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Peterson's relationships with feminism and youth activism are very touchy subjects, both because of factors addressed in the article, and because Peterson engages them with a vitrol that's absent from most of his other work. I'm a huge proponent of most of his lectures, but readily concede that he gets combative there in ways that are unproductive if not shortsighted. The Guardian had a review of his new book that, while blind to some nuance, landed some reasonable blows against him.

My advice to anyone looking to form an opinion on Peterson: Begin with his Maps of Meaning series on youtube. They're ~2hr lectures on the intersection of biology, religion, and morality, and they are the most illuminating rationale of world religion, its motivation, and its persistence, that I've ever read. He's frequently referred to as "Christian" because that's an easy set of values for readers to recognize, but dig into the lectures and you'll find that he's only "Christian" because the christian framework of morality is a subset of a larger and more universal moral framework common across time and cultures.




What....what part of the interview had "a vitrol that's absent from most of his other work"?

Or are your comments reserved exclusively for things other than the posted link?


The text of the posted link covers a subset of an interview. I'm speaking about things outside the posted link's text. I haven't watched the video it refers to in full.

Here's a good example I saw recently (eyeballing the timeline here, perhaps go back farther for context): https://youtu.be/OD-VCRNIp-U?t=21m17s

It's tough, when discussing activism and political engagement, especially by youth and typically w/r/t left-wing politics and especially feminism, to get Peterson to detach universities' far-left activism from activism in general. This is especially unusual given his gift for engaging with topics in enormously broad scopes.




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