In case you need it, here’s a Jordan Peterson resource page.
Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson became famous after he spouted transphobia and refused to use they/them pronouns to address nonbinary students in his classes. He then published a wildly popular self-help book 12 Rules for Life, and has been lauded in the popular press as a leading voice for disaffected men. Center right pundits like Conor Fridersdorf and David Brooks have held him up as an honest and important thinker, unfairly maligned by the left.
Unfortunately, Peterson’s writing and YouTube videos are a bolus of nonsense, resentment, and bigotry. This page provides resources explaining the problems with Peterson’s worldview and arguments.
Also unfortunately, Peterson’s lobster swarm is fanatical and impervious to argument, so if you cross them, you’ll want some backup. I recommend just citing this page at ’em and then ignoring them.
Thanks PZ – I can see I’ll be using that!
Not one comment from a JP fanboy? Huh, maybe all the critiques are finally starting to penetrate the concrete like consistency of the average JP defenders thought processes. I should bookmark this page, just today I encountered an otherwise rational seeming man who thinks JP is an example of sophisticated conservative philosophy.
You can’t use third-person pronouns to address someone. How does that even work? They must be using they/them when referring to a nonbinary student while talking to someone else, right?
It reminds me of when you’re speaking German with somebody who wants to say “du” when you’d prefer to stick with “Sie.” There are all kinds of polite ways to get around it.
Maybe Peterson purposely stirred up trouble on this issue when there really wasn’t anything to complain about.
I’ve been trying to think of a real, contemporary or recent example of “sophisticated conservative philosophy”, with little success. Roger Scruton is about the best candidate I can find, apparently an excellent writer on esthetics, particularly music, but his political “philosophy” is garbage, just the same authoritarianism and excuses for privilege as Peterson, better expressed.
Tethys,
I’ve only ever seen one supporter of JP, and only in one of the other posts on JP, and he was treated badly, so I’m not surprised he hasn’t returned. He had some valid corrections of some common misconceptions about what JP has said but, unfortunately, in my opinion, was also persuaded by what JP actually does say.
I don’t think we’ll hear a lot more from JP after a few months. He’s just not that interesting apart from being an example of someone who you can find lots to criticise about what he has said but who is, unfortunately, more often criticised for what he hasn’t said.
Well, this is definitely true, though it’s not exactly clear whether or not Peterson was smart enough to know that there wasn’t anything to complain about.
To the extent the legislation Peterson disliked would have made it illegal to use certain pronouns, it could only have done so in the context of gender-based harassment, and only to the extent that such was already made illegal for gendered harassment targeting non-trans* folks.
For instance, if I’m a big, hairy, macho-man and I determine that any REAL man should play tackle football, I might choose to call one of my cis-male & cis-masculine students a “woman” and refer to that student as “she”. If I do it enough times, it would almost certainly qualify as gender-based harassment. Previous Canadian law had made this illegal. The new legislation would permit a mechanism of sentence enhancement *after* conviction for certain crimes that was already available to prosecutors when cis* victims were targeted for their genders to be newly usable against those who targeted trans* victims for their genders. This is of some legal consequence, and pronoun misuse might be included in evidence to support a judgement that the victim was chosen in significant part for their (trans*) gender, but it didn’t make anything illegal that was previously illegal. The crimes to which it applied were all crimes before the bill Peterson protested, and none had anything to do with pronoun use.
So the only possible situation in which pronoun use was made newly illegal would be in situations where a trans* person was targeted for illegal harassment based on gender or sex, and the law couldn’t have been applied through an interpretation of its applicability to cis* folks.
Frankly, there are a lot of people who thought that the law was easily generalizable to trans* folks as the law in such cases references “gender” unlimited by any notion of “cis*ness”. But clarity in the law is a good thing, and passing such laws isn’t wrong or bad.
But remember: to the extent that it made certain pronoun use illegal, it was only copying existing legislation to make sure that no one was left out. If the new law would have made accidental pronoun mistakes criminal offenses (it didn’t) or even civil violations, as anti-harassment law generally provides (it didn’t), it would have been nothing new. It would simply have provided that the same standard that currently protected 99% of people should now protect 100%. That’s it.
