 'someone who has the ability to fight, but chooses not to'.

This is fundamental to what he means when he talks about underlying male violence. Not that it's a good thing in itself, but that someone who has the ability to get their way with violence, but chooses not to, is the model men should aspire to.

@reluctantcamper "This was not giving an alternative argument, this was simply giving two specific examples of individuals covered by Peterson's statement"

I've literally stated numerous times that your Hawking/Gandhi was a "logical extreme fallacy", I'm not sure why this still hasn't sunk in. I never said Hawking/Gandhi was a straw man.

This will be my final attempt at explaining a "logical extreme fallacy" to you.

If my husband is talking about weightlifting and says "I would never take steroids"

And I say "what about if you get diagnosed with asthma, have an asthma attack and get prescribed steroids"

Then I've used a logical extreme scenario of when he might take steroids to disprove/discredit his statement. The logical extreme "makes sense" because it's a valid scenario when he might take steroids, but it's not one that he considered when making the original statement and pointing out he'd take steroids in the event of an asthma attack doesn't alter his original point that he wouldn't take steroids in a weightlifting context

So by saying, "what about Hawking/Gandhi", you've gone for a logical extreme example of men who don't or can't fight back, and any reasonable person would understand why they don't/fight back without losing any respect for them

Using those as extreme examples doesn't alter or discredit his point in anyway because the examples are so extreme to be almost absurd.

If you don't get it by now then you're either a troll or the concept is too difficult for you to grasp

And what about the men who can’t get their way through violence for whatever reason?

Or the 51% of the population who won’t be able to because they are physically smaller.

Why are we settling for rules of communication that apply to men and women differently? How is that ever going to achieve a world where everyone is heard if you can’t communicate effectively with half the population.

If you find a step of communication is missing when talking to half the population you’d better go back and readdress the steps you’re using to communicate.

As a woman I think I do communicate differently to men but only because I know I need to in order to be heard, I can feel a massive chasm between my socialisation and personality (not so much now but when I was younger).

You can argue it the other way. Men have been socialised to believe that women are interested in big strong men so behave a certain way around them. Nature vs nurture. No one knows the definitive answer.

The fact that nearly all mammals exhibit some variant on this behaviour despite not having social conditioning in any sense we'd apply to humans, and that it tends the same way for different species of mammal means we'd need a pretty strong reason to suppose humans don't have it. That it's common across cultures both geographically and through time; that comments from mothers about raising boys being different to raising girls, even from a very young age, indicate differences; that, speaking anecdotally, it just feels innate in a way that other socialised differences I was raised with do not; I really think it's mostly innate. Obviously socialisation makes a big difference, but I think the difference it makes is primarily how we act, not how we feel.

This will be my final attempt at explaining a "logical extreme fallacy" to you.

If only that were true. We won't hold our breath.

And do you know what ‘someone who could fight but chooses not to’ is, it’s a threat.

As a woman I am very aware that a man could hit me, I don’t for a second think that a man wouldn’t hit me in an altercation. I don’t behave in a way that assumes I wouldn’t be hit, I have modified my behaviour since I was tiny to minimise the chance of being hit or killed by a man.

For a man to say that it’s hard to debate with women because he threat of violence isn’t there, is tone deaf at best.