Posted on 12/06/2016 3:24:55 AM PST by jalisco555
(Snip)
Jungs propositions was that whatever a person values most highly is their god. If people think they are atheistic, it means is they are unconscious of their gods. In a sophisticated religious system, there is a positive and negative polarity. Ideologies simplify that polarity and, in doing so, demonize and oversimplify. I got interested in ideology, in a large part, because I got interested in what happened in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution in China, and equivalent occurrences in other places in the world. Mostly I concentrated on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I was particularly interested in what led people to commit atrocities in service of their belief. The motto of the Holocaust Museum in Washington is we must never forget. Ive learned that you cannot remember what you dont understand. People dont understand the Holocaust, and they dont understand what happened in Russia. I have this course called Maps of Meaning, which is based on a book I wrote by the same name, and it outlines these ideas. One of the things that Im trying to convince my students of is that if they had been in Germany in the 1930s, they would have been Nazis. Everyone thinks Not me, and thats not right. It was mostly ordinary people who committed the atrocities that characterized Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Part of the reason I got embroiled in this [gender identity] controversy was because of what I know about how things went wrong in the Soviet Union. Many of the doctrines that underlie the legislation that Ive been objecting to share structural similarities with the Marxist ideas that drove Soviet Communism. The thing I object to the most was the insistence that people use these made up words like xe and xer...
(Excerpt) Read more at c2cjournal.ca ...
Even extreme leftists of the 1950s 1960s and 70s would have laughed at jokes about the so called ability to switch gender at will. IE.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgp9MPLEAqA
Thank you for the post.
Long is OK as it appears very insightful. Will bookmark for later.
Eventually, they will kill people like this...
THIS IS A FANTASTIC ARTICLE THAT DESCRIBES THE PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERGIRDING OF THE LEFTISTS TOTALIARIANS.
It needs to be copied off onto FR, perhaps in another Thread, for it will not be allowed to exist in Canada, where leftist totalitarianism has made larger strides.
or we will kill them
"...One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face..."
I have found that there are many people who lived in, and had first hand experience in totalitarian countries, who are horrified by what they see from the Left in this country (and other countries in the West today). It reminds them of what they saw in places like the Soviet Union and Cuba.
I listen closely to those people.
mark for later
Excellent article, thanks for posting.
Very good article. Thought provoking
Long, and well worth it. Excellent article, based in objective reality.
Bookmark for later read.
Bump for later.
Bookmark
Very important. Thank you.
Yes, that was a very good article.
Bfl
Interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson by Jason Tucker and Jason VandenBeukel
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Can you give us a brief background of your academic career and your interests?
For the first two years of my undergraduate degree I studied Political Science and English Literature. I was very interested in politics, but what I was learning in economics and political science was just not correct. There was too much emphasis placed on the idea that economic interests were the prime motivators for human beings, and that was not obvious to me at all. I was spending a lot of time thinking about the Cold War, and the Cold War was not primarily an economic issue. So I started taking psychology, and I was interested in clinical psychology. I did my PhD under Dr. Robert Pihl, and I worked on drug abuse, alcoholism, and aggression there was a heavy biological emphasis. I did my post-doc with Dr. Pihl, and Maurice Dongier. Then I taught at Harvard for six years, and Ive been at the University of Toronto ever since then.
My primary interest has always been the psychology of belief. Partly religious belief, and ideology as a sub-category of religious belief. One of Jungs propositions was that whatever a person values most highly is their god. If people think they are atheistic, it means is they are unconscious of their gods. In a sophisticated religious system, there is a positive and negative polarity. Ideologies simplify that polarity and, in doing so, demonize and oversimplify. I got interested in ideology, in a large part, because I got interested in what happened in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution in China, and equivalent occurrences in other places in the world. Mostly I concentrated on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I was particularly interested in what led people to commit atrocities in service of their belief. The motto of the Holocaust Museum in Washington is we must never forget. Ive learned that you cannot remember what you dont understand. People dont understand the Holocaust, and they dont understand what happened in Russia. I have this course called Maps of Meaning, which is based on a book I wrote by the same name, and it outlines these ideas. One of the things that Im trying to convince my students of is that if they had been in Germany in the 1930s, they would have been Nazis. Everyone thinks Not me, and thats not right. It was mostly ordinary people who committed the atrocities that characterized Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Part of the reason I got embroiled in this [gender identity] controversy was because of what I know about how things went wrong in the Soviet Union. Many of the doctrines that underlie the legislation that Ive been objecting to share structural similarities with the Marxist ideas that drove Soviet Communism. The thing I object to the most was the insistence that people use these made up words like xe and xer that are the construction of authoritarians. There isnt a hope in hell that Im going to use their language, because I know where that leads.
