Controversial Canadian psychologist Dr Jordan Peterson explains to Tom why keeping his room clean is important, why identity politics suck, and why the ABC should be less Marxist.
And the heading is absolutely right: “Jordan Peterson DESTROYS Tom Ballard.”
And this is the audio from his presentation in Melbourne.
From June 2017. About Free Speech. You might even wonder whether this conversation could happen today, never mind a decade from now.
Some quotes from JBP but you need to watch it all for yourself. And there is also Mark Steyn!
“I’ve studied the development of totalitarianism for a very long time and one of the things I know is the issue of ceding control over language, and the Government has carelessly made a precedent and the precedent is compelled speech essentially.”
“I think I am a classical liberal in the old school sense. I am an individualist.”
In reference on the form of sex and gender education that is happening in schools, “people have no idea it is happening. . . . The average person has no idea that it is happening.”
“We take free speech for granted, we actually take our whole civilisation for granted and we don’t understand that it rests on certain foundation blocks and if you remove those blocks all hell will break loose. And I think our civilisation is a whole lot more fragile that people understand and it is also in a lot more peril than people understand.”
“We’re also in a situation right now where your right to say anything about religious beliefs, unless they’re Christian, is seriously in danger, and that’s so dangerous that it’s almost beyond comprehension. It puts us back in Mediaeval times.”
“The patriarchy is just Western Civilisation. Patriarchy is just a code word for that. Governed by their Marxist dogma and post-Marxist dogma, they think it needs to be re-tooled from the bottom up. It makes them natural allies of any other system that opposes our system.”
“Jacques Derrida may be is the most dangerous person of the last forty years.” His writings are the basis for “an all out assault on Western categories of thought. . . . Categorisation is the basis of cognition. And so he has basically made the claim that thought itself is an agent of oppression.”
“As the politically correct movement inches forward. . . . [The Social Justice Warrior types] find a hypothetically vulnerable group – it doesn’t matter what it is – and then they use them as a protective shield while they move incrementally forward and so if you object you are targeted as if you are picking on the poor vulnerable people.”
Why I had stood out was not that I was speaking in generalities but that “I had said there was something I would not do and so had drawn a line so it was the combination of generalities with specificity that made the issue real for people.”
“Many of the kids on the left equate argument for free speech with racism.”
“Why I took these issues on now is because I believe it will be worse later.”
I went along to hear Jordan Peterson speak last night, and went early since I did have it in my mind that our own ANTIFA types might show up. I suppose it was this story that spooked me. This happened in Kingston, Ontario on the Monday of the same week he spoke in Melbourne on the Thursday.
A woman in eastern Ontario is facing numerous charges after taking part in a protest against a lecture by a controversial Toronto professor.
Police say a 38-year-old woman was arrested near Queen’s University in Kingston Monday evening. . . .
Officials say officers searched her backpack and found a weapon — a metal wire with handles commonly known as a garrotte.
But as it happened, no demos and a very very pleasant night. I won’t discuss anything of what he said during his presentation since he has a couple more to give, but will say he received the loudest applause I have ever heard for anyone, both when he came in and when he finished up. A wonderful evening of reflective thought.
What I will reprint however, as best I can, is his answer to the question that was asked by the lad sitting next to us, who is a trainee teacher, dismayed to the farthest extent about the cultural Marxism he finds at every turn. So his question (one of only five among the around 100 who were still queuing up when the Q&A ended) was how to push back when surrounded by ideological enemies. This, to the best of my recollection and according to my notes, was how he replied.
You are in a war.
If you go along with them you are going to lose.
If you try suicidal forms of resistance you are also going to lose.
The question is how do you fight “ideological possession”*?
You pay attention looking for alternatives and ways to oppose what you see.
But do not make any unnecessary enemies.
If you are going to move forward you need to make a plan and think strategically.
Don’t burn yourself up early. Play for the long run. Do it intelligently and move forward step by step.
You have to always think about what the people you are fighting can take away from you.
And while all that is right, the bit that is missing is a recognition of the crucial importance to help your friends. I am amazed and no little angered by the lack of mutual support for those who take largely the same side but have some difference which becomes all it requires for all too many to separate themselves and declare a fundamental discontinuity between their views and yours.
To take what ought to be a trivial example but is not, Donald Trump deciding for a variety of reasons to place tariffs on aluminium and steel. As it happens, his reasons are sound and sensible – starting from the imperative of ensuring that basic requirements for its war industries, along with shoring up electoral support in potential swing states. But even if you don’t like this particular policy, why join his and our enemies in building an anti-Trump case?
