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Thinking to his issue over pronouns...

He's arguing that he should not be coerced into using preferred pronouns. Ok, that's fine. But he should use preferred pronouns anyway, in order to not be an asshole. Because refusing to use preferred pronouns isn't standing up to oppressive postmodern SJWs. It's being an asshole.

And this is the real headache with Jordan Peterson. He may be thoughtful and interesting. But for thousands of followers, he's just providing intellectual cover for bigotry and emotional sadism.

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Respectfully, I'd like to put this in a different frame.

"Being an asshole" isn't some universal quality. If someone is complaining that someone else is "being an asshole," what is essentially meant is that person "is doing something for which they should be socially shamed." There's nothing inherently right or wrong with having a system of shaming in a society, but it's something particular to a culture and a time. These things come about through consensus and if there isn't some consensus that that's the way things are, then those attempting to impose new norms are ironically also "being assholes."

When you have moral society in recent decades changing very rapidly in terms of what is being considered acceptable or not (whether or not you consider that positive progress), it's going to feel like whiplash to people who are not on the vanguard of the latest new definition of what's acceptable. People say, "Wait a second, I was taught to be a decent person, I think I'm a decent person -- who are these people telling me that I'm now a hateful person for doing or not doing what seemed reasonable up until a couple years ago? Do the people telling me this have moral authority in my eyes?"

Cultural practices take time to adjust or to be adjusted externally. Move too fast and people won't be happy about it, and that should be understood.

Most people with unusual gender identities understand this, and are understanding and patient with those who are making an effort to respect their wishes. It's those who consciously refuse, or mock their attempts to clarify their identities, that get called out, and they deserve it.

Yeah, it's hard for us. Hell, I'm 52. I have a lot of adjustment to do. But I try to do it, because I respect my friends. (Patton Oswald did a really excellent speech about this, btw.)

For my own part, a lot of my frustration is the loud and sincerely meant (if wrongheaded) declarations of victimhood by the privileged, simply for being asked to be nice to others. So when I hear Jordan Peterson say he's being oppressed by the evil forces of Marxist postmodernism for being asked to use preferred pronouns... I hear a comfortable, privileged person complaining about how he's a victim. And when he doubles down and says people shouldn't get to choose their own pronouns, their own identity, and instead society should choose for them? Then he's a hypocrite. And an asshole.

So when I hear Jordan Peterson say he's being oppressed by the evil forces of Marxist postmodernism for being asked to use preferred pronouns...

But you've never heard that. You've only heard him reject being coerced to do that. He's even on the record as saying he's fine with addressing people as they'd like to be addressed, so long as it's all done civilly. What you're doing is projecting a caricatured position onto him.

For my own part, a lot of my frustration is the loud and sincerely meant (if wrongheaded) declarations of victimhood by the privileged, simply for being asked to be nice to others.

A law that empowers kangaroo courts isn't "simply asking nice." A law that empowers those courts to use an unscientific "unconscious bias" test that claims to get into your head isn't "simply asking nice." A law that can result in dismissal from your job isn't "simply asking nice."

I hear a comfortable, privileged person complaining about how he's a victim.

He doesn't claim he's a victim. What he claims is that the law is a potential abridgement of freedom. You could make a claim that Lindsey Shepherd claims to be a "victim" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpFUvfAvKs4 -- but then you'd be presenting evidence that Dr. Peterson's assertions about the law are correct.

And when he doubles down and says people shouldn't get to choose their own pronouns, their own identity, and instead society should choose for them? Then he's a hypocrite. And an asshole.

A coworker at my work announced her transition, and everyone just started using the feminine pronoun. Everyone was civil about it, and everything was fine. (And I am certain that she was happier and a more vibrant and complete person for making the change.) Again, you are misrepresenting his position. More accurately, a person exists within society (and hopefully a community) and identity is something which is effectively negotiated between the person and society. It's the parties who are being emotionally dishonest, playing games with emotional blackmail, and being crappy people who are "being assholes." From where I'm sitting, it's a lot of emotionally imbalanced trans "activists" who fit that description. Jordan Peterson gets mail from trans people, the majority of whom are supporters or sympathetic to him. Their collective position is that they just want to not be singled out and live their lives in peace.

> A law that empowers kangaroo courts sin't "simply asking nice." A law that empowers those courts to use an unscientific "unconscious bias" test that claims to get into your head isn't "simply asking nice." A law that can result in dismissal from your job isn't "simply asking nice."

