Facts and reason are powerful allies

Friday, January 19th, 2018

If you haven’t seen Channel 4 News’ full, fiery interview with Jordan Peterson, please do watch and enjoy:

Uri Harris discusses the interview:

Earlier this week, clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson appeared on Britain’s Channel 4 in an interview with TV journalist Cathy Newman. It didn’t go well. Journalist Douglas Murray described it as “catastrophic for the interviewer”, while author Sam Harris called it a “nearly terminal case of close-mindedness”. Sociologist Nicholas Christakis perhaps described it best:

This man Jordan Peterson is preternaturally calm and composed in the face of a hostile interviewer who also had simply not thought adequately about her ideas and approach. Facts and reason are powerful allies.

Christakis mentions two important things about Newman. First, she seemed hostile towards Peterson, clearly going into the interview with a moral prejudice towards him. Second, she seemed unable to engage with his arguments, instead misrepresenting them (“You’re saying women aren’t intelligent enough to run top companies?”) or taking issue with them (during a conversation about unhealthy relationships, Newman asked: “What gives you the right to say that?” Answer: “I’m a clinical psychologist.”) At one point, she was rendered speechless.

It was as though she had never heard arguments like Peterson’s before, and was taken aback to discover they existed. As a presumably well-read person, why had she not been exposed to arguments like this before? The answer, I think, is that these arguments have largely been banished from contemporary mainstream news media and entertainment. Only because of Peterson’s immense grassroots success has he forced his way into the conversation, which makes it all the more awkward when an interviewer looking to put him in place ends up bewildered.

I think Peterson will be selling more than a few copies of his 12 Rules for Life.

Comments

  1. Albion says:

    Poor woman. She ducked and dived and tried to weave a trap, hurrying to say “so you’re saying that…” when the man never said anything of the sort. She was hostile, niggardly to the point of tedium and unable to stay on a topic if it didn’t suit her ‘righteous’ agenda. She was determined to try and force Peterson into admitting that women were inferior while he sensibly pointed out some difficulties with her approach to a complex subject of gender and roles in society.

    In short, Ms Newman was poor. If that is the best a journalist can do, and in particular a Channel 4 journalist, then I can see why I stopped watching their news output.

  2. Faze says:

    Peterson is fantastic. He’s making the same sensible arguments as the rest of us, but what delivery: The preternatural calm; the unblinking stare; the unhurried articulation. Most of all, he’s not scared. You can see it in his eyes. The only thing that frightens him is the chance might be led away from the truth, only to make a better argument. But the man’s self control is awesome.

  3. Sam J. says:

    Wow. That was really impressive. He’s a very quick thinker.

    I wonder what someone on the Left would think about this? Are their thought processes so different that they would not see his performance as I did?

  4. Slovenian Guest says:

    The irony is, of course, that people like Cathy think they’re pointing into the bubble, while it’s them who are in the bubble, pointing out! They are in the mirror universe, it’s them who have the proverbial evil goatee.

    Cathy Newman is a bearded lady.

  5. Isegoria says:

    Jordan Peterson discusses the Channel 4 interview with GeenStijl at length.

  6. Slovenian Guest says:

    Best Nietzschean quote from this interview:

    “You are not moral if you are just harmless.”

  7. Isegoria says:

    Agreed. Harmless does not mean virtuous.

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