There have been lots of cases where free speech has come under attack, why did you choose this particular issue?
This is very compelled speech. The Supreme Court in the United States has held that compelled speech is unacceptable for two reasons. One is to protect the rights of the speaker, the other is to protect the rights of the listener. The listener has the right to be informed and instructed without being unduly influenced by hidden sources. If your speech is compelled, it isnt YOU who is talking, its some other entity thats compelling your speech. So I actually think that Bill C-16 is unconstitutional. Im using American case law, but the principles apply. It just hasnt been pushed to our Supreme Court yet.
For me this became an issue because there is not a chance Ill use radical, authoritarian language. Ive studied this psychologically, and I know what it does.
I was also quite profoundly influenced by [Alexsandr] Solzhenitsyns book The Gulag Archipelago. People say that real Marxism has never been tried not in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cambodia, in Korea, that wasnt real Marxism. I find that argument specious, appalling, ignorant, and maybe also malevolent all at the same time. Specious because Solzhenitsyn demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the horrors [of the Soviet system] were a logical consequence of the doctrines embedded within Marxist thinking. I think Dostoyevsky saw what was coming and Nietzsche wrote about it extensively in the 1880s, laying out the propositions that are encapsulated in Marxist doctrine, and warning that millions of people would die in the 20th century because of it.
Youve painted a pretty bleak picture for the future.
There are bleak things going on. To start with, Bill C-16 writes social constructionism into the fabric of the law. Social constructionism is the doctrine that all human roles are socially constructed. Theyre detached from the underlying biology and from the underlying objective world. So Bill C-16 contains an assault on biology and an implicit assault on the idea of objective reality. Its also blatant in the Ontario Human Rights Commission policies and the Ontario Human Rights Act. It says identity is nothing but subjective. So a person can be male one day and female the next, or male one hour and female the next.
How do you see the future of public discourse in this country if we dont reverse course on things like C-16?
I have no idea. I think that were in a time of chaos and anything can happen in a time of chaos. I dont know what will happen at the university in the next week. There is a debate on Saturday at 9:30 in the morning. Itll be live-cast on my YouTube channel. I have no idea what the consequences of the debate will be, I have no idea whether Ill be teaching in January. The university has told me that that every time I insist that I wont use those [gender neutral] pronouns, the probability that Ill be teaching in January decreases.
Do you believe that you or others could be imprisoned for refusing to comply with these laws?
Theres no doubt about that. The human rights tribunals have been given the right to hold people in contempt. Well, youre going to be in contempt if you dont pay the fine. My opponents say youre just scare-mongering. We dont really have that much power. Then why change the criminal code? Why put the hate speech amendments in there? The final word in law is incarceration. There is no question about this. When I made the video on September 27th, and I said, probably making this video itself is illegal. Not only that, the university is as responsible as I am for making it, because thats in the human rights code. The university read the damned policies and had their lawyers scour it, and concluded exactly what I concluded. Thats why they sent me two warning letters. Theyre on the hook for everything their employees say, whether or not the consequences of what they say were intentional or unintentional, regardless of whether or not there was a complaint.
Does that include things that my employees say in their private time?
It includes everything they say. It doesnt matter whether people complain or not. Even if no one complains, or even if the effect is unintentional. The other thing thats built into this law and the surrounding policies and this is also increasingly the case in sexual harassment tribunals on university campuses which the [Ontario Premier Kathleen] Wynne government is pushing like mad theyve changed two legal principles. Its not innocent before being proven guilty, its preponderance of evidence, and its not intent, its outcome. Those transformations are so far reaching, its almost unimaginable.
Are you suggesting theyve altered the rule of law as we traditionally understand it?
They have. They say what you said hurt my feelings and this is part of the assault on the objective world your intent is irrelevant. My subjective response is the determining factor. The idea that they would dare to undermine the doctrine of intent is beyond belief.
Are you surprised that almost half of the Conservative Party of Canada caucus voted in favour of C-16?