Any lawyer could explain this to Peterson – and a good many did. His persistence in the face of these obvious and easy-to-understand corrections carries with it the obvious conclusion: he wanted to sexually harass students and no longer had a group of convenient victims who were arguably uncovered by existing anti-harassment legislation.
If he didn’t intend to harass, he had nothing to worry about. If he was content with the previous state of anti-harassment law, he had nothing to worry about.
Peterson’s campaign of disinformation was ethically horrible. He should have known better, though it’s just barely possible that his cognitive limits made it impossible for him to learn, even from the abundant information available. Frankly, however, if his cognitive limits are that severe, he probably shouldn’t be teaching psychology.
Crip Dyke,
My understanding gels with yours regarding the new law being simply an extension of an existing law (that was actually already fairly inclusive anyway) to trans people.
PJ misunderstood this from his own reading of that law (always problematic when you’re not an expert) and the contents of a letter from his employer at the university where he teaches. His employers may have also misunderstood the meaning of the law but, more likely, the letter was either ambiguous or read ambiguously by JP. I don’t know if he attempted to clarify their meaning. But he didn’t seek clarification with a lawyer and I agree that he should have done so before he made his public stand. I also agree that he has chosen to remain blind to the information provided freely by lawyers on the Internet since since he went public.
Interestingly, JP actually changed his view from using trans pronouns if asked by a student to do so, to refusing to use them, period, justifying this by his belief that it’s all a post-modern neo-Marxist plot threatening free speech.
The idea that the sentence meted out for a crime will be increased if your crime was against a person of a minority group and because that person was of a minority group. The law already takes circumstances into account, so I assume this is also simply an extension of existing laws that take the circumstances of a crime into account.
Yes, precisely. Some people have a problem with the idea that two instances of behavior can be categorized the same for prosecuting purposes but receive different sentences based upon factors like motive and/or particular characteristics of the victim.
But in truth, we’ve done that for quite a long time. The rape of one’s spouse was not prosecutable in all 50 states until very recently, and certain laws in the US still make it easier to defend oneself against such a rape charge (when compared to a charge of rape against a non-spouse). I’m not aware of similar statutory provisions here in Canada, but similar provisions might exist as appellate precedents with the same effects. (My knowledge is particularly hazy with regards to Quebec as the provincial appeals courts try very hard to apply the CCC uniformly across Canada, but it’s never perfectly uniform and Quebec has a particularly individualist streak in its jurisprudence.)
Likewise, judges have inflicted particularly severe punishments for the rape of comatose patients (while others have apparently done the reverse, and in stunning irony judges actually tend to sentence “angel of death” medical practitioners to shorter sentences per murder when caught killing the vulnerable, the sick, and the already dying).
Terrorism is a good example as well, and is perhaps the most relevant example. Though recently in the US, Canada & Australia we’ve acquired different statutes under which terrorist murders (only) may be prosecuted, murder for the purpose of creating public terror – especially terror that might tend to affect political decisions or elections – have been singled out for particularly harsh punishment. Hate crimes laws are designed to respond to the possibility that terror might target only a minority of a population. In such cases, the terror might be more likely to support the status quo of the majority’s power and in so doing the political element can be hard to perceive. Thus the sentence enhancements for crimes that have already been proven if the prosecution can additionally prove that the victim was targeted because of membership in a particular group or the belief in / expression of a particular idea (including religious ideas). We call such violations of law “hate crimes”. There has been a critique that all crimes are hateful (or, in some more limited forms, all murders are hateful) and thus the term “hate crime” is misleading and the sentence enhancements unwarranted. Yet at the same time, how can a murder not create terror? And yet we still have ways to prosecute terrorism in order to mete out enhanced sentences.
I generally support “hate crime” laws as a concept, but I generally oppose incarceration as practiced in most nations, and certainly as practiced in the USA. I prefer not to oppose “hate crime” laws, however, and instead focus my efforts (when I feel like I might be effective) on prison reform.
Which, I suppose, is a digression. But you asked about laws that take circumstances of a crime (other than the core elements) into account (by which I assume you mean “in sentencing”, because if it were necessary to prove to reach a guilty verdict then it would be a core element – or just an element – of the crime).
Crip Dyke,
Yes, it was about sentencing.
