Why Abigail Shrier Took on the Transgender Craze Amongst Teenage Girls

 

I remember seeing the full podcast of this last year, and the part that has stayed with me the most is where she says:

“When [Dr] Lisa Littman looked at the [transgender] prevalence rate she found that it's 70 times what we would expect within a friend group, which means it's highly concentrated in groups of friends... we wouldn't expect that if it were randomly distributed among the population.

“If we’re just reverting to normal, now that there’s greater societal acceptance... if we’re just reverting to a normal base rate of transgender women, where are all the women in their 40s and 60s coming out as trans? They should be coming out! Now’s their time! We should see tons of women in their 40s and 60s and so on coming out as transgender. We’re not seeing that: we’re seeing the same population that gets involved in cutting... anorexia, bulimia... and convinces themselves there’s a problem”.

In Britain there has been a four thousand percent increase in teenagers identifying as transgender the past decade, and three-quarters of those referred for gender treatment are girls.

Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier

 When I think back to my own high school years in the 1990s, no one came out  as  “trans.”  And until the last five years, that is precisely what the statistics for gender dysphoria would have predicted. Somewhere around .01 percent of the population means that you probably didn't go to high school with anyone who was "trans" either.

But that didn't mean that girls were a monolith, or that we all expressed girlishness in the same way.

I had been a "tomboy", which basically meant I excelled at sports and  preferred the comparatively straightforward company of boys. Friendship with girls so often seemed unnervingly like breaking into a bank vault, all those invisible lasers shooting every which way, triggering alarms of sudden offense.

But there is no such thing as a "tomboy" anymore, as any teenage girl will tell you. In its place is an endless litany of sexual and gender identities - public, rigid and confining. As sixteen-year-old Riley, a young woman who began identifying as a boy at thirteen, put it to me:

“I think being a masculine girl today is hard because they don’t exist. They transition.” Transition, that is—to boys.

Years after my high school graduation, some of us who had dated the cutest boys  would  come  out  as  gay.  Others we might have silently suspected of being gay turned out not to be.  None of us then felt pressured to make any identity decisions we couldn’t easily take back.

Teens and tweens today are everywhere pressed to locate themselves on a gender spectrum and within a sexuality taxonomy—long before they have finished the sexual development that would otherwise guide discovery of who they are and what they desire. Long before they my have had any romantic or sexual experience at all. Young women judged insufficiently feminine by their peers are today asked outright, "Are you trans?"

Many of the girls now being cornered into a trans identity might, in an  earlier era,  have  come  out  as  gay.  “You’ve  got a  situation  where young lesbians are being pressured if they don’t give into this new idea of what it is to be a lesbian,” prominent gay writer Julia D. Robertson told me. That “new idea” is that lesbians do not exist: girls with more masculine presentations are “really” boys.

Some adolescents today do identify as lesbian, but it’s hard to miss that this identity has considerably less cachet than being trans. Riley told me that fifteen students in her British all-girls' school of five hundred have come out as transgender. "How many girls are lesbian?" I asked her. She thought about it for a moment, and I watched her be surprised by the answer: "None," she said. 

 - from “Irreversible Damage” by Abigail Shrier (Swift Press, 2020)

To defeat woke tyrants, the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are

By Glenn H. Reynolds

Most Americans hate woke politics — and most minorities don’t share “woke” priorities. Indeed, according to pollster David Shor, woke excesses are causing black voters to flee the Democratic Party. Despite endless charges of “racism,” former President Donald Trump took the biggest share of minority voters of any Republican in my lifetime.  

Woke tyrants ride high, even so; according to a Cato/YouGov poll, 62 percent of Americans self-censor their political expression. Only a tiny minority of consumers care about Mr. Potato Head’s toxic masculinity, about “Aunt Jemima” as a brand or about the #MeToo aggressions of Pepé Le Pew. Yet corporations, universities and governments rush to placate that minuscule slice of the population, trashing large chunks of our culture in the process.

It’s happening not because anybody voted for it, but because a small but determined and vicious minority is bullying people to go along, relying on cowardice and groupthink to achieve ends that could never happen via majority vote: How do you think Dr. Seuss would have done in a referendum?

How does this happen? To some degree, the woke abuse the good nature of Americans. For the most part, Americans want their fellow citizens to be happy. If they hear something makes others unhappy, they generously look to change things.

And there’s fear. Writing about the goings-on at New York’s Dalton School, Bari Weiss notes that even parents who think the political correctness has gone too far are afraid to speak out: They think their kids’ shot at the Ivy League could be at risk. And it’s not just Dalton.

Weiss quotes one mother: “I look at the public school, and I am equally mortified. I can’t believe what they are doing to everybody. I’m too afraid. I’m too afraid to speak too loudly. I feel cowardly. I just make little waves.” Another says: “It’s fear of retribution. Would it cause our daughter to be ostracized? Would it cause people to ostracize us? It already has.”

In his book “Skin in the Game,” Nicholas Nassim Taleb writes about the surprising ability of small but intransigent minorities — 3 percent to 4 percent is enough — to change the direction of entire societies. He writes: “The most intolerant wins. . . . Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. . . . [I]t will eventually destroy our world. So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities.”

Does this mean we should be less tolerant of our own minoritarian tyrants? In a word, yes.

I don’t mean that they should be forced into camps, or even driven from their jobs and from polite society, as the woke are all too willing to do to their opponents. But they need to be deprived of the thing that is most important to their self-image: moral credibility.

The woke think of themselves — and want everyone else to think of them — as deeply moral. If they have a flaw, it’s that they just care too much. They’re too idealistic, too empathetic, too eager to make the world a better place.

That’s bulls–t (pardon my French, Pepé!). If you look at what they do, rather than what they say about themselves, it quickly becomes obvious that the woke are horrible, awful people, and they should be treated as such and reminded of this whenever they raise their head.

Historically, it’s not the good guys who are out burning books and censoring speech. It isn’t the caring, empathetic people who try to destroy lives based on something someone said years ago, often while young, often taken out of context. It isn’t the good guys who take undisguised glee at the ruining of lives, families and careers.

You know who does these things? Horrible, awful people. Selfish people. People with serious mental and emotional problems who seek some sort of vindication for their deficient characters by taking power trips while imposing suffering on others.

