[rubecube]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

Alright, well we're basically analyzing a piece of garbage journalism at this point, but fine, I'll bite.

So, first, any time you see someone write their own sentence and stick small chunks of someone else's words into it with quotation marks around them, you should basically ignore the quotation marks. Here is an example:

There are no actual quotes from Jordan Peterson in that paragraph. There may be a couple of words he has said at some point or another, but that is a very different thing. Frankly, you could construct a paragraph out of words or phrases used at some point by anyone and come up with a full justification for the holocaust.

EDIT: Incidentally, I find it hilariously ironic that the author tries to justify a charge of hucksterism by quoting Freud.

So leaving those bits aside, of which there are many, there are only two quotes in the article that I can see. Here they are.

That is a book review. I've never read the Gulag Archipelago, so I can't say what Peterson's praise of it says about him, but I'm not sure that there's any book besides Mein Kampf that would justify suspicion of a person for liking it. Well... maybe Atlas Shrugged.

That's basically the source of all of Peterson's controversy from a year or so ago. Lots of people disagree with his views on this, including, apparently, the author. Fair enough.

Now look at the rest of the article and the charges levelled at Peterson, basically non-stop. Are those two quotes the basis for them? They sure don't appear adequate to render the incessant smears and vilification defensible... unless you already agree with the author, or are inclined to not think too hard and simply take the word of columnists about who's an evil misogynist alt-righter.

I think I might have glossed over most of that because these were the two main things that stuck out to me in the article:

Peterson arrived at the conclusion that the difference between Google's and Bing's respective results of bikini photos revealed the former's apparent desire "to shape our perceptions themselves in the politically correct manner."

Peterson's lectures, YouTube videos, and new book contain wisdom that ranges from the incendiary (that sexual assault is a consequence of the decline of traditional marriage), to the obvious (skateboarding is cool), to the vacuously pithy ("Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong"), and utterly ponderous ("cats are a manifestation of nature, of Being, in an almost pure form").

Then, Bill C-16, an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act to enshrine legal protections on the basis of gender identity, turned Peterson into a glowering cause célèbre. "I will never use words I hate," Peterson wrote, "like the trendy and artificially constructed words 'zhe' and 'zher.' These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century."

These are all things Peterson has said or written and I think they're perfectly valid things to criticize him on. It's not the anti-tans angle I take issue with regarding the last quote as it is the utterly laughable hysteria.