What do you guys think of Jordan Peterson?

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spagetti_jones said:
Postmodernists want women to be men and men to be women.

They disregard the objective fact that sexual dimorphism exists in human. I think that has a huge reason for some of the differences between men and women.

But group differences are not ipso facto proof that things are -ist.

I just feel that is field is sort of intellectually getting hijacked by one, probably small, but loud minority.

To them, everything has to do with groups and power. There is no such thing as personal responsibility, individual choice, competence, effort, work, inborn differences, etc.
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I am totally jumping in at the end of this conversation but I find that I cannot resist.

I think the postmodern view is that gender exists on a continuum. Not that they want men to be women and vice versa. Gender is, to some degree, a performance. See Marc Bolan, Mick Jagger and so on, to cite boomer references. I'm sure there are some that are more updated but I don't love modern music.

IMO everything has to do with groups and power as well as personal responsibility, individual choice, competence, effort, and so on. They don't negate each other.

Also, did someone say that Dylan Klebold had no love for humanity? If so I think you should read up on the Columbine situation. The kid was oozing with love in the midst of a psychotic depression and an unhealthy relationship with a psychopath.
 
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Psycycle said:
I think the postmodern view is that gender exists on a continuum. Not that they want men to be women and vice versa. Gender is, to some degree, a performance. See Marc Bolan, Mick Jagger and so on, to cite boomer references. I'm sure there are some that are more updated but I don't love modern music.

IMO everything has to do with groups and power as well as personal responsibility, individual choice, competence, effort, and so on. They don't negate each other.

Also, did someone say that Dylan Klebold had no love for humanity? If so I think you should read up on the Columbine situation. The kid was oozing with love in the midst of a psychotic depression and an unhealthy relationship with a psychopath.
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I think you'll find it tough going trying to inject any semblance of nuance in this thread at this point.
 
Psycycle said:
I think the postmodern view is that gender exists on a continuum. Not that they want men to be women and vice versa. Gender is, to some degree, a performance. See Marc Bolan, Mick Jagger and so on, to cite boomer references. I'm sure there are some that are more updated but I don't love modern music.

IMO everything has to do with groups and power as well as personal responsibility, individual choice, competence, effort, and so on. They don't negate each other.
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It is not postmodernist to discuss how gender/gender expression are partially performative/socialized/continuous/non-binary/fluid.

The postmodern position is that there is no biological difference between sexes and that gender does not have any biological association. These are demonstrably false assertions. Postmodernism is inherently disinterested in science and views data that doesn't fit their narrative as a reflection of existing x-ist power structures.

Postmodernists are part of the extreme Left and are a very vocal minority. You don't have to be a postmodernist to be a run of the mill moderate left Democrat.
 
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FlowRate said:
It is not postmodernist to discuss how gender/gender expression are partially performative/socialized/continuous/non-binary/fluid.

The postmodern position is that there is no biological difference between sexes and that gender does not have any biological association. These are demonstrably false assertions. Postmodernism is inherently disinterested in science and views data that doesn't fit their narrative as a reflection of existing x-ist power structures.

Postmodernists are part of the extreme Left and are a very vocal minority. You don't have to be a postmodernist to be a run of the mill moderate left Democrat.
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That is NOT how I have read the postmodern thinkers. My understanding of postmodernism is as a rejection of the modernist grand narrative, e.g. William Burroughs cutting up his book and pasting it back together randomly. I do not see it as the extreme leftist position you outline. There is not one postmodernist position on anything, including gender, because that would be not very postmodernist - that would be modernist. There is no essence, just the perception of essence, the viewpoint of essence. When we observe, we change things. Existence is a process rather than a state.

That is quite different than "no biological difference between the sexes." Rather it is a rejection of a grand narrative of what it means to be female or male.
 