Treat these tyrants as what they are: awful people who shouldn’t be listened to and who need to work hard on joining the better half of the human race. And remind them of it, over and over. Because it’s true. Deep down, they know it, too.

___________________

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.

Source

Male Feminists Call out Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer

 

How I Left the Social Justice Cult - Keri Smith

This is astonishingly on-point. I've not heard of this woman before but she extremely lucidly illuminates all the stages I went through when I deprogrammed myself from that echo chamber 10 years or so ago. I wish everyone could get to see this.

The Privilege Pyramid

by Eddie Scarry 

Privilege is an outgrowth of the social justice movement, that branch of political activism that asserts there’s an inherent unfairness, and prejudice, rooted in American life. This unfairness manifests itself in the oppression, grievance, and victimization of women, nonwhites, gays, lesbians, and even transsexuals. It’s an ideology that demands that the country’s very foundations, customs, and norms be reordered to right all of its wrongs. The goal of the movement isn’t always clear because it frequently changes, depending on which set of people is deemed to have suffered adequately and which set is guilty of some form of privilege. Because the movement operates largely by using shame, it can sometimes seem that shame is in itself the objective.

Friedrich Nietzsche directly influenced today’s version of social justice by asserting that there is an inseparable link between morality and power. He wrote in his 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morality that those who wished to overthrow the established hierarchy intended to invert it so that the bottom would become the top and vice versa. This wasn’t his prescription for society, but rather a severe criticism of the tendency to view society’s subordinates as inherently moral. “Only those who suffer are good,” he wrote with acrimony. “Only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones saved, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!”

Nietzsche was identifying and criticizing the notion that those at the bottom of civilized societies should be presumed virtuous and admirable simply by nature of their suffering and disadvantages. But that concept is precisely what forms the basis of the present social justice movement. According to the movement and its ideology, the good, virtuous, and admirable are those who claim to have been aggrieved on account of their race, gender, or sexuality. Under social justice, asserting grievance and claiming oppression earns an individual a higher moral worth than those who are deemed “privileged.”

Who has the power in America’s culture now? The social justice movement does, and that power is reinforced by Hollywood, the news media, academia, and much of the Washington political establishment. Social justice ideology first spread through the universities and from there, to the other hubs of American culture. It went from university academics, who taught it to their students, and then flowed from them to screenwriters and journalists. What’s seen in Hollywood entertainment and in national newspapers, on the TV news, and on the internet becomes a piece of our collective culture. With enough repetition, it’s then absorbed into the mainstream. This is how social justice ended up everywhere.

The ridiculous notion that individuals hold their own truths, as reflected in the asinine “live your truth” mantra, is a key feature of the social justice movement’s ideology. It’s linked to what early 20th-century Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs called “standpoint epistemology.” Epistemology is the philosophy of understanding human knowledge. Standpoint epistemology, or standpoint knowledge, holds that the perspective of a certain person can lend that individual access to a unique truth that others don’t have and can never obtain. Lukacs developed the concept in his 1923 work History and Class Consciousness, in which he refers to a kind of “knowledge” held by people of the working class that “stands on a higher scientific plane objectively.”

In essence, depending on an individual’s identity — race, gender, sexuality, or any combination thereof — he or she will have access to a truth unobtainable to anyone who doesn’t share that identity. Furthermore, social justice dictates that these truths must be acknowledged as unchallengeable and that the “victims” who profess to hold them are to be regarded with reverence.
In America, the earliest signs of social justice in its current state began in the 1960s. Postmodern theories and ideas about class resentments and struggles made their way from Western Europe, spread among academics, and eventually gave birth to the third-wave feminist movement, according to New York University professor Michael Rectenwald. They spun off from there, creating the things that normal people now dread: political correctness, affirmative action, calls for reparations, identity politics, civil rights for infinite special classes of citizens, and on and on.

Because the social justice ideology, the movement, and its enforcers operate outside the purview of normal people, they have their own concepts and terms, some or all of which you might not have heard before.

According to Rectenwald, “social justice” as a well-intentioned remedy to economic, societal problems traces back to the 1840s, when Italian Catholic Jesuit priest Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio used the term to describe “the glaring lack of an adequate Catholic response to industrialism and urbanization, with their associated social and economic symptoms.” It was the “supplanting of guild-based cottage industries by urban factories [and] the displacement of workers” during the Industrial Revolution that moved d’Azeglio to state that a certain social justice was required to remedy the impact it had had on the laborers.

During that period, factories and advancements in machinery disrupted the working classes of Western Europe, just as automation has done to the Midwest in America today. The technological shift created economic opportunity for some at devastating expense to others. “The original social justice,” writes Rectenwald, “amounted to the protection and mobilization of small charitable and philanthropic organizations to address (but not eliminate) the recalcitrant social facts of individual, economic, and political inequality, which had been exacerbated under the new industrial economy.”
In short, there were private charities that worked to ameliorate the effects of job displacement and poverty of the industrial age. That was considered social justice. It stands in contrast to today’s social justice movement, which is only tangentially concerned with uplifting the impoverished. It instead trains its energy on bringing down the “privileged” and reordering the social hierarchy around identity and grievance. It wants the moral superiority of the oppressed moved to the top and nothing less.

Feminists of the 1980s did most of the work in bringing social justice from academia to the rest of America. In her 1986 book The Science Question in Feminism, influential feminist Sandra Harding writes that “by starting from the lived realities of women’s lives, we can identify the grounding for a theory of knowledge that should be the successor to both Enlightenment and Marxist epistemologies.” In other words, Harding is asserting that women, simply by nature of their gender, possess a particular knowledge that should function as the viewpoint by which the world operates.
If standpoint knowledge functions as the brain of social justice ideology, its heart is intersectionality, an ever-shifting ranking system that determines who is more aggrieved than the next, who deserves more deference than the other. It’s a hazy, nonconcrete way of measuring overlapping identities and their corresponding hardships and victimhood. The more cross sections of oppressed identities an individual can claim, the higher his or her status on the intersectionality scale.

