Joe Rogan Podcast with Professor Jordan Peterson

It’s three hours long but this is an interesting podcastbetween Joe Rogan and Canadian Professor Jordan Peterson from the University of Toronto. The views expressed no doubt goes against the grain of the majority of members on the board, but if your into having your views respectfully challenged it’s worth a listen.

They discuss Peterson’s current issues with bill C16, a gender identity and gender expression bill that recently passed in Canada. Here’s his testimony at the senate hearing from a couple of weeks ago, they discuss the state of universities today, activism as part of a curriculum, social justice, feminism, how Trump won, post-modernism, identity politics and much more.

Peterson and Rogan are not Conservatives, they’re Libertarians and their critique is off the left, not Liberals but the left.

Could you summarize what was said so we can decide if it’s worth spending three hours on?

I’ll expound on bill c16 since most people aren’t aware of it, but all other subjects I mentioned we’re all familiar with and I gave you his stances on them, against or critical of.

He’s an opponent of bill C16 an act to amend human rights and the criminal code. A poorly written bill in his opinion that’s dangerous when it uses broad undefined terms like “gender expression”. He’s opposed to being force to speak certain words, pronouns like zi, zir etc.

That might be a legitimate critique if it were true. Is there any evidence for it?

Looking around a bit, I see that New York has already passed a similar bill, with $250k fines for deliberate misgendering. So: has anyone yet been fined for not saying “zir”?

Overall, I see a lot of Chicken Littleism without any real evidence of a problem. I’m not exactly a fan of hate speech laws, but if this actually only applies to, say, some public servant refusing to accept a transgender woman as a woman, by deliberately saying “he” instead of “she” and other things, then I don’t really see a problem with the law. The existing hate speech laws require intent and a pattern of behavior, and I doubt that bill C-16 changes that.

If someone went around calling a specific person “it” for racist reasons, would you say that’s at least potentially hate speech? I don’t see this law as being substantially different.

  1. Gender expression can be defined, and has been in laws from around the world. This argument fails.

  2. He objects to being “force[sic] to speak certain words, pronouns like zi, zir etc.” Good thing the bill never says anything of the sort.

You listened to a multi-hour podcast but couldn’t be bothered to do the legwork to verify the claims?

The entire text of the bill is here: Government Bill (House of Commons) C-16 (42-1) - Third Reading - An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code - Parliament of Canada It’s pretty light reading, so one wonders how this person I never heard of before in my life on a podcast invented so much offense over it.

Cite for Rogan self-identifying as a Libertarian?

Saying Peterson has an argument is not summarizing his argument. What evidence did he offer to support his position? Did he offer evidence? Did he address evidence given by people that oppose his position and refute it? Or did he spend three hours just saying he didn’t like something?

Three hours, huh?

With my internet connection it would take 3 months.

Jordan Peterson sounds a whole lot like Rick Green!

This was far more entertaining when imagining it’s a new Prisoners of Gravity episode.

To get off speech and onto Peterson…

He’s gathered quite a YouTube/Reddit/Facebook following, and they’re known mostly for their uncritical adulation. Seldom will they actually discuss his thought, and never will they offer a précis or summary of any point. Instead they insist that you immerse yourself and commit upfront. His lectures are long, start from very basic premises, and (IMO) make little attempt to hold the listener’s interest.

It all seems calculated to keep out skeptics (and given Peterson’s more or less conservative stance, liberals as well). And I’m not just a skeptic, I’m a flat-out cynic when I see unrelieved adulation for an intellectual figure. I smell guruism, and hear the far-off note of a pied piper.

I really wanted to start a thread about Jordan Peterson, and was disappointed to find that this one got only ten posts deep and died out.

In a nutshell:
Jordan Peterson rose to prominence with his (misguided) criticism of Canada’s Bill C16, which he claims will compel Canadian citizens to address transgender individuals by their preferred pronouns under threat of fine or imprisonment. In fact, as has been pointed out upthread, the bill makes no mention of either pronouns or fines. It does state that specific enforcement of the law will be left up to the courts and local commissions, and specifically references the Ontario Human Rights Commission. It is on the website of that commission that the bill’s detractors find language about pronouns, but they are only included as one component that may be considered in assessing whether someone has been a victim of hate speech, and it only refers to specific social areas such as employment, housing, and education. In other words, your average Jordan Peterson fan is not in danger of getting fined or arrested for refusing to do a transgender person the far simpler favor of simply using their preferred pronouns.

I agree with the poster upthread who called this “Chicken Littleism,” and I note again that none of this gloom and doom has actually come to pass. What has happened is that Jordan Peterson has become a cause célèbre among the angry young (white) men of the alt-right and men’s rights movement, and has monetized his newfound celebrity through lecture tours and self-help books in which he advocates for men to be men and women to be women, and rails against the boogiemen of PC Culture, Social Justice Warriors, Leftist Authoritarianism, a poorly-defined caricature of Postmodernism, and (shudder) Cultural Marxism. His countless Youtube videos are drenched in fawning comments from his shitty fans, who insist that he has demolished everyone he has ever debated.

I have not listened to his entire Joe Rogan appearance, but I have listened to pieces. If you search for it on Youtube you can find many shorter clips that will give you a taste of his views without requiring you to listen to the entire thing.

Jordan Peterson brings a kind of intellectual gravitas to old-school sexism and “it’s a man’s world” thinking. He is beloved by Men’s Rights advocates, Alt-Right dipshits, Tucker Carlson, and Fox and Friends. Really, that’s all you need to know about him.

A really excellent discussion of C16 that clears up a lot of the hullabaloo:

And a really excellent critique of Peterson’s views:

This thread has been active on him: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=851465

Very kind of you, thanks!