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Psycycle said:
That is NOT how I have read the postmodern thinkers. My understanding of postmodernism is as a rejection of the modernist grand narrative, e.g. William Burroughs cutting up his book and pasting it back together randomly. I do not see it as the extreme leftist position you outline. There is not one postmodernist position on anything, including gender, because that would be not very postmodernist - that would be modernist. There is no essence, just the perception of essence, the viewpoint of essence. When we observe, we change things. Existence is a process rather than a state.

That is quite different than "no biological difference between the sexes." Rather it is a rejection of a grand narrative of what it means to be female or male.
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You're right. I should have taken more care to delineate. I'm obviously not an expert on this brand of philosophy. The way I understand it is that there was 60's-early 80's postmodernism which is what you're talking about and that's very different from the 85-onward postmodernist-social justice-intersectionality-neomarxist political movement under academic guise. I shouldn't have used postmodern as shorthand for that movement but I don't have a good shorthand for it that's not also charged/pejorative (e.g. grievance studies.)
 
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That's not postmodernism's applied form, though. That's its weaponization. You can weaponize any philosophy - arguably, Hitler weaponized Nietzsche AND modernism by co-opting both into a victimization package. Postmodernism as a philosophy - no absolute narratives - to me, is a good thing, because it's harmful to people to think there is one great standard and all other is, well, "other."
I also think there's a bit of a cause and effect problem here, to quote the White Stripes. It's easy to love a grand narrative when you're allowed to be part of it. But for so long, others were excluded from the story. It hurts us all. We are all lucky to have, for example, Mozart, and wouldn't it also be nice to have the other 50% of the population's music?
 
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Jon Snow said:
Seems relevant.

Note the content and the downvotes and the comments. Seems maybe, just maybe these concepts hit strongly on politics and maybe, just maybe people have different conceptions of masculinity. And, some people don’t like negative attributes coupled with features such as gender or race.

There’s obviously nothing wrong with the basic message here at all in the sense of be kind, stand up against violence and boorish behavior. Protect the weak and vulnerable. So, why the negative response?
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There's the scent of cynical marketing taking advantage of the zeitgeist, for one thing.

Otherwise, I think it's partially because the message is explicit, and an explicit message is easier to get upset about. The implicit messages that culture has been throwing out for years have been widely ignored, and I must say, Dr. Snow, that many of the posts on this site exemplify that. There was no comment or irritation, that I've seen, for the stereotypes on race and gender that have been going on for countless, countless years. It's just that the message was implicit.

Just watch the original Ghostbusters. I watched it last weekend with my little boy. It's stunning. And I was mostly concerned about the message it sent to my boy about gender and human relationships. But it's implicit, so everyone just went along with it. I think the outrage should be on both sides of this equation.

Also, the comments you discuss consist of such gems as:

Feminine traits include emotionalism. This includes anger , hatred and resentment , along with other emotions. Masculine traits include logic and reason, thus checked and balanced emotions. A violent angry man is inflicted with toxic femininity not masculinity .
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A woman could lie and destroy a man's entire life, take away his job, his home, his children, his standing in society. Toxic feminity has been the root cause of many of the issues plaguing families worldwide. Women can be very evil under their pretty faces. If any company in the future
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This ad isnt just an outliner, its media propaganda against white males on an enormous scale. The mind of a child is where the revolution begins, Cultural marxism (jewish invention) & social justice are subverting the youth in the west. Look at this; Gillette’s ad agency is Grey Group. Grey Group is a unit of communications conglomerate WPP Group. WPP Group's largest shareholder is Harris Associates LP (7.38%). Harris Associates L.P. is a Chicago-based investment company that is wholly owned by Natixis Global Asset Management, a French financial services firm that is principally owned by BPCE. Groupe BPCE is a French banking group. The CEO of Groupe BPCE is Francois Perol Francois Perol is -- a jewish Rothchild banker
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Oh no apparently as a straight white male everything I do is wrong Gillette and its all my fault?
 