I'd like to underline this statement. Making this into a law that will impact employment, sentencing, etc., is not a polite request. It's the power of the state. When that involves a certain way of speaking, or thinking, a lot of us civil libertarian types get very uneasy, regardless of the merits of the issue at hand.

I'm a civil libertarian myself. It makes me uncomfortable. But people seem hell-bent on missing my point in order to correct me for God forbid equating coercion and oppression.

My actual godddamned POINT is that, whatever the logical merits of Peterson's position coming from him, the practical effect is for a hundred thousand red-pill assholes to share excerpted clips around, and thinking it means that a wise philosopher agrees with their joy in being mean to people over their gender identity.

No matter what position you pick, some gaggle of idiots on the Internet are using it as a pretext for being a dick. A lot of the acrimony coming from the Right is a reaction to others doing it using pretexts from the Left.

The solution is to have reasoned dialogue. If you follow Peterson's message, he seems to have explicitly decided to minister to lost young clueless right-wing men, by urging them to clean their rooms, and live worthwhile, responsible lives. In fact, I remember the video where he talks about becoming aware that so many of his followers were effectively Alt-Right, and seeing him hesitate, then say he didn't know what to make of that.

He also talks about the mechanisms by which a crowd can suborn a speaker, so I think he's actively fighting against that.

thinking it means that a wise philosopher agrees with their joy in being mean to people over their gender identity

It seems to me that a lot of people did exactly that, coming from the far Left, in the name of Intersectionality. It was also done with racial identity. (Google "Feminist Cringe" & "Dartmouth College Library Activists")

Oh, undoubtedly. There's no small amount of tribalism and moral sadism among the SJWs, using these sudden shifts in vocabulary as an excuse to berate people they didn't like in the first place.

Which in no way means intersectionality is a Bad Idea. Intersectionality is a major advance in the understanding of oppression.

I hope Peterson can actually wake up some of his red-pill followers, and do more harm than good in the long run. But for now, he really needs to apply that intellect to dealing with something he wasn't ever prepared to deal with - being a symbol of intellectual authority to a movement that stands for things he no doubt despises.

I hope Peterson can actually wake up some of his red-pill followers, and do more harm than good in the long run.

Freudian slip? As George Orwell noted in Road to Wiggan Pier, leftists often don't so much as love the poor, but hate the rich.

But for now, he really needs to apply that intellect to dealing with something he wasn't ever prepared to deal with - being a symbol of intellectual authority to a movement that stands for things he no doubt despises.

For one thing, I can imagine him basically paraphrasing that sentence. How come I don't often hear anything like that kind of introspection coming from the left about the depredations of unbalanced followers? When it does come, why is it that others on the Far Left then try to kick them out of the Left? Then too, I hear and read things like, "It's okay to hate your oppressors." I think I know what it means when people start to say it's okay to hate on a group of people based on outward and inherent characteristics. I grew up being on the receiving end of that.

You're making an awful lot of generalizations with very little substance here.

You're denying people say "It's okay to hate your oppressors?" You're denying that people have been trying to kick people like Dave Rubin and Bret Weinstein out of the Left?

You're being pedantic. I'm characterizing what he's saying using colorful language of my own, but the principles are the same. He objects to gender pronoun changes because he sees them as postmodernism, he believes postmodernism derives from Marxism, and he sees Marxism as authoritarian oppression. So in Peterson's worldview, the difference between being asked to use ze and zim by someone, and sending Solzhenitsyn to a Siberian death camp, is merely a matter of degree, not of kind.

And I'm quite sure he'd agree with my assessment here.

I'm characterizing what he's saying using colorful language of my own, but the principles are the same.

No. It's one thing to advocate that everyone should be nice and say "hello." It's an entirely different thing to advocate for a law that says you will be dragged before a kangaroo court for failing to say "hello," where a scientifically dubious "test of unconscious bias" will be used as evidence of your guilt. Either your bias is showing, or you're missing the distinction.

So in Peterson's worldview, the difference between being asked to use ze and zim by someone, and sending Solzhenitsyn to a Siberian death camp, is merely a matter of degree, not of kind.

If you study the detailed legal history of the Weimar Republic, then you'd be prone to agree. The Nazis didn't have to change the Weimar laws a whole lot, because the Left-leaning Weimar republic left loopholes in the law that basically amounted to, "...unless the state deems it for the common good."

If you let "activists" erode due process and create "crimes" of "unconscious bias," then you are creating legal means for people to engage in the sorts of accusations which sent people to the Gulag. The Magna Carta and particularly Habeas Corpus came about because laws which were about one thing were abused out of poltical expedience.