It gets messy even within the movement. Who can say whether one person is more aggrieved than another? Is a black woman more or less oppressed than a white gay man? Is a Latino man more or less privileged than a Palestinian transgender woman? Is a Native American man more or less aggrieved than a lesbian Asian woman? It’s all worked out through a type of never-ending oppression Olympics, a competition for the title of Most Aggrieved. The judges are the social justice enforcers, the culture fascists in academia, in Hollywood, in the news media, and in political Washington.
Black feminist author Gloria Watkins, better known by her pen name "bell hooks," helped usher in the intersectionality ranking system in her 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, a critique of the feminist movement of the 1960s. In that book, she argues that the movement overlooked struggles against forms of oppression that fall outside of gender, and outside of white women in particular. She writes, “Within society, all forms of oppression are supported by traditional Western thinking. ... Sexist oppression is of primary importance … [because] it is the practice of domination most people are socialized to accept before they even know that other forms of group oppression exist.” She continues, “Since all forms of oppression are linked in our society because they are supported by similar institutional and social structures, one system cannot be eradicated while the others remain intact.”

Hooks maintains that the most discussed grievance of the time, the lack of women’s sexual and economic independence, was only the first step in addressing other forms of oppression not yet acknowledged by society. That observation was a prescient prediction of the situation in present-day America, with its bottomless well of grievance and oppression.

The most up-to-date idea of privilege, social justice theory’s ultimate adversary, was pushed into the mainstream by Peggy McIntosh, who is famous for her 1988 essay, White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies. The essay builds on 1960s feminism but ventures into race by critiquing the privilege of white people in everyday life. Without ever using the phrase, McIntosh talks about the hierarchy of intersectionality. She refers to it instead as “interlocking oppressions.” And without ever using the phrase, she introduces social justice ideology’s most potent weapon — the modern-day struggle session: the command to “check your privilege” in front of the masses.

“I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious,” she writes. “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks.”
She goes on to give 46 examples of white privilege she personally enjoys, an exercise that college students are now instructed to replicate at universities all over the country. (I personally went through it during a mandatory freshman-level course.)

Among McIntosh’s examples of her white privilege are: “I can be reasonably sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me”; “I can go shopping alone most of the time, fairly well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store detectives”; and, “Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance that I am financially reliable.”

McIntosh’s “knapsack of special provisions” might have simply served as an innocuous set of observations about unrecognized prejudices if it weren’t for the second half of her essay. That part takes a maniacal nosedive and suggests that those who possess privilege feel a sense of shame and a sense of responsibility to atone for something they had no say in.

“A man’s sex provides advantage for him whether or not he approves of the way in which dominance has been conferred on his group,” McIntosh writes. “A ‘white’ skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us.” She says that “individual acts can palliate, but cannot end” the cycle. “To redesign social systems,” she puts forth, “we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions.”

To redesign social systems. That’s the entire purpose of the social justice movement. It’s to remake society from top to bottom.

McIntosh concludes her essay by denouncing the “myth of meritocracy,” which she says is kept alive by “obliviousness about white advantage [and] obliviousness about male advantage” and is “kept strongly inculturated in the United States.”

This is social justice. It’s an ideology that says the America you understand today is fundamentally broken and that full equality is unobtainable without a complete overhaul of its current order and a total abandonment of what McIntosh called the “myth of meritocracy.” Social justice maintains that there is no meritocracy, only identity, oppression, and privilege. Those assumed to hold an advantage due to their race, gender, or sexuality must submit to the aggrieved in accordance with the new intersectionality hierarchy.

“Politics,” says Rectenwald, “is reduced by social justice warriors to a series of … Facebook statuses, tweets, kneel-downs during the singing of the U.S. national anthem, and so forth.” This is called “virtue signaling” — overt gestures that communicate adherence to the movement and its ideology.
Social justice is centered on who can claim the highest form of oppression, grievance, and victimhood at any given moment. It’s an endless competition in claiming to have been the most exploited, most subordinated, and most abused.

Social justice and its enforcers have created an ever-evolving, never-satisfied new class of people: the victims of privilege, who in turn become the privileged by victimization. They are our privileged victims.

--------

Eddie Scarry is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner and the author of Privileged Victims: How America's Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People , from which this essay is adapted.

Sex & Sensibilities

I’ve just about made it through Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, at long last, as it’s been on my bucket list for awhile. It has arguably the greatest opening line of any novel, which has always made me want to continue with it, but apart from the odd nice observation or turn of phrase here and there, it’s been a bit of a slog.

I’ve been trying to withhold judgement or limit my expectations, since it’s a relatively ‘early’ novel (1813), but as with another highly regarded book from roughly the same period, Wuthering Heights (1847), I found it to be extremely limited in accomplishment and amateurish in execution: with both books I had the problem several times of not knowing who was talking to who on the page, which would seem to me a very elementary mistake to make when writing a novel. And then realizing this was taking place going on a hundred years after Gulliver’s Travels, which suffers from none of these deficiencies.

Most of all it’s been making me think about the differences between male and female art - Austen, after all, is perhaps the highest regarded female author there is, and especially in Britain is always mandatorily listed in the ‘top tens’ of great writers.

But why? Her strengths are few - mostly just an ear for, and wry observation of, middle-class life and gossip. Whereas, in terms of invention, originality, drama, plot, tension, sustained humour, concision, and most of all scope, she is nothing at all to write home about.

Nothing exists for her outside the comfortable drawing rooms and pleasantly-kept gardens of her world. The book was written - and set - during a time of enormous upheaval and drama and death - the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars - and yet the only flicker of acknowledgement of this is the occasional mentions of the young army officers, newly stationed in town, who are of interest only as potential marriage prospects. There is an absolute absence of curiosity about the wider ramifications of the war, the political changes daily taking place, about the horror those men are heading to or coming from - let alone the experiences of the ordinary footsoldiers. Her vision is microscopic: all that matters to her are the internal frettings of a woman in search of a marriage.

Austen made light of this herself, even writing of one character. “without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object”. But though Austen recognizes how deeply cringey and unpleasant this is, her avatar in the book, Elizabeth, is shown to be no different from the rest of the womanfolk: when the protagonist of Pride & Prejudice improbably ends up at the country home of her love interest Mr Darcy, the long, loving descriptions of the grounds and the estate, the decoration of the house, even the furniture, are all an integral part of the changeover of her feelings, all plus points and incentives on the growing list of advantages to bag him. Essentially saying ‘soon, all this will be yours’.