I assume the law works like this:
If M is a person who belongs to a minority group, and someone says: “I hate M because M belongs to a minority group” that is not a crime. If someone punches R in the face, where R is some random person in the street, that is a crime deserving of punishment, P. Similarly, if someone punches M in the face but NOT because M belongs to a minority group (for example, not even being aware that M belongs to a minority group), that would also be a crime deserving of punishment, P. But, if someone punches M in the face because M belongs to a minority group (for example, by being on record for saying something like: “I hate M because M belongs to a minority group”), that is a crime deserving to punishment P+p (all else being equal, of course).
M could be a person who belongs to the minority group: Black, Trans, Jewish etc.
But, what if M is actually a minority group which itself promotes hate or descrimination? What it M is a Nazi? I assume that would not apply. But is that actually accounted for in the law? Do you get an extended sentence because you punched a Nazi in the face because he was a Nazi. Or does the Nazi’s own discrimination act as a mitigating circumstance. Conversely, is there provision in the law to make the sentence P-p in circumstances such as these?
@billyjoe #9:
Article: Wikipedia – Hate crime laws in the United States
Oh sorry. Canada was the context on this thread (Bill C-16). Same idea.
Article: Wikipedia – Hate Crime, Canada
Being a Nazi is an ideological choice, not a minority group, subject to unequal treatment for circumstances beyond their control such as gender, race, or sexual orientation . Minority is not the qualifying factor. Women are slightly more than half the population, but that does not prevent them being subject to misogyny.
This. This. This.
This whole dishonest “you preach tolerance and diversity but don’t want to tolerate people who are planning your extermination and you don’t give them platforms” bullshit is so damn tiring.
“I think Jews are responsible for all evil in this world” or “I think that women who had abortions should be hanged” is not the same as “I prefer to fuck people of the same gender as me” or “I’m a black person born to black parents”.
Nazi punching should be protected under Good Samaritan laws.
Yes, that should have been minority groups AND groups that are the target of discrimination. But if religion is a group to which this law applies then, logically, so should Nazism. Both are ideological viewpoints. And Nazis are, obviously, a minority group. I’m not sure why you would even want to deny this. But I don’t want to argue whether or not Nazis should be protected under the law, I wanted to know whether or not they are protected under the law – in the same way as minorities and groups that are discriminated against are protected under the law. If you punch Nazis in the face because they are Nazis, do you get an extended sentence?
billyjoe:
Such jurisprudence!
Why you brought up Nazis in the first place is opaque, too.
Has anyone been prosecuted for it?
I imagine that, as CD eloquently explained above, the case would be considered on its particular circumstances.
(Or, you could personally determine the answer empirically and definitively, at your own convenience. Guaranteed results!)
I’m not sure why anyone would spend so much energy defending nazis, and making self-refuting points.
But if? Goalpost gallop is such a tedious game. Only shitlords claim that”logically” the people who made hate laws necesary are somehow being unfairly discriminated against.
Anything but an answer to a reasonable question. Just a lot of flag waving as far as I can see. As well as the ongoing habit of assigning to me views that I do not hold. And Saad, at least, should know the answer to this question before he ever considers putting his words into action.
billyjoe #18
Are you quite sure that Saad is a “he”?
Damn!
But, going on his pic, I thought so, buy maybe not, so change that to:
…before ever considering putting words into action.
BJ:
Which just had to be about Nazis, in a post about (heh) Petersonia.
So very reasonable. Have you tried Googling?
(You also got my answer: depends)
Flag waving? I told you exactly how you could find out, for sure for sure.
That’s practical advice, that is.
Um, you are the one suggesting Nazis should be legally treated as religious adherents.
—
How’s this, why not rephrase your question to be about another (ahem) representative minority group, instead of about Nazis? Then it won’t look as if you’ve got a thing about Nazis.
If it’s only a philosophical examination of edge cases of legal consequences of “hate speech” elements which shows the concept is problematic, any other group would work as well. Right?
billyjoe #20
okay then
面白そ
too many for me
:)
I misrepresented billyjoe by quoting him saying that nazis are somehow a minority, and that their white supremacist ideology/genocide is like religion. so logic
I can’t believe we’re in for another round of billyjoe going on about how we must protect the poor Nazis.
Cue for another round of billyjoe whining about how he’s totally not defending Nazis.