> It's one thing to advocate that everyone should be nice and say "hello." It's an entirely different thing to advocate for a law that says you will be dragged before a kangaroo court for failing to say "hello," where a scientifically dubious "test of unconscious bias" will be used as evidence of your guilt.

And it's yet another thing to criticize a law for saying that when, in fact, the law says nothing of the sort.

Only if you accept the dishonest sleight of hand, in that the Human Rights Tribunals are not courts of law. They are "kangaroo courts" by my estimation.

> Cultural practices take time to adjust or to be adjusted externally. Move too fast and people won't be happy about it, and that should be understood.

To your point, failing to accommodate this, and expecting everyone to immediately change because you have, is its own flavor of "being an asshole."

My "Miss Manners" etiquette book from the 1960s says you should call people by the names they wish to be called. So it's not "modern", it's timeless. She directly addresses the social issues of the day, such as gay couples or couples living in sin; it's clear what she would recommend today.

Radical examples from the 1960s: If Bob and Nancy have been living together for a while, invite "Bob and Nancy", not "Bob and Guest"; and this classic:

Q: WHAT DO I SAY TO MY SON'S GAY FRIEND BOB'S LOVER AT MY SON'S WEDDING???

A: How do you do? My name's Judith.

There are some 4 or 5 new pronoun classes, totally over 30+ new gender pronouns recognized by some transgender rights activists. This UW LGBT Resource Center lists an additional 7 pronoun classes, totaling 35 new pronouns [1].

So imagine the typical college professor. They've got what? Three or four classes of up to 50 or 60 students?

So you want them remember not only each student's name, but also which of these new pronoun class they prefer, as well as the proper declination of that pronoun class?

And if someone prefers not to do this, it's because they're an asshole?

My guess is that Peterson would have been happy to try to use preferred pronouns for his students, if only he weren't being forced to do so by some human rights act about pronouns and coerced by various activists groups. He's basically said as much before.

For the record, I'm in favor of most transgender rights issues (re: employment, anti-violence, identity documents, etc). But you can't go passing laws to force changes in attitude. US lawmakers did the right thing by passing civil rights laws in the 1960s, but those lawmakers didn't then go and outlaw the use of the n-word. That would have been a bridge too far. People have to learn from those around them what is and isn't appropriate. You can't just force them to think and speak the way you want by force of law.

Or at least, we don't typically try to do that in free societies.

1. http://uwm.edu/lgbtrc/support/gender-pronouns/

It's very simple, really. You use what seems obvious, and if someone corrects you in one-on-one conversation, you finish the conversation doing the best you can to respect their wishes. And if you screw up, you apologize and self-correct.

We're not talking about 200 students in this case. We're talking about one on one conversation with one person. That's when pronouns matter.

Being unhappy about coercive regulation is an entirely separate issue from trying to do the decent and not terribly difficult thing. And using the coercion as justification for not doing it is, bluntly, an excuse. It's turning around and claiming yourself the victim of what you do to others.

> We're not talking about 200 students in this case. We're talking about one on one conversation with one person. That's when pronouns matter.

Professors never engage in one-on-one conversation with their students? And they never refer to their students in the third-person within the classroom?

> And using the coercion as justification for not doing it is, bluntly, an excuse. It's turning around and claiming yourself the victim of what you do to others.

I don't think Peterson sees himself as a victim, at all. I think he's alarmed and outraged that proscriptive laws governing his speech have been passed. And as an American who's pretty happy with our 1st amendment, I agree with him.

I mean, forget for a moment that this is concerning transgender rights. If a country like Canada continues to outlaw certain ways of speaking, at what point would that concern you? Or would it ever?

I fail to see the distinction between "he's alarmed and outraged that proscriptive laws governing his speech have been passed", and seeing himself as a victim of oppression. But this distinction seems very important to some people, who object to my characterization of him as a self-styled victim of oppression.

Just because he doesn't use the word "oppression" in that context doesn't mean it isn't his broad meaning. Coercion and oppression are more or less interchangeable.

"You" is not gendered, only third-person pronouns are in English.

Jordan Peterson is on record saying he would use preferred pronouns. He is opposed to the law and regulation of these pronouns:

https://youtu.be/aMcjxSThD54?t=21m39s

23m16s is where he states he would use preferred pronouns.

I'm not surprised, because Jordan Peterson is thoughtful.

And yet, a hundred thousand assholes gleefully share the video clip of him getting in the face of someone confronting him about pronouns, him talking about how it's oppressive, and they take it as the intellectual seal of approval for their refusal to use preferred pronouns, based on their contempt for those who ask for it.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I notice you have used the insult “asshole” twice when no one else is, and you are using the mention of the word as proof someone is wrong.