This is another profound difference between the sexes, for if a man - then or now - was writing about a woman he had met, and began listing all her wealth and shiny objects, about how she has a swimming pool that he looks forward to swimming in every day once they are married and she’s taking care of his every want and whim forever…. everybody, woman or man, would simply think him a heartless cad or a ridiculous gigolo. The idea that such material covetousness would be a fundamental part of his ‘love’ for her would be unthinkable in any sympathetic male character. It would not, in fact, be recognized as ‘love’ at all. And yet this fetishization of wealth and/or status is still the rule for female-written women characters in practically every ‘Romance’ novel there is, from Jane Austen right up to 50 Shades Of Grey.

To return to my original point: Austen is widely held to be the greatest female author, and yet her objective accomplishments are few. In this she illustrates in microcosm a general disparity between the sexes in ambition and achievement and, well… genius.

For example, in literature there is no female equivalent to Shakespeare, Joyce, Tolstoy, Dickens, Milton….. There’s no female Tolkien - a woman spending decades building a world for which she wrote dictionaries in an invented language and long books of political history and mythology before even publishing a word. The nearest female equivalent would probably be J.K. Rowling, a mediocre and derivative hack who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. The former is the product of an all-consuming obsession, a drive to break new ground no-one has walked before, to do what previously would have been thought to be impossible. The latter is a nice, safe, part-time hobby that paid well.

On the other hand, and to be fair, there’s no male equivalent I can think of to, say, Anaïs Nin, but then she herself is perhaps the most extreme example of the solipsism I’m addressing: the subject of almost all famous female writers is the internal feelings of a single woman.

This lack of vision, the lack of ability or inclination to rise up above and out of oneself, attempting to reach far beyond one’s grasp, is largely why there are no great female composers - no female Bach, or Mozart, or Debussy or Mahler or Beethoven or Wagner or Stravinsky or so many others. Even though all you need to write a symphony is some paper, a pen and a piano, the middle class women of the 19th century, who had more free time and piano lessons than anybody else alive, came up with precisely nothing, not one orchestral work of any note.

I already (unintentionally) made a lot of people angry by pointing out awhile back the incontrovertible fact that there are no great all-female rock & roll bands - yes, a few good little cult acts like The Slits or The Dixies Chicks or The Go-Gos or whoever, but none that achieved anything like the universally recognized (and recognizable) body of work of The Beatles, The Stones, Black Sabbath, The Clash, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Sex Pistols, The Smiths, R.E.M., U2, etcetera etcetera etcetera…

Now, part of that is simply because of how hard it is to keep an all-girl band together, when at least half the band will want to quit and become a mother instead within the first 5 years. But it’s also just because of the lack of shared technical excellence and overwhelming drive to eclipse everything by everybody (male or female) that has come before them. There ARE very important female figures in the history of rock & roll, like Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, Carole King, Nina Simone, Laurie Anderson and others: my point has always been simply that either they worked alone, or almost 100% exclusively with men. Any great female singer you can think of, the entire musical architecture built around and supporting her singing was constructed pretty much exclusively by fellas. Just as in every other medium.

Even female magicians: right now I’m hooked on watching Penn & Teller’s Fool Us, and every time a woman appears onstage, I instantly know what I’m going to see: an old trick, performed at an amateur level, dressed up in an appealing and well-thought out presentation. The focus is always much more on the colours, the clothes, the backdrops, the character she is playing, rather than actual technical ability. The female magician simply refuses to spend decades sitting in front of a mirror practising with cards, or cups and balls, at the expense of all else, or obsessively designing and building device after device after device to reach towards some new standard of greatness.

And that’s a perfectly sensible position to have - to want a well-rounded, pleasant life instead of one of mania and single-minded obsession. But that’s also why no woman got to the North Pole, or the top of Everest, or up in an aeroplane, or down to the bottom of the sea, until long after the first man bit the bullet and made the trip.

Julia Hartley-Brewer meets Douglas Murray

The most refreshingly sane political conversation you will see all year.

RIP Daniel Johnston

I’ve just now found out that the Vincent Van Gogh of underground rock & roll, the late great Daniel Johnston, has died, apparently of a heart attack.

The man had been a grotesque physical and mental wreck for decades, and yet it somehow still seems very sudden and unexpected.

He first came to public attention in the early 1990s, at the height of grunge, and in the middle of all that whining, self-pitying and mumbling angst, Johnston stood out as the real deal, a genuinely schizophrenic, regularly institutionalized tortured poet struggling to cope with the voices in his head whilst also writing the most beautiful, wide-eyed, open-hearted, painfully honest songs perhaps ever penned, and drawing endless pictures of an Hieronymus Bosch-like hellscape, peopled with superheroes and impossible creatures of his own invention.

The musical well - along with his singing voice - dried up in his final couple of decades, most likely because of all the very heavy medication and just plain old physical deterioration, but the songs he recorded at home in anonymity throughout the 80s are now rightfully treasured among those who know as scratchy classics comparable to all the great, mysterious blues recordings from the 1920s and 30s: unique historical recordings of an authentic American artistic voice.

There’s a lot to his story, too much to try go into here, but his music has been a touchstone of truth in my life, and it means a great deal to me that he existed and made what he made. No-one ever sung truer.

So rest in peace, Daniel, and thank you.

Jordan Peterson explains the Post-Modernism/ Neo-Marxism connection to Slavoj Žižek

People always go after Peterson for his lumping these two, seemingly disparate movements together, but this is the best and simplest stating of his position I’ve seen.

RIP Scott Walker

So I’ve just found out that Scott Walker, one of the greatest, most influential, and uncompromising artists in all of pop music, has died at the age of 76. I guess that’s a decent innings but it still feels a blow, and too soon. It felt like he still had a lot more in him.

The newspaper obituaries all seem to be dwelling on his early mainstream success back in the 1960s with the Walker Brothers, with hits like ‘Make It Easy On Yourself’, ‘My Ship Is Coming In’, and especially the utterly magnificent ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’:

And that's to be expected, but the truth is, his most important work came later, with a long solo career that paid no attention at all to chart success or sales, or his movie star good looks, but instead fiercely followed his own obsessive, idiosyncratic avant-garde path into unknown realms, with deeply serious work that has no real contemporaries or precedent in the English speaking music world, and more easily discerned roots in French and German theatre and cabaret, as well as Russian writers of the past.

