U t professor sparked vicious battle gender neutral pronouns

From Jordan Peterson Criticism Analysis
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Metadata[edit | edit source]

Title: The Pronoun Warrior

Link Archive Link

Organisation: Toronto Life

Distribution: Toronto Life Website

Author: Jason McBride

Date Published: January 25th 2017

Style: Reporting

Central Claims[edit | edit source]

None. Mostly reporting on facts, including quotes and thoughts from both sides.

Potential Mischaracterization[edit | edit source]

The author is mostly even handed with the exciting recounts of inflammatory events.

On the many TV appearances Peterson made in the months after the YouTube lectures, he was uniformly dour, unapologetic and supercilious. The person I met was not much different

JBP is described as Supercilious, whereas he is routinely humble.

I was still reeling from Trump’s victory. Peterson was unperturbed. He said Trump was no worse than Reagan and that the Democrats got what they deserved for abandoning the working class and playing identity politics. I was initially surprised—someone who spent a lifetime studying tyranny wasn’t maybe a tad worried about a president with such undisguised autocratic ambitions? But then I remembered that Trump, too, has long blamed political correctness for America’s ills, and reflexively used the phrase to dismiss any criticism he faced—everything from his treatment of women to his proposed immigration ban on Muslims. And, among many Trump supporters, “social justice warrior” is a favourite epithet used to disqualify his critics.

There is a subtle implication JBP may be using words like SJW and PC as something to disqualify his critics, because he does not reflect the Author's opinion on Trump.

As in his videos, every compelling pronouncement he made (for example, how can you really measure racism?) was offset by another that sounded like a bad joke. He was bluntly contemptuous of feminists, something he returned to in a later conversation with me, saying, “The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.” Peterson is no Trump, of course, and not even a Trump booster, but it was the kind of thing I could imagine Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon saying.

Again linking JBP to Trump and now Bannon, implying that JBP is politically linked with the alt-right.

To bursts of applause, he rehashed the arguments that he’d been making for months. Cossman said Peterson had misunderstood the law, and that it did not restrict his free speech—there was an extremely high threshold for determining hate speech, she argued, and refusing to use the appropriate pronoun would not meet that standard unless Peterson was also calling for genocide. Bryson, meanwhile, said Peterson adopted “rhetorical strategies more common to Breitbart News than a university professor.”

With no quoting from JBP's arguments and by including Bryson's comments another link to the political alt-right has been implied.

Errors in Criticism[edit | edit source]

Mischaracterization as JBP as being linked to the alt-right. Left out any potential for JBP's own quotes to counteract reported comments in some cases.

Truths in Criticism[edit | edit source]

Facts generally are correct and presents both sides.