Would you consider writing what someone has specifically done wrong, rather than the insult? It’d be more clear, and we wouldn’t need to guess whether your overall assessment of people is reliable.

He's arguing that he should not be coerced into using preferred pronouns. Ok, that's fine. But he should use preferred pronouns anyway, in order to not be an asshole.

AFAIK, he does use preferred pronouns.

Because refusing to use preferred pronouns isn't standing up to oppressive postmodern SJWs. It's being an asshole.

If one is faced with oppressive ideologues who refuse to engage in dialogue and just want to coerce you, the proper response is to stand up to them.

He may be thoughtful and interesting. But for thousands of followers, he's just providing intellectual cover for bigotry and emotional sadism.

I genuinely think that the critiques of Postmodern Social Construction are thoughtful and interesting. I also think they provide intellectual cover for bigotry and emotional sadism, dressed up as "activism."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj28qAS8MWU

Perhaps the asshole is the person who expects the rest of the world to jump through linguistic hoops in order to protect their carefully maintained delusions.

> Ok, that's fine. But he should use preferred pronouns anyway, in order to not be an asshole.

Let me ask you, do you think requests for preferred pronouns are rooted in a correct understanding of human nature? Or are you merely accommodating something you believe to be mistaken so as to not hurt someone who likely be (on net) hurt by a more honest approach?

Let me give you a libertarian answer... it's up to individuals to decide what their own identity is. When an individual identifies as one thing, and society refuses to accept that identity and imposes labels they find offensive, then they are being oppressed. And that's a much more substantial form of oppression than "Please don't say that" is.

I'm utterly shocked (not really) how many people proudly wave a flag of liberty, but are quite content for society to denounce and punish harmless individual expression, if they aren't comfortable with that expression.

> it's up to individuals to decide what their own identity is. When an individual identifies as one thing...

That's actually not true and not workable. A very obvious example is a criminal who identifies as a good, upstanding person.

IMHO there are actually two kinds of identity (at least). They are separate things, but related and often confused.

1. Self-identity: the identity that someone applies to themselves based on their own thoughts and aspirations. This is very closely related to one's inner life. This is the identity that you're referring to above.

2. Applied-identity (for lack of a better term): the identity that each person applies to someone else based on their own thoughts, beliefs, and experiences with that person. Someone's reputation is an example.

If you try to force everyone's applied-identity of you to conform with your self-identity, that's also a form of oppression. What and how they think of you is their own business.

I'm not sure that's a particularly libertarian answer. But whether your views belong to a particular political label or not is not my main concern.

My question was whether you think such identity claims are true.

Now maybe you don't think it matters, and that we should use preferred pronouns regardless. But at that point you are saying that people should lie for the sake of politeness. The request isn't just "Please don't say that"; it's "Please say this other thing even if you don't believe it's true".

I think I generally agree with your second paragraph. We should not deliberately be jerks to others, even if they are different from us. And also, we should not be under legal coercion to not be jerks - that way lies at least serious trouble, and maybe social madness.

But I think I disagree with your third paragraph. People who have thoughtful, interesting things to say should say them. (They should also take care to specify what they don't mean, to discredit "followers" who run off in bad directions. Or else, if they agree with those followers, non-followers will conclude that the bad directions taint the thoughtful and interesting things.)

There's the rub, though. When you have something interesting to say that may well be taken the wrong way to justify things you despise (as I believe is the case here), you should take care to clarify as well as possible - and clarify up front, with caveats, to reduce the number of people hearing only the first half of your sentence.

And even then, people will hear what they want to hear. However carefully Peterson speaks his thoughts on this manner, there will still be a lot of people who now think it's the intellectual thing to do to beat up a dude in a dress. Which makes speaking one's mind, however truthfully, an ethical dilemma.

This is the hole below the waterline in the sinking ship of radical honesty. This is why "Don't be an asshole" is more complicated than it sounds.

I kind of hate to beat on Peterson too hard for this, though. He's suddenly acquired a large and unexpected following that he didn't actively pursue. But he needs to deal with the ugly reality of what kind of people make up the bulk of that following, and how his words and ideas affect them. It's an ongoing learning experience.

Well, there's no way I can see that you can say anything and prevent people from reading into it what they want it to say. (This is especially true if they're doing it deliberately - trying to use your stuff as a smokescreen to give support for their pre-chosen position.)

You can make it harder for them. But you can't stop them.

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