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Fan_of_Meehl said:
Forgive my ignorance of this area of the field (I'm going to try to learn more about it). But I still see asymmetry. Consider the following:

Here are the names of the scales for the Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory (CMNI): Winning, Emotional Control, Risk-Taking, Violence, Dominance, Playboy, Self-Reliance, Primacy of Work, and Power Over Women.

By contrast, here are the names of the scales for the Conformity to Feminine Norms Inventory (CFNI): Nice in Relationships, Thinness, Modesty, Domestic, Care for Children, Romantic Relationship, Sexual Fidelity, and Invest in Appearance.

Hmm.

So no bias at all in terms of how masculine traits are characterized/described/llabeled vs. feminine traits?

Sugar and spice and everything nice, I suppose.
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I don't see the bias. I think you're reading into it. why would being Nice in Relationships necessarily be a positive quality? That particularly feminine-norm based pressure can have awful consequences. Thinness? Modesty? Domestic? Care for Children? Romantic Relationships? Sexual Fidelity? Invest in Appearance? - same. I find those to be a mix of problematic and non-problematic. Same for the male ones. Risk-taking? good and bad. Violence? Same. Self-reliance? same, and so on. I think you see the asymmetry in terms of nice and not nice. Because who says "nice" is an overall positive attribute??
 
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Jon Snow said:
. That's not that there's been, necessarily, an escalation on white supremacy or sexism.
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At least in terms of its effect on such things as self-identified membership and incidence of hate crimes against certain groups (namely anti-Semitic incidents), the numbers would suggest otherwise.
 
Jon Snow said:
Yeah, there have been increases in anti-semitic incidents in rhetoric and action over the past few years coming from left and right sources.

See Ellison, Sarsour, Tlaib, and Omar for recent democratic politicians with such ties/statements and of course we had the shooting in Pittsburgh recently. Relative to the rise in alt-right recently, I see that as in part a reaction to the approach of the progressive left to diversity. I think it's a dangerous game, personally. I'd like to see that de-escalate and the language shift to something more inclusive and less hostile.
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I see it more as a reaction of law enforcement turning a blind eye to neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic violence for so long, coupled with the acceptance of white nationalism at the highest office in our nation. The Pittsburgh shooting is a perfect example of this, long-time far right, neo-Nazi, who frequently posted veiled violent threats on known platforms where such threats are encouraged. And, surprise! The exact thing that one would think would happen, eventually happens. And continues to happen with more frequency.
 
Please watch the Contra Points video about Jordan Peterson linked several times in this thread. She discusses post-modernism and why Jordan Peterson's criticism of the movement doesn't really make sense.
 
Jon Snow said:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/560285/

I think this opinion piece has a lot of great points pertaining to language choices and labels.

Relative to reading my posts, consider my positions.

- racism is bad
- sexism is bad
- we should strive to achieve a more inclusive society
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I'll give it a read, here's a piece supporting the blind eye view


Also, no one is disputing your listed positions in this thread. But, I imagine our definitions of what constitutes violations of such positions varies greatly.
 
Psycycle said:
Just watch the original Ghostbusters. I watched it last weekend with my little boy. It's stunning. And I was mostly concerned about the message it sent to my boy about gender and human relationships. But it's implicit, so everyone just went along with it. I think the outrage should be on both sides of this equation.
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I binge watched West Wing a few months ago, having missed it when it first aired. The way men and women interact on that show is fascinating given it was a show by- and for- mainstream liberals at the time, when compared to the implicit workplace script today (see the episodes South Park did on this for the comedic version.)

WisNeuro said:
At least in terms of its effect on such things as self-identified membership and incidence of hate crimes against certain groups (namely anti-Semitic incidents), the numbers would suggest otherwise.
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Maybe I'm misunderstanding you so I'll just link this to show "the numbers" and it'll either affirm or refute your point.