Not only that, isnt there a leadership convention right now? Have any of the candidates commented on any of this? No. Why? Because theyre afraid. I think the fact that no ones commented on it is an indication of how even for conservatives, especially in Canada, this demand for orthodoxy has gone so far that even Conservatives are afraid to be conservative. This stuff is not easy to understand. You might ask, why cant you just call people what they want to be called? Well, when someone questions your use of pronouns, it puts you on the spot. You dont know why you use the pronouns you use. You use them because everyone else uses them its a social convention. Then someone else says its a mark of respect to use a pronoun, and its a mark of respect to use the pronoun of someones choice. Those are large-scale philosophical assaults. If youre not prepared for them, all you can do is stumble around, and your default is going to be well, maybe we should be nice.
So maybe some of them voted for it because they dont understand the philosophical issues and just didnt want to offend anybody?
Thats why Im trying to take these arguments apart. First of all, he and she are not marks of respect. Theyre the most casual terms possible. If I refer to someone as he or I refer to someone as she, its not a mark of respect, its just categorization of the most simple and obvious kind. Theres not anything about it thats individual, or characteristic of respect. Second, you have no right to demand from me that I do anything with regards to you thats respectful. The best you can hope for from me is sceptical neutrality and courageous trust. Thats it. Thats what you get from me.
Could you define those two terms?
Skeptical neutrality is youre a bucket of snakes, just like me. However, if youre willing to abide by your word, and Im willing to abide by my word, then were able to engage in mutually beneficial interactions, so thats what were going to do. The reason I said courageous trust is to distinguish it from naiveté. Naive people think that everybodys good. Thats false, everybodys not good. But acting in a manner thats hostile and sceptical and anti-social is completely counter-productive. So what you do if youre a mature person is you say well, yeah, youve got a dark side, so do I. That doesnt mean we cant engage in productive interactions. We do that by sticking to our damned word. Honesty simplifies us to the point where we can engage in mutually beneficial interactions. But you certainly dont get my respect by demanding it. You have no right whatsoever to ask me to mark you out as special in any way whatsoever.
So we shouldnt call someone your majesty just because they ask for it?
Well thats another problem thats lurking under the subjectivity argument, once you divorce identity from an objective underpinning. These people [advocates for multiple gender identities and laws to protect them] claim that identity is a social construct, but even though thats their fundamental philosophical claim, and theyve built it into the law, they dont abide by those principles. Instead, they go right to subjectivity. They say that your identity is nothing more than your subjective feeling of what you are. Well, thats also a staggeringly impoverished idea of what constitutes identity. Its like the claim of an egocentric two-year old, and I mean that technically. Your identity isnt just how you feel about yourself. Its also how you think about yourself, its what you know about yourself, its your educated judgement about yourself. Its negotiated with other people if youre even vaguely civilized because otherwise no one can stand you. If your identity isnt a hybrid of what you are and what other people expect, then youre like the kid on the playground with whom no one can play.
Plus, your identity is a practical vehicle that you use to manoeuvre yourself through life. In your real identity, youre a lawyer, youre a doctor, youre a mother, youre a father, you have a role that has value to you and others. None of thats subjectively defined. So thats completely absurd, and philosophically primitive, and psychologically wrong. Yet its built into the law. I think the law makes discussions of biology and gender illegal. I think we got a taste of that in the TVO Agenda interview I had where [U of T transgender studies professor] Nicholas Mack said well, the scientific consensus in the last four decades is that theres no biological difference between men and women. Its an absurd proposition. There are sex differences at every level of analysis. There are masculinity/femininity scales that have been derived; theyre basically secondary derivations of personality descriptors. There are huge personality differences between men and women. Theres literature looking at differences of men and women in personality in many, many societies throughout the world. I think the biggest paper examined 55 different societies. And they rank societies by sociological and political equality. The hypothesis was that if you equalize the environment between men and women, you eradicate the differences between them. In other words, if you treat boys and girls the same, the differences between them will disappear. But thats not what the studies showed. In reality, they get bigger. Those are studies of tens of thousands of people. The social constructionist theory was tested. It failed. Gender identity is very much biologically determined.
Do you see any parallels between this issue and some of the other social justice causes that have come up in the past few years, like Black Lives Matter or IdleNoMore?
Its all part and parcel of the same thing. Theres a war going on at the heart of our culture. Lots of people have talked about political correctness, and the fact that its pernicious. Often, that just disappears into the ether. I think what I did was different because there was something I said I wouldnt do. That took the general and made it specific.