To me, more than anything, he resembles one of the great French film directors, like Bresson, or Cocteau, or Renoir, if they had instead chosen to work only in song. And like those great artists, the best of what he made will never age or go out of fashion, but still be encountered with new eyes and treasured a hundred years from now.

Count Dankula Live Stand-Up

This is 2019 comedy gold.

That idiotic Gillette ad may have turned the tide on ‘toxic masculinity’

By Karol Markowicz

Razor blade commercials aren’t supposed to make national headlines, but these aren’t ordinary times. Last week’s Gillette commercial playing on the #MeToo movement became the latest piece of corporate messaging to berate and belittle men.

The commercial implored men to “be better,” while juxtaposing scenes of boys wrestling at a cookout, bullies menacingly chasing a boy down the street, men catcalling women and making lewd jokes and generally acting like brutes.

Many Americans were angry, not least men, whom the commercial framed as universal aggressors and rapists.

Fans claimed that those who were upset by the Gillette ad should be asking themselves why. The implication was that, if you didn’t like being lectured by a company trying to sell you razors, it must mean that you are likely the bully and sexual assaulter the ad makers had in mind when they made the commercial.

Well, I’m a woman, and I hated the commercial, because I’m tired of the boy-bashing that has become all too common on our screens and in our world.

“It’s just an ad!” doesn’t fly. Would women shrug off “just an ad” that treated femininity as something inherently bad and in need of modification? They wouldn’t. Women accept far less criticism from advertisements than men do.

In 2015, a company called Protein World released an ad for a diet supplement featuring a fit model in a bikini and the words: “Are You Beach Body Ready?” The backlash was swift. The ad was defaced again and again in the NYC subways, and the city of London went so far as to ban “body-shaming” ads on the Underground.

If there was a moment in time when women collectively decided that they would no longer stand for being body-shamed, that was it.

Similarly, the response to the Gillette ad feels like a dam breaking. This might be the moment when men have finally had enough.

Men are constantly barraged with criticism. “Men are the worst” has gotten old. The word masculinity is only preceded by the word “toxic” these days.

Meanwhile, men have been on a downward trajectory for some time now. Fewer men go to college, more men commit suicide, more men live at home with their parents well into adulthood.

Men take the most dangerous jobs, they fight and die in our wars, yet they are told nonstop that they are terrible, and the future isn’t for them. They are expected to shrug it off because, well, they are men.

If men are traditionally stoic and impervious to criticism, and we like them that way, then the idea that men can take the shots simply because they are strong and manly flies in the face of the commercial — which bashes male stoicism.

Gillette implores men to be better because kids are watching. Yes, kids are watching men portrayed as bumbling idiots in so many ads and as violent misogynists in this one.

The worst part of the commercial is the group of men standing in a row over their grills robotically repeating “Boys will be boys.” The message is that men are all the same. They don’t think for themselves, and they excuse bad behavior in each other. They’re grilling just like your husband, father, brother — doing this activity they enjoy while simultaneously creating bad men out of their sons.

“We expected debate,” Pankaj Bhalla, Gillette’s North America brand director, told CNN Business. “Actually, a discussion is necessary. If we don’t discuss and don’t talk about it, I don’t think real change will happen.”

No, what we need is to stop insulting men. We can’t elevate women by knocking men down. Some men will nod along with ads that insult them, but, in general, these companies are offending men and doing damage to their own stated cause. On the Gillette YouTube channel, the commercial has garnered more than double the number of “dislikes” than “likes.”

This wasn’t a win for the company.

“Isn’t it time we stopped excusing bad behavior?” Gillette asked in the tweet introducing the commercial. Yes, it is. And that includes the bad behavior of corporate salesmen treating half of the population as monsters, all to sell a product targeted at precisely that segment of Americans.

What is a man? A response to Gillette

A company puts their money where their mouth is and creates a positive response ad to Gillette’s. Beautiful.

https://www.egardwatches.com/

The Best A Man Can Expect

At Last Someone Gets Me

Louis CK vs the new pearl-clutchers

by Andrew Doyle

There is very little point in attempting to explain a joke. A sense of humour isn’t a universal quality, and in any case is wholly dependent on subjective taste. Those who find themselves unamused are unlikely to change their minds once a routine has been systematically deconstructed. It’s all about the timing.

A recording of Louis CK’s work-in-progress show at the Governor’s Comedy Club in New York was leaked last week, and has been subject to the sort of moralistic scrutiny that now passes for comedy criticism. ‘Louis CK condemned after leaked audio shows him ranting about gender pronouns and school shooting survivors’, ran a headline in the Independent. ‘Louis CK’s rant shows abusers are still casting themselves as victims’, railed the Guardian, characterising him as a man ‘bubbling with wrath’. According to the Daily Mail, he ‘attacked Asians’ with his ‘racist stand-up set’.

Then there was the predictable pearl-clutching on social media. ‘You know what’s the worst, most boring kind of comedy?’, wrote comedian Andy Richter. ‘The kind where older white men are angry that older white men can’t do or say whatever the fuck they want any more.’ According to filmmaker and amateur psychologist Judd Apatow, ‘Louis CK is all fear and bitterness now. He can’t look inward.’ Nuance was jettisoned wholesale by actor Ellen Barkin, who stated that ‘Louis CK is a sociopath and serial predator’ who she hopes ‘gets raped’ and ‘shot at’.

It goes without saying that CK’s critics are entitled to their opinions, however unhinged. He is likewise within his right to ignore or ridicule the backlash. As Ricky Gervais has pointed out, the reactionary response of ‘You can’t joke about anything anymore’ is simply untrue. The controversy over CK’s set is evidence enough that some comedians still refuse to self-censor, although there is little doubt that a less established performer would risk career suicide for a similar routine.

