Jordan Peterson to Launch Academy

Here's the entire abstract of the study Peterson linked.

The study divides men into three groups. One is at high risk of violence, "Sexually active men, who are not in a monogamous relationship." Two are at low risk of violence, "men who are sexually active within monogamous relationships and men who are not sexually active."

Peterson's claims were about violent attacks and particularly the 2018 Toronto van mass murder.

The perpetrator was a 25-year-old male college student. He was never married. He has stated that he never had a girlfriend and was a virgin. He described himself as an incel. Evidence places him in the category "men who are not sexually active." That's a group identified at low risk of violence!

"Fewer partners since last wave" is pretty different from socially promoted monogamy, let alone from marriage.

"Results were not accounted for by marital status."

Looks like a lazy five-second Google by Peterson that gives little if any support to his priors.

 

Someone who stands up in front of an audience of non-academics and uses terminology like "enforced monogamy" knows exactly what they're doing. He knows that he can fall back on the excuse that "oh, it's academic language", but if he doesn't explain immediately and in-depth exactly what "enforced monogamy" means, his audience of incels is going to use it to go murder women. Someone doing a commentary later is not the same thing. It's no better or worse than if he were to use language like "y'know, it'd be amazing if XYZ politician were murdered when they go out to get their paper in the morning". You don't get to say stuff like that and then claim that you were only speaking metaphorically. It's irresponsible at best and exceedingly dangerous at worst.

 

To me, that's a fair characterization of Peterson himself - irresponsible at best and exceedingly dangerous at worst.

I'm 80 - and no Hulk -- creaky, not creepy. But yeah, I can make that leap, no problem. I have no doubt whatsoever there are twisted individuals out there poised to seize on stuff like this.

 

Yep. Did you know that there is an incel wiki? Gross, gross, gross.

https://incels.wiki/w/Jordan_Peterson

The wiki says that he's been "critical" of violence perpetrated by incels. But... pretty much everything else he says contradicts that. It's like someone saying "I'm not racist, buuuut... y'know, those darn foreigners/ethnic minorities are terrible people."

 

Peterson is widely associated with a fuzzily indistinct, partly overlapping partly not, set of ideologies and movements with labels including manosphere, neo-masculinist, men's rights activist, red pill, anti-feminist, anti-SJW, gender critical, and intellectual dark web.

Incel and pickup artist could both defensibly be included in the set, despite obvious big difference even between the two. There are also notable, but even fuzzier and significantly less overlapping, connections between the foregoing and a second extended set with labels including dark enlightenment, alt-lite, alt-right, and far-right.

There's some really bad stuff among even the first set, stuff that goes beyond normal social and political disagreement, through denying rights, even to murder. We've discussed one of several mass murderers who stated misogynist motives.

There are also many people in the set who disclaim bad stuff in it.

How much does Peterson's work bolster such bad stuff? I think reasonable people can disagree, and I think each poster in this thread is a reasonable person. I think Peterson has written or said things that deserve criticism, even harsh criticism.

Peterson is not the worst leader among that set, by orders of magnitude. Peterson was a notable writer and speaker before becoming associated with the set. It seems to be possible to find value in some things Peterson has written or said without agreeing with any part of that set.

 

Just jumping in to say...

It looks like I should have posted this in the Politics section rather than the General section.

 

Thank you, good Sir!