In Christianity, theres the idea of the general Christ, thats the Word that God used to speak chaos into order. Then theres the specific Christ, a carpenter in the Middle East 2,000 years ago. So theres this weird notion in Christianity between this general principle, which is the logos roughly speaking; the logos is the thing that mediates between order and chaos and is very abstract principle; and the specific human being who had a specific identity tied to a specific time and place, making the archetypal individual, and that makes an unbelievably compelling story. The archetypal is too abstract. Its like saying the good guys won theres no story there. I think that what I did was make the general concrete and specific, and drew a line. Now the price you pay for drawing a line especially with the politically correct material is that youre going to get tarred and feathered for bigotry. The social justice people are always on the side of compassion and victims rights, so objecting to anything they do makes you instantly a perpetrator. Theres no place you can stand without being vilified, and thats why it keeps creeping forward.
Isnt that the logical outcome of the tactical application of Saul Alinsky?
Thats exactly right. The thing is if you replace compassion with resentment, then you understand the authoritarian left. They dont have compassion, there is no compassion there. Theres no compassion at all. There is resentment, fundamentally.
In a National Post op-ed you wrote that words like zhe/zher are the vanguards of a radical left wing ideology thats frighteningly similar to Marxism. Can you elaborate?
Assigned identity is oppression. Assigned identity is the identity thats assigned to you by the power structure the patriarchy. The only reason the patriarchy assigns you a status is to oppress you. And so the language that frees you from that status is revolutionary language. So, as an example of revolutionary language, were going to blow out the gender identity categories, because the concept of woman is oppressive. The anti-patriarchy philosophy is predicated on the idea that all social structures are oppressive, and not much more than that. Then to assault the structure is to question its categorical schemes at every possible level of analysis. And the most fundamental one that the anti-patriarchy radicals have come up with is gender. Its a piece of identity that children usually pick up on around two its pretty fundamental. You could argue that there isnt anything more fundamental. Though, I dont know of anything thats more fundamental, more basic, and that would have been regarded as more unquestionable, even five years ago.
Do you believe that society should draw the line at all when it comes to limitations on hate speech?
No. Hate speech laws are wrong. The question not a question, but THE question is who gets to define hate? Thats not to say theres no such thing as hate speech clearly there is. Hate speech laws repress, and I mean that in the psycho-analytical sense. They drive [hate speech] underground. Its not a good idea, because things get ugly when you drive them underground. They dont disappear, they just fester, and theyre not subject to correction. I made these videos, and they have been subject to a tremendous amount of correction over the last six weeks. I dont just mean from my public response, but also partly from the universitys response, partly from a group of friends who have been reviewing my videos and criticizing them to death. This is why free speech is so important. You can struggle to formulate some argument, but when you throw it out into the public, theres a collective attempt to modify and improve that. So with the hate speech issue say someones a Holocaust denier, because thats the standard routine we want those people out there in the public so you can tell them why theyre historically ignorant, and why their views are unfounded and dangerous. If you drive them underground, its not like they stop talking to each other, they just dont talk to anyone who disagrees with them. Thats a really bad idea and thats whats happening in the United States right now. Half of the country doesnt talk to the other half. Do you know what you call people you dont talk to? Enemies.
If you have enemies, you have war.
If you stop talking to people, you either submit to them, or you go to war with them. Those are your options and those arent good options. Its better to have a talk. If you put restrictions on speech, then you cant actually talk about the difficult things that need to be talked about. I have about 20,000 hours of clinical practice and all I do for 20 hours a week is talk to people about difficult things the worst things that are going on in their lives. These are hard conversations all the time. The conversations that are the most curative are simultaneously the ones that are most difficult and most dangerous. Most normal people will not have those conversations. Thats why so many marriages dissolve. People dont like to have those conversations. Part of that too, is because lets say you have a little tiff with your wife, and you know theres more to it than the little thing thats bothering her, and you ask what are you REALLY upset about? Try peeling that back. You might find shes upset about something her grandfather did to her grandmother two generations ago that hasnt yet been resolved within the family, and thats the determining element of her attitude at the present moment. If you unpack it though, then you dont have to live it over and over again.
Theres also this idea that you shouldnt say things that hurt peoples feelings thats the philosophy of the compassionate left. Its so childish its beyond comprehension. What did Nietzsche say: you can judge a mans spirit by the amount of truth he can tolerate. I tell my students this too, you can tell when youre being educated because youre horrified. So if its pleasant and safe, its like youre not learning anything. People learn things the hard way.