Those who have defended CK have, inevitably, been accused of being ‘outraged by the outrage’, but this strikes me as an unconvincing assessment of the situation, one possibly adopted in an effort to undermine an alternative point of view through the imputation of hypocrisy. If anything, CK’s defenders seem genuinely weary at having to reiterate what we all know already: he is a comedian who was telling jokes. Such an excruciatingly obvious statement wouldn’t be necessary at all were it not for the fact that the overwhelming majority of our news outlets appear to have ignored this reality, wilfully or otherwise.

To my mind, this is the most significant aspect of this story. I may not be outraged by the outrage, but I am fascinated by the way in which the mainstream press seems determined to promote a narrative that very few will find convincing. Even those of us who didn’t consider the routine funny are likely to understand why others might, because only the irredeemably solipsistic believe that their own sense of humour is the benchmark against which all comedy should be measured.

The other curious aspect of the media coverage is the insistence that comedy should be taken at face value. Few who listen to the recording will believe that CK is tickled by the notion of mass murder, yet this is how his set has been perceived by the vocal minority. ‘I would call it a comedy set’, writes Fiona Sturges in the Guardian, ‘but that would give it a credence it doesn’t deserve’. Note the assumption of bad faith in this interpretation. Sturges presumes the worst of CK, and so feels confident in denying that a comedy routine performed in a comedy club to gales of laughter can even be classified as comedy at all.

It would seem that some no longer trust CK as a performer, following a number of women accusing him of sexual misconduct in 2017. Although the accounts suggest that the acts were consensual, CK’s status as a villain of the #MeToo era now means that his material is being reassessed through a process of cod-psychological guesswork. ‘It is possible that this is a calculated career move’, writes Sturges, ‘to restyle himself as a right-wing hatemonger expostulating about snowflakes, virtue-signallers and ethnic minorities… A more likely story is that this is just a howl of self-pity.’ But anyone with the slightest familiarity with CK will know that this new set is entirely consistent with his previous work. Writer Jesse Singal made the point by quoting one of CK’s lines from 2008: ‘I would happily blow 20 guys in an alley with bleeding dicks so I could get AIDS and then fuck a deer and kill it with my AIDS.’

CK has always tested the limits of his audience’s tolerance, and from listening to the leaked audio it is clear that even when his material is still in the developmental stage, his timing, turn of phrase and impeccable stagecraft provoke many of us to laughter in spite of our sensibilities. This is also why when his jokes are reported in the press, divorced from the context of performance, they can seem needlessly cruel. His style hasn’t changed, it’s just that his critics have decided to presuppose a malicious underlying motive. If Louis CK does have a motive, it is surely the standard one that drives all comedy. Simply put, he wants to make us laugh.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/01/03/louis-ck-vs-the-new-pearl-clutchers/

Kirsten Gillibrand's worldview only makes sense if you understand how feminists think

by Suzanne Venker

Tucker Carlson asked Heather Mac Donald a perfectly reasonable question this week: "Why would a group, any group, want to poison the relationship between women and men, which is the building block of everything that's good in the world?"

The segment was about this Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., tweet:

Our future is:

Female
Intersectional
Powered by our belief in one another.

And we’re just getting started.

— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) December 5, 2018

To the average person who's busy living their life, this worldview doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense that feminism, which bills itself as merely promoting sexual equality (a phrase that sounds so utterly innocuous but isn't), could be so destructive that it rips relationships, families, and society apart.

But that's exactly what it does. In response to Carlson's question about why any group would do this, Mac Donald said, "Because [feminists] would rather hate."

Bingo.

Any serious study of feminism reveals startling truths and commonalities among its leaders that have led them all to the same place: a hatred of men and marriage. The vast majority had highly dysfunctional upbringings, fraught with emotional abuse or neglect. Many had mothers who resented their children or their husbands ( here's a post I just wrote about that very thing) and feminists internalized this dysfunction as children.

Here’s a direct quote from Gloria Steinem: “I didn’t understand the degree to which my response has been magnetized by things that had happened to me before, and I think that realization came out of being depressed.”

When women like Steinem grew up, they displaced their pain onto society. They concluded that their mothers weren’t to blame for their problems and decided that if society had functioned the way it's supposed to (with men and women as "equal," or interchangeable) their mothers would have been happy. Harboring this attitude allows feminists to resent their mothers less and hate men and society more.

In other words, once you put their lives into context, the politics that drive feminists make sense. Feminists hate anything that smacks of tradition, especially traditional gender roles, since that family structure reminds them of their past, which they associate with depression and dysfunction. Ergo, they're on a mission to destroy traditional society and to convince everyone else that this country is bad and must be changed.

"Feminism is really at odds with the civilizational legacy we've inherited," adds Mac Donald.
Mac Donald concedes this sounds hyperbolic; but those of us who follow feminists very closely know it is not. Feminists' entire worldview about men, sex, work, marriage, motherhood, and politics is filtered through a hateful lens, and they begin this destructive message in universities, when young women are still impressionable and forming their own ideas.

It is calculated, and it is evil. Indeed, feminists are a hate group. The evidence is all around us, but you have to pay attention. Just the other day Hannah Gadsby gave a pathetic speech for "Women in Entertainment" where she jokingly claims that even good men aren't good.

The dissident feminist Camille Paglia goes so far as to call feminists "literally insane" in a conversation with Jordan Peterson, who then says (which goes back to my point about feminists' upbringing) that women whose relationship with men "has been seriously pathologized can't distinguish between male authority and competence and male tyrannical power." He adds, "They fail to differentiate because all they see is the oppressive male."

In other words, giving feminists power is the equivalent of giving the enemy a hand grenade. This group will never be satisfied until, as Gillibrand wrote, "the future is female."

Wake up to what feminists are doing. Stop letting yourselves be bullied. If you don't, they will get what they want. And trust me, It won't be pretty.

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Suzanne Venker (@SuzanneVenker) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. She is an author, speaker and cultural critic known as “The Feminist Fixer.” She has authored several books to help women win with men in life and in love. Her most recent, The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men & Marriage, was published in February 2017. Suzanne’s website is www.suzannevenker.com.

Why It’s Not OK to Hate Men

by Tim Lott

Is it okay to hate women? Obviously not. It’s not only stupid and immoral but impractical given how many of them there are and the marked differences between each and every one of them. Is it okay to hate men, then? Again, obviously not, for the same reasons. Except – it’s not so obvious. Because such sentiments are again entering the mainstream.

