Thread by @JuliusGoat

Young men who think they have a right to kill if they can't get the affections of their pick of women are having their sick fantasies encouraged by repackaging them back to them as victimhood by charlatans like Jordan Peterson. bbc.com/news/world-us-…

The El Paso killer wanted a girl.

He thought he should be able to get her.

He found he couldn't.

So he got her.

There exist no end to narratives—grown in fevered minds, brought whining into the mainstream by professional egos and complicit platforms—to tell him he was right.

Jordan Peterson and his like aren't suppressed shadow intellectuals. Their big "idea" is simply to counter a culture that increasingly values consent with an even more muscular and weaponized non-consent.

They indoctrinate vulnerable and unstable minds into violent radicalism.

I don't know what the answer to people like Peterson is, any more than I know what the answer is to other radicalizers of disaffected youth like ISIS, but one start is to recognize that this is exactly what they are.

One difference between ISIS and Peterson (or Alex Jones, etc) is I think Peterson doesn't specifically want violence; he just wants fame and wealth and doesn't care about the inevitable violence.

This doesn't exactly commend him as a new voice of the intellectual right, though.

I think it's worth interrogating the motives of a media platform that would frame him in such a way.

A political movement that finds such a voice compelling.

An opposition that can't find the courage to counter such framing.

Such interrogation is not silencing any voices; it's merely raising one's own.

Protesting the promulgation of such "ideas" isn't anti-free speech. It's using free speech to create a defense against a present danger.

The only way you can accept the premise of Jordan Peterson as an intellectual, the only way you can accept that his ideas have merit for inclusion in the marketplace of ideas, is if you are willing to take on his unmistakable assumption that women are possessions.

We shouldn't.

Sure, he should be allowed to say it. But nobody should for an instant think there is some civic responsibility to pay him to teach it, book him to speak it, publish his writings on it or to give it shelf space, to invite him onto shows.

There's money in doing so. But no value.

We need to become better at recognizing when an idea proposes an exclusive space, hidden as a proposal for a safe space.

An exclusive space is when full access to public life is seen as the right of a specific type of person, to the necessary exclusion of others.

People who benefit from exclusive spaces really love exclusive spaces.

A safe space is a space that becomes necessary when exclusive space already exists. It's a place that exists for that excluded other, and creates within a small specific parameter the full access to life that should already exist for them everywhere.

People who benefit from an exclusive space HATE safe spaces, it should be noted.

They point to those little pockets of safety from themselves as evidence that they themselves are victims of exclusive spaces.

Jordan Peterson's big idea is an exclusive space for men.

Others in our country have big ideas like exclusive spaces for white people, or for Christians, or for able-bodied people, or for the wealthy.

And they already have them. They just want to stomp out the safe spaces.

That's an "idea," I guess.

I reject it.

Here's how you can tell.

A proposal for non-exclusive space is about how someone wants to live FOR themselves.

A proposal for exclusive space is never just about how the person wants to live, but how they want to live AT somebody else.

Reject it on those precise grounds.

Talk of a "sexual marketplace" is exactly misogyny, in its essence. It is belief in women's bodies as commodities in a marketplace, rather than a destabilization of such a nonexistent marketplace, that leads directly to things like the Santa Fe shooting.

If you are talking about men who aren't having the sexual experiences they feel they deserve as an "imbalanced sexual market," you absolutely do believe exactly this—it's the undergirding premise.

If that were true, why do you not see women killing men over sexual rejection and talking about male sexual consent as if it were a fungible commodity good subject to redistribution?

Yeah except it’s not being used as analogy. “Sex” in this so-called metaphor stands in for ... sex. And the marketplace stands in for ... a marketplace. Incel discussion is about redistribution of sex to men who have none from men who have more.

The women don’t come into it.

Though it’s sad that people employ hypothetical whatsboutism, let’s not pretend it’s not an obvious deflection from the actual topic and the real problem.