Jordan Peterson
is a Canadian professor of psychology who is one year younger than I am and specializes in myths and their Jungian interpretation. For example, he points out that in some myths males represent order and females represent chaos. So far so good, that is an accurate description of those myths.
But then, instead of pointing out that such myths (developed and propounded mostly by males, of course, with very little consultation of female viewpoints) are descriptive of the psychology of the myth-tellers, he actually claims that they are literally accurate. He insists that males are ordered and that females are chaotic. All 4 billion or so human males, Peterson says, are ordered, and all 4 billion or so human females are chaotic.
And furthermore, he insists that male and female are the only 2 human genders which exist. (Any real experts in myth who never heard of Peterson before this blog post are already beginning to sense how much myth Peterson has to ignore in order to keep his worldview intact.) And this leads to the way in which Peterson became famous: by objecting, in 2016, to the the 2nd clause of Bill C-16, which reads:
This enactment amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to add gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination.
The enactment also amends the Criminal Code to extend the protection against hate propaganda set out in that Act to any section of the public that is distinguished by gender identity or expression and to clearly set out that evidence that an offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on gender identity or expression constitutes an aggravating circumstance that a court must take into consideration when it imposes a sentence.
Peterson objects to this because, he claims, it will infringe upon his freedom of speech by forcing him to use pronouns other than "he" and "she" when referring to persons.
As far as I know, Peterson has not yet faced any criminal or civil prosecution because of his use of pronouns. Still, in tried-and-true right-wing fashion, he is claiming to have been victimized when no-one has done anything to him.
That's what made him famous. That, and some very popular YouTube videos in which he spews his right-wing viewpoints which, in tried-and-true right-wing fashion, he claims are not right-wing, but Classical-Liberal (or, as we would say in the United States, libertarian.) And also his book which followed very quickly upon his sudden fame as a martyr against pronoun abuse, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. (Remember: as mentioned above, Peterson says that males are orderly, females are chaotic, and that no further human genders exist.)
Peterson is a far-right-wing nut. He checks all the boxes: He claims that women need (and secretly want) to be dominated and controlled by men. He says that postmodern neo-Marxists have (again, secretly, as the postmodernists deny that they are Marxists and the Marxists deny that they are postmodern) swarmed into the faculties of our universities, where they are trying their best to enslave the minds of our young people in preparation for marching all of us off to the gulag. He is a climate-change skeptic. He says that white privilege doesn't exist. He's against women's right to choose with no if's and's or but's. He's against casual sex and gay marriage.
And he's passing himself off in many -- by no means all -- mainstream media outlets as not being right-wing at all. And he has a huge following among incels and other groups of misogynistic young men. And, annoying to me personally as a real intellectual, very many people, even including some generally-sensible Leftists, keep referring to this doofus as an intellectual. Does this help answer your question about why I've been posting about him?
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