I don't have immediate access to recent data regarding alt-right nationalist movement, which I believe is still just a small, vocal minority. The alt-right didn't elect Trump, they helped him get the nomination thanks to first past the poll primaries and the tendency of parties to polarize in a two party system, but mainstream Republicans and a number of independents elected him.
 
Jon Snow said:
No irritation from whom? Certainly on a psychology forum, you're not suggesting that no one comments on sexism or racism as perpetrated by white people and there's no voice here advocating for using privilege rhetoric in how to think about diversity issues. Your talking about a field that requires its applicants to write essays on diversity and inclusion to get in. You are on home base for gender studies/progressive social justice language and concepts.

It seems that's kind of the game right? People don't like being negatively stereotyped. Male, female, hispanic, muslim, christian, Jewish, black, white, asian, etc..
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Well, since you asked.. from you or the others arguing similar POVs to yours. I think I'd hear the point, personally, a bit better if it was placed in its context. No one likes being negatively stereotyped, of course, but the white male stereotyping is in a context of a lot of historical stereotyping by that group toward others, so it can feel a bit precious when it's presented as the most salient stereotype du jour.


Yep. I'm with you there. Though, I do think that movie was funny. We have had a shift in what people see as appropriate. Watch something like Eddie Murphy Raw and you'll see that doesn't hold up well to today's milieu. I would not want my son or daughter watching these as elementary school children. Comedians today are definitely struggling with how to deal with the culture of offense/outrage that currently is increasingly loud.
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It's still recent, however. My generation loved this movie, and now they're the adults who are wrestling with some of these concepts. I was thinking, when I watched it, how could the culture send the implicit messages that the movie is sending to boys:

- be an ass to women, they will eventually find it charming
- do not STOP pursuing said woman, because eventually she'll give in if you just keep at it
- it's cute to hit on an attractive female student while abusing a male student

and then flip the narrative 30 years later and blame the boys for what they were taught by their culture at the time. To me, that's one of the most important reasons why a commercial like the Gillette commercial is overall a good one. Because it changes the story enough that these internalized ideas won't bite the men and women that our kids become.

The fact that the movie's funny makes it all the more dangerous. Awful things don't look like Voldemort. They look like chocolate cake. They are palatable. And that's the problem.

There are abhorrent comments throughout. I agree. I wasn't suggesting one should agree with the comments. I was noting the strong reaction to the content.

It used to be BPD/Histrionic were considered female personality disorders. Toxic feminity, if you will. And ASPD, a male PD. Toxic masculinity, more or less.

The former is not how we talk about women and psych, now. We, instead try to be careful of stereotyping and how individuals identify and guidelines for women are couched in the context of male oppression elements.

I think part of the problem is that when identity becomes so much the focus, whatever that identity, it triggers people talking about other forms of identity that have a bad history. We've had a major shift in how identity is addressed politically and one side has taken up the gender studies/sociology "grievance" language. I think this is how the alt-right got any degree of traction in the last election. That's not that there's been, necessarily, an escalation on white supremacy or sexism. I actually think that one could argue the contrary. But, that by taking the grievance studies language as the default vernacular it puts people in a language space that when applied by white people or men sounds racist or sexist. . . because it's racist and sexist. Identity has become okay to lean on as the crux of various drives and arguments. It's tu quoque, but I think that's a natural response to how mainstream elements are addressing these topics.

As with any bigotry or prejudice it's all about in group and out group exclusion. To be truly inclusive, we need to drop the modifiers as applied to race, gender, ethnicity.
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I didn't see the document as denying the context of toxic masculinity. I mean, Brock Turner is a creation to some degree, of his father's viewpoint, no? which could come from what I'll call the Ghostbusters milieu of the time? (this from someone who read all the court documents from the case. I am trying to go to the original sources as much as possible these days.) If the word "toxic" was absent, then you'd have a point. "Masculinity" in and of itself, I think, is pretty fabulous.