What happens when that truth actually does contribute to violence against groups?
You pick your poison, and free speech is the right poison. There are groups that advocate for hate, but thats not the issue. The issue is whether repressing them makes it better or worse. I would say that [repressing them] just makes it worse. Theres lots of times when you dont have a good option. People think that if we just dont let them talk, itll go away. It doesnt work that way at all. In fact, if theyre paranoid, you just justify their paranoia. By pushing them underground, you dont weaken them. You just give them something compelling to fight against. You make them into heroes in their own eyes.
Can you comment on the U of Ts specific response, the letter you received from Arts Faculty Dean David Cameron?
They talked to their lawyers, and theyre doing exactly what HR people always do. If you want to get rid of someone, you write them a letter. Tell them what theyre doing wrong, tell them to stop, and you tell them nicely. Then you write a second letter, and you tell them the same thing except not so nicely. Then you give them a third letter, and after you give them a third letter, if they dont comply, then you can do whatever you want, youve put your paper trail together. The lawyers looked at the policies on the OHRC website, and theyve concluded that my interpretation of the law is absolutely correct. Its worse than that however. Its like okay, thats against the law, the university is supposed to abide by the law, and Im not doing that, at least in principle. So they have a legal and ethical obligation to do what they did, but they did it in a deceitful way. In the first letter, they misquoted me. So I told them you guys should take this letter back and rewrite it because its not accurate, and if you want to hand me a warning letter, its in your best interests to get it right. The second letter was far worse. It said that I contributed to this climate of fear and danger on campus, which I thought was a specious and unfounded claim to begin with, but when they mentioned that they had received many letters from groups on the university campus, they didnt mention the 500 letters they received from supporters of mine, which I know about because I was CCed on them. They didnt mention the petition with 10,000 signatures which I also received. Thats the lie. They didnt have to omit that. They could have said we understand there are a variety of opinions on this, and you have substantial public support. But the truth of the matter is, as far as we can tell this is illegal, and its our obligation to tell you to, you have to comply with university policies and the law. They could have done that, but they didnt.
Then, when we started talking about the debate after the second letter, I went to talk to David Cameron. I thought that since this is an issue of great public interest here, maybe we should have a debate about it. Thats what a university would do, if it was a civilized place, so thats what I recommended to Cameron. He took it to the university administration, and they agreed. But they put a restriction on me: at the debate, Im not allowed to repeat the statement that I wont use these preferred pronouns. Its a little absurd that were going to go forward with a debate about freedom of speech, and I cant repeat the central claim that initiated the debate. So I wrote to them and I said, look, you guys are doing this wrong. Instead of telling me look, you cant say this, what you SHOULD be doing is saying you might be wrong, but you should be allowed to say this, and well support you all the way to the Supreme Court. Well take our legal resources and well throw them behind you, and well fight them through the courts. Cameron said categorically that they wouldnt do that. They had to choose between social justice or freedom of expression. They chose social justice which is equity, or equality of outcome because thats what theyre teaching. I decided that I would go forward with the debate anyways because all things considered you dont always have a good option. I decided to take the lesser of two evils and go ahead with the debate.
So, just to clarify your thoughts on C-16. Do you think your YouTube video definitely violates it?
The university thinks so. I thought so. I read the damned policies. I looked at the policies on the Ontario Human Rights website because I think those are the people that are behind all this. The writing on that website is appalling from a technical perspective its incoherent. Theyre the semi-literate, philosophically ignorant, malevolent little coterie who are behind it. You would expect better than that from quasi-judiciaries.
What do you hope to achieve coming out of this?
I hope that I can continue to educate people, both at the university and, if not at the university, then on YouTube. For the first time in human history, the spoken word has the same reach and longevity as the written word. Not only that, the space between the utterance and the publication is zero. Three months ago, I had some research assistants writing out the transcripts of my lectures so people could watch my lectures with the subtitles because its easier for people to follow and I was looking at my growth in terms of subscribers, and I half-jokingly thought I could soon have more subscribers to my YouTube channel than U of T has students. I dont know what the significance of that is. It might be that the university is already dying. It wouldnt surprise me. I mean, I think huge swaths of the university are irrevocably corrupted: sociology, gone; anthropology, gone; history, big chunks of it are gone, the classics, literature, social work, political science in many places, and that doesnt cover womens studies, ethnic studies. They probably started lost, and its gotten far worse. I believe now, with the exception of the science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) branch, that universities do more harm than good. I think they produce indentured servants in the United States because tuition fees have gone up so much and you cant declare bankruptcy on your student loans. Were teaching university students lies, and pandering to them, and I see that as counterproductive.
