The goal of eliminating the differences between the genders is straight out of Karl Marx's playbook. It defies biology and reason. If the state can mold all of us into uniform, unthinking blobs, we can be more easily controlled. Both genders and their differences are necessary for a healthy society composed of free and thinking people.
Society seems less uniform today than ever before. There are more subcultures and belief systems than ever. All this cis/trans/gender fluid stuff is adding more normative genders, not less.
As I said elsewhere I do have some issues with that specific APA document, but Marxism? If there is a Marxist plan to make everyone the same it is failing badly. If anything it is the far right that seems to want culture to be uniform.
BTW the USSR was not "socially liberal" in the Western sense except for (like much of the West) in some "hip" urban centers. Being gay in Russia has never been a great experience. Russia today has gone full social reactionary, and this didn't pop out of nowhere. It's always been a current in Russian culture going way back to the Stalin era. Stalin was not a social liberal.
I would take him more seriously as a critic of the excesses of "PC" ideology if he weren't a believer in IQ based neo-racism and if he weren't an actual misogynist.
That doesn't mean I have no problems with the APA document in question. It does indeed read like ideological buzzword salad and I do get the impression that it is minimizing legitimate traditional masculine virtues. It deserves a better critic than Jordan Peterson and having him fill that role only reinforces this whole meta narrative.
My own opinion on all this is that everyone has gone completely insane.
The right has gone insane. The ideology of The Turner Diaries is now mainstream. The left has gone insane, parroting ideological duckspeak and utterly incapable of genuinely discussing or defending their ideas. I get the sense that neither side even cares about ideas, just "memes" and winning.
Since both sides are now insane, deplatforming and brigading are the only form of debate. Deplatforming is normally associated with the left but the right wing echo chambers will all ban you in five minutes if you question the party line. Brigading likewise is practiced by both sides.
Yes folks, I am saying the awful "both sides" thing. I really do think everyone has gone mad.
What is it? Are rising CO2 levels impacting our cognition? Is there something in the water?
Or is this medium just flawed? Have we turned the Internet into an anti-intellectual memetic laser that is slowly lobotomizing us to get people to click ads?
He sounds reasonable until he doesn't. My overall impression of him is that he is a mess of contradictions who is trying to have a lot of things both ways.
Maybe he thinks he's searching for a synthesis but in the end he just ends up providing what seems to be both an on ramp and an off ramp to the neo-fascist right.
The stuff that makes Peterson sound profound all comes from Jung and other similar thinkers. The good stuff is not original and the original stuff is not good. He's not even close to the worst pop intellectual around right now but he's never impressed me.