Didn't we always talk about the context that created BPD or ASPD? Other than psychopathy being largely genetic or brain-based and not gender specific? And I'd argue the explicit/implicit point of "toxic femininity" - for a long, long time femininity has been associated, as a given, with everything from disgustingness to weakness. The current focus on context has a lot to do with that. As we move away from that viewpoint (because I do think it's getting better) perhaps women's negative behaviors will be decontextualized as men's have been.
 
Jon Snow said:
, I see that as in part a reaction to the approach of the progressive left to diversity. I think it's a dangerous game, personally. I'd like to see that de-escalate and the language shift to something more inclusive and less hostile.
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Again, may I quote the White Stripes:

Well first came an action, then a reaction
But you can switch around for your own satisfaction
Well you burnt my house down then got mad at my reaction
Well in every complicated situation of the Human Relation
Makin sense of it all takes a whole lot of concentration
Well you can't blame a baby for her pregnant ma
And if there's one of these unavoidable laws
It's that you just can't take the effect and make it the cause
 
WisNeuro said:
I was referring more to data from places like the UCR and others, which track these things in incidences, rather than survey attitudes. So, that link doesn't appear to either affirm or refute my point.
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Ah fair point.

Re: UCR, there's a longstanding issue with lack of uniform reporting and changing numbers of reporters. This is from the 2017 FBI release:

"Law enforcement reported 7,175 hate crimes to UCR in 2017, up from 6,121 in 2016. Although the numbers increased last year, so did the number of law enforcement agencies reporting hate crime data—with approximately 1,000 additional agencies contributing information."

I wonder if there's also an issue with the new/expanding definition of "hate" crime including new groups being added on a regular basis.

The general data for violence shows a decreasing trend. Racist attitudes are going down. It's hard to reconcile those facts while claiming that hate crimes are increasing unless you make some sort of play to saying that the remaining minority of racists are committing dramatically increased numbers of crimes, which could certainly be true. But it may not even be racists, it could be any -ist at this point given the number of classes considered these days.

Actually, here's the table with offender and victim class, I haven't had time to parse it productively or compare to prior years. It seems to paint a pretty heterogeneous picture.
 
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WisNeuro said:
If anything, it appears that it's under rather than over-reported

Why America Fails at Gathering Hate Crime Statistics — ProPublica
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Absolute numbers? Definitely. But if we stuck to a consistent and reliable reporting method, we'd have an idea of whether hate crimes were, as you claim, increasing despite, as I already pointed out, racist attitudes and violent crimes being on the decline.

There's also the inherent issue with trying to divine the motivation for a crime... Was it really white on white hate crime or just a white person committing crime on another white person?

If we get an omniscent being to note all bias-motivated crimes this year, the numbers will go up dramatically, but that doesn't mean there were more hate crimes this year than last year except in the most narrow tautologic sense--you've now labeled regular old violent crimes as hate crimes and so you have more hate crimes that used to be crimes otherwise.
 
FlowRate said:
Absolute numbers? Definitely. But if we stuck to a consistent and reliable reporting method, we'd have an idea of whether hate crimes were, as you claim, increasing despite, as I already pointed out, racist attitudes and violent crimes being on the decline.

There's also the inherent issue with trying to divine the motivation for a crime... Was it really white on white hate crime or just a white person committing crime on another white person?
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I'm all for it being more uniform, but you'd see some major pushback from local enforcement. In the meantime, we have the data we do, which is pretty compelling.
 
Jon Snow said:
This thread started as a discussion of Jordan Peterson and then a discussion of the apa guidelines of men and boys and peripheral issues in the cultural mileu and political space as pertaining specifically to how men are portrayed and discussed.

My contention is that we should diminish racial/sex/ethnicity stereotyping especially when combined with negative attributes (eg privilege, laziness, criminality, oppressive attributes, aggression, miserliness, weakness, emotionality, etc). The context is effectively irrelevant to that.