Theres even an anti-psychology program at OISE [Ontario Institute for Studies in Education]. It started when they got rid of [Ken] Zucker, and you dont stop with one person. Zucker was a more than credible psychologist. He ran a very good program for people who had gender dysphoria, and he was conservative. Zuckers attitude was that if youve got a kid who is complaining about their gender, you follow them up, and you see what happens, and you derive your conclusions from the research. Eighty percent of them declare themselves as homosexual, ninety percent settle into their biological identity as adults. His logical conclusion is to keep the goddamned surgical knife sheathed, and dont bring out the hormones too soon. Well thats all gone its illegal now for doctors to question the decision of a three-year old child that he is a she. And if the parents want to start biological transformation, it is illegal for the doctor to reject that.
Did you see that Lauren Southern got identity as a man from the Ontario government? That shows you what the law has done to the physicians. That physician couldnt question her because its illegal. So now Lauren Southern has government identification as a man. She went to the Service Ontario kiosk in high heels and makeup. She didnt expect to get the god damned ID. That also means that the government is so tangled up in this mess that theyll actually sacrifice their own ID. Think about that think about what will happen to our society if peoples identification became unstable.
You said in your interview with Gad Saad that free speech is The right and maybe the obligation to conduct discourse that is aimed at solving serious problems. What happens when the discourse itself becomes weaponized?
Errors accumulate, and chaos ensues. Ive studied mythology for a long time. The flood story means that if you warp things badly enough, everything falls apart. If you interfere with the mechanism by which people formulate problems, solve them, and negotiate their implementation, then problems accrue and multiply. Thats what a hydra is cut off one head, seven grow back. These things can multiply out of control far faster than people think.
Is that part of what explains the results of the United States election?
The Democrats decided in the 1970s that they were going to abandon the working class and play identity politics, and the working class bit them. [Hillary Clinton] lost all the rust belt states. You really have to work pretty hard to lose the rust belt states if youre a Democrat. So, they got exactly what was coming to them. And all the lefties are worried that Trump is a right-wing demagogue. Its insane hes a liberal. He was a Clinton supporter. I mean, you could say hes opportunistic, hes narcissistic, but hes no right wing demagogue. I dont think hes any more narcissistic or opportunistic that Newt Gingrich, I dont think hes any more narcissistic or opportunistic than Hillary Clinton. I dont think what happened in the U.S. is a surprise at all. I think the left is saying My god, this is a catastrophe. Its no more a catastrophe than Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan as far as right-wing demagoguery goes. I dont think its any different than the Reagan revolution, or what happened with Thatcher in terms of seriousness. Trumps a moderate. Hes a noisy moderate, and hes a bit of a populist, but fundamentally hes still a moderate and people are reacting as if hes Hitler. You could get Hitler and it certainly isnt Trump. Was he a qualified candidate? No, I dont think so, but he did a lot of things right, and one of those was he didnt give the same canned speech all the time, and he wasnt handled to death. People saw that and thought hes not crafting every utterance. Hes kind of jerk, but at least we know what he thinks. Then people went into the ballot room, and they thought fuck it, Im voting for Trump and thats what they did. It was just like Brexit. The left pushed too hard, mucked about too much, and people thought were not doing this anymore, and then Democrats abandoned the working class. Im not a Sanders admirer because I dont think the kind of socialism he promotes is a tenable solution, but I certainly understand the working class in the United States has been screwed since 1975. Their social institutions are falling apart, their wages have been flat, the advances of India and China have all been on the backs of the American working class. Then the intellectuals think oh, those rednecks, theyre stupid. Trades people are NOT stupid. In fact, they tend to have a lot more sense than most of the intellectuals that I know, even though theyre not as good at articulating their arguments.
How do you define social justice warriors?
Theyre the ones who weaponize compassion.
Do you view social justice culture as a threat to democracy, and why?
Absolutely. Theres nothing about the PC authoritarian types that has any gratitude for any institutions. They have a term patriarchy. Its all-encompassing. It means that everything our society is, is corrupt. Theres no line, they mean everything. Go online, go look at ten womens studies websites. Pick them at random. Read them. They say western civilization is a corrupt patriarchy right down to the goddamned core. We have to overthrow it.