The left never ever on any issue allows the slightest deviance from its core policy front. There are no end of issues for which there is exactly one answer permitted. On our side, it is one thing to explore an issue and wonder about the pros and cons. It is quite another to be subject to some kind of reflex reaction – ideological possession if you will – which does nothing other than help tear down the side you need to succeed if we are not going to be swamped by the next turn of the election cycle.
*Ideological possession = Rote and unthinking answers to genuine social questions. Or as described by someone unnamed somewhere else on a comment on a Peterson video:
“The noise made by a person that has been so fanatically indoctrinated into an ideology that they’re able, quite without conscious thought, to generate a constant stream of sterile, inoffensive, thoroughly orthodox and politically correct platitudes that are almost (but not quite) wholly removed from real meaning and (by design) totally devoid of any visceral human feeling.”
Here are examples from that same Peterson presentation at Queens – but first turn the volume down.
I went along to hear Jordan Peterson speak last night, and went early since I did have it in my mind that our own ANTIFA types might show up. I suppose it was this story that spooked me.
A woman in eastern Ontario is facing numerous charges after taking part in a protest against a lecture by a controversial Toronto professor.
Police say a 38-year-old woman was arrested near Queen’s University in Kingston Monday evening. . . .
Officials say officers searched her backpack and found a weapon — a metal wire with handles commonly known as a garrotte.
But as it happened, no demos and a very very pleasant night. I won’t discuss anything of what he said during his presentation since he has a couple more to give, but will say he received the loudest applause I have ever heard for anyone, both when he came in and when he finished up. A wonderful evening of reflective thought. But I will reprint, as best I can, his answer to the question that was asked by the lad sitting next to us, who is a trainee teacher, dismayed to the farthest extent about the cultural Marxism he finds at every turn. So his question (one of only five among the around 100 who were still queuing up when the Q&A ended) was how to push back when surrounded by ideological enemies. This, to the best of my recollection and according to my notes, was how he replied.
You are in a war.
If you go along with them you are going to lose.
If you try suicidal forms of resistance you are also going to lose.
The question is how do you fight “ideological possession”?*
You pay attention looking for alternatives and ways to oppose what you see.
But do not make any unnecessary enemies.
If you are going to move forward you need to make a plan and think strategically.
Don’t burn yourself up early. Play for the long run. Do it intelligently and move forward step by step.
You have to always think about what the people you are fighting can take away from you.
*Ideological possession = Rote and unthinking answers to genuine social questions. Or as described in one of the comments in the video below,
“The noise made by a person that has been so fanatically indoctrinated into an ideology that they’re able, quite without conscious thought, to generate a constant stream of sterile, inoffensive, thoroughly orthodox and politically correct platitudes that are almost (but not quite) wholly removed from real meaning and (by design) totally devoid of any visceral human feeling.”
Ignorant Stupid Immature and Socialist – our version of ISIS.
They know nothing worth knowing. They are ignorant of history and ethics, have no expertise in anything other than an ability to misunderstand anything. All emotion, no actual learning. Cannot discuss anything in a rational manner. Only know how to hate but no ability to explain. They are the very essence of stupid, completely unable to learn anything that requires depth and commitment. Dull witted and boring in every relevant sense. They are unable to explain anything that is worth anyone else’s time. Their only way to get attention for their empty thoughts and useless ideas is to come at someone with a mask on their faces and a club in their hands. And irrespective of their age, they have never grown up, still trapped in the playground with them as the bully. And of course, socialist, the gold standard of ignorance and stupidity. In spite of socialism’s 100% failure rate in every circumstance in which it has been tried, they still seek a socialist outcome not knowing and apparently not caring that the result is human misery on a scale that can only be exceeded in the midst of war. The lowest form of human.
Speaking of which, off to hear Jordan Peterson this afternoon, assuming the Australian version of ANTIFA lets us through. The police certainly won’t open a path so we shall see what we shall see. Meanwhile back in the home country there is this: Woman arrested after rally against controversial professor Jordan Peterson. I’ll just give the first and last sentences of the story:
A woman in eastern Ontario is facing numerous charges after taking part in a protest against a lecture by a controversial Toronto professor. . . .
Officials say officers searched her backpack and found a weapon — a metal wire with handles commonly known as a garrotte.
Here are the final lines of my review of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life.
I can do no more than encourage you to read the book. There is nothing else like it and I cannot praise it enough.
This then is how the review begins.