It sounds like you’re saying white people in general were racists and many still are racists so it’s okay to lump them together and say bad things about white and male oppression and go to individuals that we identify as white and when they say something we don’t agree with, ascribe it to their race and privilege. Two wrongs don’t make a right?
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Please don't dumb down my point, it's a bad way to argue and it's part of the problem.

edit - oops hit post before I finished.

To finish: I am saying it is reactive. Not that it is right. But to remove that reactivity is to change the dialogue about it substantively.
 
WisNeuro said:
Increasing # of crimes along with correlation of increasing number of neonazi/WS orgs.
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Except for the reasons just discussed we don’t have proof of increasing crimes in that category....what we have is increasing numbers of depts reporting
 
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Jon Snow said:
I don’t think I dumbed down or mischaracerized your point. Here’s what you stated.

“No one likes being negatively stereotyped, of course, but the white male stereotyping is in a context of a lot of historical stereotyping by that group toward others, so it can feel a bit precious when it's presented as the most salient stereotype du jour.”

Translation - Saying bad things generally about white men is occurring in a context of white men saying bad things about other groups. Without acknowledging bad behavior by white men as a group, I can’t hear your point about saying bad things about white men because the most salient issue is white men behaving badly.


I’m agreeing that the issue is full of reactive behavior and suggesting we get off the treadmill and drop the negative stereotyping.

Generally speaking if your sentence starts off with any iteration of “Jews...” “whites....” “blacks”, “Hispanics,” in all likelihood you’re about to say something stupid.
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That's absolutely not what I'm saying. What I AM saying is that these things have a context and a historical timeline, and to pull them out of context and equate them is false logic.
And if you're not dumbing it down, or at least REcharacterizing it, why the need for the "translation?"
 
Jon Snow said:
Just putting it into plain language that you think racism and sexism are okay depending on the targetted group and what members of that group may have been responsible for some time in the past.

The last one I translated line by line.
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This is disappointing
 
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We should all aspire to be better people. And, as men, we need something to aspire to:

 
I love this scene in HBO's Rome:

The Lucius Vorenus character stands up to Caesar because he was taking the action he thought was right. The result is surprising.

 
Justice should always be tempered with mercy...and vice versa
 
More experientially, this is is pretty decent exposition of toxic masculinity ('cmon huck):

 
Jon Snow said:
Boys Will Be Boys. Covington’s Showed Yet Again Why Only White Boys Can Smirk Through That.

Hmm....
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except that's not at all how it went (which you would know if you had looked into it further). the kids were being taunted by some black isrealites and were defending their black classmate and defending trump from gay slurs when the drummer (who no one was messing with) walked into the crowd of kids, got in the face of the young man in the picture, and banged his drum in the kid's face

smirking was a perfectly acceptable response
 
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Jon Snow said:
I don’t embrace it. My primary point is that we should try to refrain from generalizing to an individual based on sex/race. Do you disagree with this?
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You have. Others have pointed it out in this thread, multiple times. People have tried to engage you in serious discussion. Each time you simply put your hands over your ears and sing "LALALALA Can't hear you!" Quite simply, you are not worth the time at this point.
 
sb247 said:
except that's not at all how it went (which you would know if you had looked into it further). the kids were being taunted...
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Jon Snow said:
... I don’t think you can discuss this topic without the context of the political debate.
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Interesting, are you both suggesting we need greater context to more fully understand what is going on at any particular moment in time?
 
calimich said:
Interesting, are you both suggesting we need greater context to more fully understand what is going on at any particular moment in time?
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We can move along faster if you just go ahead and provide the followup statement that’s coming
 
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WisNeuro said:
I think it's more that many people view equality and power as a zero sum game and it's easy to be afraid of things that don't exist. I learned a long time ago that life is so much easier with no fear of imaginary things like god, the baba yaga, or that someone was coming to take my guns or masculinity away.
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R u male or female?
 
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