Which means democracy, which means liberalism, which means human rights.
It means the whole thing. The whole edifice. And what do they compare it to? Utopia. Why do you think the feminists would go after Ayaan Hirsi Ali? Shes a hero, that woman. Shes from Somalia. She grew up in a very oppressive patriarchy a real one. She escaped from an arranged marriage, and moved to Holland and she fell in love with Holland. Two things really struck her initially before she went to university and become a student of the Enlightenment. Number one she would stand where there was public transport, and a digital sign would say when the public transport was going to arrive, and it would arrive exactly when it said it was going to. It was unbelievable to her. And the other thing she couldnt believe was that police would help you. You know youre in a civilized country when the police dont just rape you and steal everything you have. The radical left people dont give a damn about any of that.
Is there anything else youd like to add?
You asked what people can do. They can refuse. They can refuse to be pushed in this direction any further. Anything thats predicated upon group identity, we need to get rid of. Albertans were very sceptical of Pierre Trudeau and all his changes, especially with the introduction of the Charter and they were right about that too. We should never have had a bill of human rights in Canada. That was an import of French Civil Law over top of English Common Law, and it was a mistake. In English Common Law, you have all the rights there are except those that are expressly forbidden by law. In the French system, you enumerate peoples rights that makes it look like rights are granted to you by the government, and thats not true. Then we started talking more about identity in Canada, and that was a deviation from the tradition of enlightenment individualism.
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Are you denying the existence of discrimination based on sexuality or race?
I dont think women were discriminated against, I think thats an appalling argument. First of all, do you know how much money people lived on in 1885 in 2010 dollars? One dollar a day. The first thing well establish is that life sucked for everyone. You didnt live very long. If you were female you were pregnant almost all the time, and you were worn out and half dead by the time you were 45. Men worked under abysmal conditions that we cant even imagine. When George Orwell wrote The Road to Wigan Pier, the coal miners he studied walked to work for two miles underground hunched over before they started their shift. Then they walked back. [Orwell] said he couldnt walk 200 yards in one of those tunnels without cramping up so bad he couldnt even stand up. Those guys were toothless by 25, and done by 45. Life before the 20th century for most people was brutal beyond comparison. The idea that women were an oppressed minority under those conditions is insane. People worked 16 hours a day hand to mouth. My grandmother was a farmers wife in Saskatchewan. She showed me a picture of the firewood she chopped before winter. They lived in a log cabin that was not quite as big as the first floor of this house. And the woodpile that she chopped was three times as long, and just as high. And thats what she did in her spare time because she was also cooking for a threshing crew, taking care of her four kids, working on other peoples farms as a maid, and taking care of the animals. Then in the 20th century, people got rich enough that some women were able to work outside the home. That started in the 1920s, and really accelerated up through World War II because women were pulled into factories while the men went off to war. The men fought, and died, and thats pretty much the history of humanity. And then in the 50s, when Betty Friedan started to whine about the plight of women, its like, the soldiers came home from the war, everyone started a family, the women pulled in from the factories because they wanted to have kids, and thats when they got all oppressed. There was no equality for women before the birth control pill. Its completely insane to assume that anything like that couldve possibly occurred. And the feminists think they produced a revolution in the 1960s that freed women. What freed women was the pill, and well see how that works out. Theres some evidence that women on the pill dont like masculine men because of changes in hormonal balance. You can test a womans preference in men. You can show them pictures of men and change the jaw width, and what you find is that women who arent on the pill like wide-jawed men when theyre ovulating, and they like narrow-jawed men when theyre not, and the narrow-jawed men are less aggressive. Well all women on the pill are as if theyre not ovulating, so its possible that a lot of the antipathy that exists right now between women and men exists because of the birth control pill. The idea that women were discriminated against across the course of history is appalling.
Now groups that were discriminated against. What are you going to do about it? The only societies that are not slave societies are western enlightenment democracies. Thats it. Compared to utopia, it sucks. But compared to everywhere else people dont emigrate to the Middle East to live there, and theres good reason for that.