I say ‘again’, since misandry – the unapologetic hatred of men as an undifferentiated group – is nothing new. Radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Valerie Solanis (founder of the Society for Cutting Up Men and shooter of Andy Warhol) were the most famous man-haters in the 1970s, but were pretty much disavowed at the time by many more mainstream feminists and later by third wave feminists. Misandry went out of fashion during the 1980s and the idea that feminists were all ‘lesbians and man haters’ was rightly ridiculed.

Now it’s back – and much closer to the mainstream than it was 50 years ago. Despite all the remarkable advances we have made in gender equality, the idea that all men are the enemy of all women has been given a new lease of life, helped by the disgrace of Harvey Weinstein, the rise Donald Trump and the successes of the #metoo and #timesup movements.

Understandable though this hatred may be as an emotional reaction, it is shocking – at least for a man – to see it in cold print. The highest profile attack came from Susan Danuta Walters in the Washington Post earlier this year, who says, in a piece titled, ‘Why Can’t We Hate Men’ that, far from being irrational, it “seems logical to hate men.”


If this were a lone voice, one could dismiss it as a fringe point of view. But it isn’t.
“You can’t hate all men can you? Actually I can,” writes Suzanne Moore, a British feminist, in the New Statesman in 2016. “As a class, I hate men.” Men are not a class but this doesn’t deter Moore from continuing her peroration. “I think any intelligent woman hates men,” she continues. She even comes up with a hash tag in the hope that this blanket condemnation will catch on – #yesallmen.
Meanwhile, in ‘The Cut’ section of the New York magazine, a member of the public writing in complains to the ‘agony aunt’ – the journalist Heather Havrilesky – that she “hates men” and is in danger of becoming a “cranky old bitch”. Heather suggests in reply that she simply embrace her inner bitch. “Most men are terrible,” she says. “Most men are shit.”

In addition, two articles on Medium – not quite as mainstream as New York magazine, the Washington Post, and the New Statesman, but certainly not fringe – echo the theme. Turns out, it’s not only (self-defined) man-hating women who have turned towards hate as a response to gender inequality. So have some men – like Anthony James Williams who writes in Medium that, “Women don’t have to like us, and history shows us that they have a right to hate us.”

In the charmingly titled ‘When You Can’t Throw All Men Into The Ocean And Start Over, What CAN You Do? Ijeoma Oluo – the mother of two boys, God help them – writes,

This society is doing everything it can to create rapists, to enable rapists, and to protect rapists. This society is broken, abusive, patriarchal (and white supremacist, ableist, hetero-cisnormative) trash. This entire patriarchal society is responsible for every single sexual assault that occurs.

If reading such hatred is exhausting, actually generating it must be even more so. I suspect hate is a young person’s game (although Danuta Walkers and Moore are not exactly spring chickens). It is tempting to shrug off this new misandry as just silly and something of a sideshow, but it’s possible that it represents a real strand of rising consciousness. If that is the case, it is not merely silly – it is dangerous. I have occasionally indulged in group hatred – ISIS in their racist, faithist, head-hacking, innocent-slaughtering prime, the Conservative Party in the 1980s, anyone involved in Prog Rock – but it’s not a very healthy principle to base your life around.

What does it mean to hate an otherwise random and unrelated group of people, as opposed to a specific individual? We can all enjoy hating, say, Nazis, pedophiles, and ISIS executioners beheading an aid worker. Hate can be reassuring, which is why it is so seductive. But when one is hating Nazis, one is hating people who subscribe to an ideology, an idea. Pedophiles and ISIS executioners are historically smaller groups, but they are also defined by a particular idea – sexual attraction to children and the cult of death. At some level, they’ve made a choice. No one is born a Nazi or an Islamist murderer, and even if Pedophilia is genetically influenced, that doesn’t absolve its perpetrators of guilt. However, hating men is not hating an idea or an abhorrent form of behaviour. It is hating half the world’s population, rich and poor, kind and cruel, black and white, gay and straight, just because they happen to have a Y chromosome.

To hate such a disparate group seems – is – demented. However, there is a prism through which it makes perfect sense, the prism constructed by the odd and contradictory fusion of neo-Marxism and post-modernism.

In this scheme of thought, now widely taught in the humanities and social science departments of the West’s leading universities, there are no intrinsically superior, universal values, like love or dignity or general human goodwill – and no such thing as ‘objective’ truth in the scientific sense. It’s all relative. There are just multiple and sometimes overlapping groups that compete for power, and their values, even their idea of what constitutes a ‘fact’, are determined by the relative status of their group. The most powerful group in society – in all societies – are men, and men, therefore, are collectively guilty for the oppression of every less powerful group.

Since anything men utter is tainted by their place in the power hierarchy and their implicit desire to maintain that power – a homeless man at Grand Central station may be surprised, even delighted, to learn that he occupies a ‘privileged’ position in this hierarchy – nothing a man says can be taken at face value because, consciously or unconsciously, it is imbued with patriarchal values and language. Whether they realise it or not, all men are engaged in a struggle to consolidate and extend their power, particularly over women. This is doubtless why, according to this theory, rape is considered a manifestation of male dominance – of the patriarchy – rather than an expression of sexual desire. Power is everything – which tells you something, perhaps, about the status anxiety of this theory’s most fanatical adherents.

Thus it is okay to hate all men – they are all infected by the canker of patriarchy which, unlike individual thoughts and motivations, is a kind of all-powerful super-organism, a hive mind controlling its male worker bees. Men as individuals are simply tokens of something deeper – structural misogyny embedded in institutional power. If you’re a man who thinks you are not a misogynist, who in fact thinks you like women perfectly well, you are deluding yourself. For such men, their sexism is simply unconscious, just as in classical Marxism the ‘good’ bourgeois was unconscious of the fact that he could not avoid exploiting his workers or employees, even though he might be providing them with a decent wage, good working conditions, and health and pension benefits.

This analysis, given a moment’s thought, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Even if you accept that all the ills of the world are down to patriarchy and the dominance of men, you have to concede the corollary – that all the triumphs of humankind are down to the patriarchy also, from medicine and science to the highest reaches of art and culture.