STEVE KATES
The Future is a Judgmental Father
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson Allen Lane, 2018, 448 pages, $35
______________________________
Jordan Peterson (left) may well be the deepest, clearest voice of conservative thought in the world today. In the space of less than a year he has risen from being a relatively obscure professor of psychology at the University of Toronto to becoming perhaps the most articulate defender of the values of the West to have arisen in the last fifty years. I can think of no one in recent times who has been able to reach such depths of understanding, but with such an extraordinary ability to make plain his meaning to such large numbers of people. You should, of course, read his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, but you should also watch as many of his online presentations as you can if you are interested in understanding, and preserving, the values of our Western civilisation.
The interviewer is so out of his depth. Peterson is trying to talk some sense into someone who cannot think outside of modern presupposition. “What are the rules of that govern sexual interaction between men and women in the workplace?” From Instapundit.
JORDAN PETERSON TAKES ON VICE NEWS (Video):
It’s fascinating watching his interviewer interrogator, Jay Caspian Kang, alternate between full-on Cathy Newmanisms (to the point where near the interview, Kang utters something like “I’ve really tried not to be like Cathy Newman here”) and acting incredibly naïve regarding Hollywood, despite writing for a Website named, err, Vice.
People worked long hours and partied together afterward. And that’s where the lines often blurred. Multiple women said that after a night of drinking, they wound up fending off touching, kissing and other advances from their superiors.
The name of the Website they decided to work for might have been their first clue.
Peterson is just playing with him. The interviewer cannot even understand the point, never mind being able to reply.
This is from Instapundit discussing Jordan Peterson, the most articulate defender of our Western values found anywhere in the world. The question that really is of central interest is why he has become the phenomenon he is. I have my own views but am interested in yours.
AMADEUS SYNDROME: “As I say, [Peter] Hitchens at least feints towards what’s really bugging many of these people. It is the Amadeus syndrome. Many of [Jordan] Peterson’s haters on the right have been toiling in the fields these long years, equally worried about, writing about, the treatment of men, especially young men; about the erosion of freedoms, etc. Where, they are wondering, are their rewards? So they are bitter. It’s a feeling I’m familiar with,” Kathy Shaidle writes.
And for a tiny sample of what he says and the approach he takes, here is a relatively uncharacteristic interview in that he is being interviewed by people who ought to understand what he’s on about but do not. These I went looking for to see what Peterson has said about Donald Trump. These were about the only things I could find, but there are probably others.
The hosts asking the questions are supposedly on the conservative side but are clearly open-ended critics of Trump. Peterson was much more careful and if he was critical, it was only about Trump’s timing in what he said and not what he said. The bozos interviewing cannot see the point. This is Peterson in my own rough but reasonably accurate transcription (from around 2:00 in):
“Truth is a tricky thing because you have to take the temporal context into account. There are white lies and black truths. Black truth is when you use the truth in a way that isn’t truthful. . . just like a white lie is a lie that isn’t harmful…
“What Trump did wrong … was he failed to specify the time and the space of the utterance. Because what he should have come out and done is said that I unequivocally denounce the white supremacist racism that emerged in Charlottesville, and then he should have shut up. And then two weeks later he could have said, well when we look at the political landscape as a whole that it’s pretty obvious there are reprehensible individuals acting out on both ends of the extreme. The Charlottesville week was not the week to make that point.”
And this is Peterson’s views on Trump’s intelligence.
He gets it, even if he is cautious about saying it. And then this, where he is being interviewed by Canada’s Cathy Newman, and if you don’t know about Cathy Newman’s interview with Jordan Peterson, you should seek it out at your earliest opportunity.
The left will get him if they can, the very thing he worries about himself.
TO WHICH MAY BE ADDED THIS: This is titled What It’s Like To Be A Conservative Talking To Progressives. Actually, it is only our dearest wish, but the link does have the original Cathy Newman interview of Jordan Peterson. It’s all there, including a proper level of ridicule for Newman. But as the author writes:
The point here is not what it’s like to be Jordan Peterson giving an interview, it’s that this same interview technique gets used on conservatives fairly often. Case in point, ex-Google engineer James Damore gave an interview to CNN Tech in which his views were repeatedly mischaracterized in much the same way. CNN Tech’s Laurie Segall brought up the alt-right twice, forcing Damore to denounce a group he had no connection to in the first place. The effort seemed less to understand than to throw him into a hole of insinuations from which he could not escape.
There are no friendly interviews from the left of the right, where the interest is merely to understand our point of view. Whether Peterson has shown the rest of us the way we will only know when someone else does what he did.
AND THIS FROM THE COMMENTS: Addresses the question, can men and women work together in the workplace? Says we don’t know since it has only been going on for the past forty years. Makes the suggestion that makeup should be banned from the work environment.
Law of Markets 