The other thing is to do a multi-variate analysis. For example, if we wanted to predict long-term life success in western countries the two best predictors are intelligence and conscientiousness. Intelligent people get there first, and conscientious people work hard. It accounts for about 30 percent of the variance in long-term life success. Theres no discrimination there, its just competence. What about women and the glass ceiling? Thats a lot more complicated than it looks. For example, Ive dealt with big law firms for years. They cant keep their women. All the big law firms lose all their women in their thirties. Do you know why? Its easy. Women mate across and up the dominance hierarchy, so women in big law firms who are over 30 who are married, maybe theyre making $300,000 per year. So are their partners. They dont need to make $600,000 per year. If you want to make $300,000 per year as a lawyer, heres your life: you work 60-80 hours a week flat out, and youre on-call. If your Japanese client calls you at 3:00 on a Sunday morning, your answer is yes, Ill do that right now because theyre paying you $750 an hour. These women are high in conscientiousness, great students, brilliant in law school, and stellar in their articling. Then they make partner, and they think what the fuck am I working 80 hours a week for? because thats what sane people think. So its all men who are at the absolute pinnacle of professions. But its not all men, its this tiny percentage of weird men. Theyve got IQs of 145 or higher, and theyre insanely competitive and hard-working. It doesnt matter where you put someone like that, theyll work 80 hours a week. The reason men do that more than women, is that status makes men sexually attractive. Men are driven by status both biologically and culturally in a way that women arent. So the real issue, when you look at these positions and thinking oh, these are wonderful, luxurious positions of plenitude and relaxation. Thats rubbish. Those people work so hard that its almost unimaginable. Most people not only cant do that, but there isnt even a chance that theyd want to. Most women hit partner in their 30s. The funny thing is when youre in your thirties is that thats when you really start to have to have your own life. When youre 18, youre just like every other knob-headed eighteen-year old, youre all the same. By the time youre thirty, you have enough idiosyncratic experience to sort of carve your own life, and most people realize well, I dont want to work 80 hours a week. They want to have a family, and theyre out of time. And then when they have a family, they discover that to have a child its not a generic baby, its a new person in your family. That new person is THE most important thing to you. Period. So women they hit that, they get two kids and they think Im only going to have little kids for five years, you think Im going to go work for eighty hours a week? To make money I dont need? Doing something I dont like? Or am I going to spend time with my kids? They cant keep women in law theres no goddamned glass ceiling. The legal profession is desperate to keep qualified people because they dont have enough. They haul them in from anywhere especially the women who are not only good lawyers, but who can also generate business. Thats just one dirty little secret about the difference in power structures between men and women. Men do almost all the dangerous jobs, men work outside, men are far more likely to move than women are. So, if you look, if you break down the statistics in terms of wage differential, if you equate for the other factors, young women make more money than young men. The whole women make $0.70 for every dollar a man makes is such a lie. Men-run small businesses make way more money than female-run small businesses. Why? Because females start small businesses when they have kids, when theyre at home, so the business is just part time. So thats why they dont make as much money. Its got nothing to do with prejudice, its got everything to do with choice. So these arguments that people make about prejudice are not even out of tribal psychology yet.
Weve made unbelievable advances in terms of levelling the playing field, and a lot of that was due to pure capitalist greed. In capitalist societies, people are desperate for talent. If they have to put up with women and minorities, generally they will. Transformations are happening so fast that theres nothing you can do to make them go faster. Everybodys yelling prejudice its a one-stop shop for every explanation. Why is society like this? Prejudice. Why is it like that? Prejudice. Theres no thinking involved at all, no multi-variate analysis. Its reprehensible. Warren Farrell wrote the book Why Men Earn More. He was a worker for the National Organization of Women in New York before he wrote the book. He actually wrote the book, at least in principle, for his daughters, because he wanted to help guide them to higher status. He did a multi-variate analysis. He went and looked, and learned more. He found that men do the high paying trades jobs, theyre dangerous, theyre outside, theyre doing hard, physical work. Then theres the other reasons as well. Theres discrimination for sure, but it counts for maybe ten percent of the variance in success.
For more on this subject, see Jason VandenBeukels article about Jordan Peterson, which also in this edition of C2C Journal: Jordan Peterson: The man who reingnited Canadas culture war
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About Jason Tucker
Jason Tucker is a recent political science graduate specializing in international relations and public policy.
About Jason VandenBeukel
Jason VandenBeukel is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto.
I just published the whole thing here because totalitarian leftist in Canada will take it down as soon as they can. And it is important. It is that bad. Ask Mark Steyn.
Thank you
Understood. I just thought it important that this excellent journal got as many hits as possible.
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