Women may point out that they have been excluded from these fields until now, and that’s largely true, although biology – the lack of control women have historically had over their own fertility and the greater physical strength of men – might be a far more simple and plausible explanation than the existence of a hypothetical, all-powerful super-organism. However, the very act that men hold the balance of power is proof of the existence of patriarchy, according to this belief system.

My own view is that we have not ended up in the place we are, for good or ill, because men are evil and stupid, or kind and clever, or because we’re all enslaved by the patriarchy. We are here largely because of blind chance – biology, the haphazard advance of technology and the peculiarities of human nature shaped by natural selection. Like most ‘ordinary’ people, I am quite sure such a thing as human nature exists and while some sex differences are biological, men and women are psychologically similar – far more similar than they are different.

As such, misandry is deeply irrational. Hating men is counterproductive. Hating men is not going to advance the cause of gender equality. On the contrary, if you tell someone that you hate them, simply because they have a penis, they have two basic alternative responses (other than ignoring you, which is probably the most sensible response). They can cringe and apologise – as many liberals do in the face of such onslaughts, hoping in vain for rehabilitation. The Maoists and their show trials did a lot to reveal the intrinsic human propensity to confess to imaginary sins. Alternatively, and more dangerously, you can respond with, “If you are justified in hating me then I am justified in hating you.”

Therein lies the hazard. I’m not denying that hatred can sometimes produce positive results, even a form of justice. Maybe some white supremacists, learning that they arouse intense feelings of hatred in others, have abandoned their beliefs. Perhaps those flirting with ethno-nationalism have been deterred from embracing it in the knowledge that it will make them a social pariah. But it’s harder to abandon your gender.

Hatred is also useful in providing people with motivation when prosecuting a just war – the Second World War wouldn’t have been won without hatred of the Nazis. But when unfocussed, inappropriate or overgeneralised, hatred is liable to produce far less desirable results. Resentment, for one thing. Anger, for another. More hatred in response. A sense of injustice on the part of good men – and such men do exist in numbers very similar, I suspect, to the number of good women. These feelings may well curdle and lead to an attitude of “If you think I’m hateful then I might as well be hateful.”

Such a response is tempting because hate has an array of psychological rewards. By hating me as a member of my group, you are legitimizing my temptation to hate you as a member of your group. So now I have a ready made justification for hating women, which didn’t previously exist (although a Google search of “I hate women” reveals zero results, unlike a search for “I hate men”).
Hatred can be a way of virtue-signaling – a way of contrasting yourself favorably with the hated party, i.e. as a ‘good person’ in comparison. To hate Nazis means you’re publicly announcing yourself as not being a Nazi. To hate pedophiles means you are not a pedophile. However, for all its short-term payoffs, hate strangles all understanding. This is as true when directed towards genuinely hateful groups – like white supremacists – as it is for those less universally deserving of condemnation, such as men. Once you hate someone, or a group, you don’t have to bother understanding them. It simplifies the world and saves a lot of mental spadework.

I don’t think that many women would say, or even think, that they hate men. But the increasingly widespread perception is that men are generally a bad lot, As Uluo puts it in Medium: “This entire patriarchal society is responsible for every single sexual assault that occurs.” We are, by default, morally in the wrong in most matters and furthermore unfairly privileged and entitled even when we don’t obviously appear to be (as in our homeless friend at Grand Central). This all-encompassing generalisation has a lot of small-scale but significant effects.

In personal relationships, for example, where any woman who thinks men are generally rotten and hateful is liable to take a pretty jaundiced view of any particular disagreement that unfolds between them and their significant other. The man, according to this toxic ideology, is going to be a priori in the wrong before the argument even starts.

I’m not suggesting women should be naïve or unduly trusting of men – yes, men commit nearly all the rapes, and most of the violence, there’s no getting away from that, and it’s no small thing, not in the least. I am forced to admit that in my experience, men are often, though by no means always, capable of being arrogant, ego driven, entitled and insensitive and I don’t necessarily exclude myself, certainly not my younger self.

Hate us if you will – your feelings are your own after all and sometimes those feelings are justified. Just don’t expect it to achieve anything positive, or make you feel better in the long run, or to produce a generous response in the objects of your ire. It may provide temporary relief from the phenomenon of the simple and relentless random unfairness of the world, but there can be a terrible arrogance in hate – the arrogance generated by what is in fact a deep self-doubt and buried fear. Fear of what? Of chaos, of uncertainty, of the fact that its very hard to work out what’s right and what’s wrong in even a single particular circumstance and individual, let alone an entire system or gender. As Reinhold Niebuhr said, “Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.”

It is an old and perhaps sexist trope that women should beware of ruthless and dishonest seducers who are out to lead them down the path to destruction. Perhaps it might be useful to think of hate in exactly that way – and send it packing, its ears ringing with curses, and vows of passionate and perpetual rejection.

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Article originally appears at Quillette.com

Tim Lott is a writer and journalist. His best-known book is The Scent of Dried Roses which won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for autobiography and is now a Penguin Modern Classic. Follow him on Twitter at @timlottwriter.

What Can The Left Learn From Jordan Peterson?

The phenomenal success of Jordan Peterson has created hugely polarised reactions, most clearly on the left, or progressive side of the political divide. Matthew Tarnas Segall is a lecturer at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a highly progressive and spiritually influenced college in San Francisco, and Jesse Estrin is a depth psychotherapist, a graduate of CIIS and has worked on causes for social justice for many years. In this four-way discussion with Rebel Wisdom's David Fuller and Alexander Beiner, both are keen to examine the question of what the left can learn from Jordan Peterson, and to ask why much of 'their tribe' has such a strong reaction to his thought.


“There's this polarization happening,"says Segall. "Everyone on the right thinks everyone on the left is a Stalinist and everyone on the left thinks everyone on the right is a Nazi.

"People like Peterson are trying to carve out... not a non-political, but a kind of position that's lateral to politics that's more in the psychological domain, to ask people to look at themselves as individuals, to question the extent to which they're projecting their shadow onto The Other.

"Until we can resolve issues on that level it's going to be difficult to resolve these political disagreements. That's one of the main reasons I've found myself so interested in what Peterson is saying: he's shifting the level of the conversation. Or trying to, at least.”