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Janice Fiamengo on Critical Theory, Feminism, and Anti-Feminism
February 23, 2021
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Approximately 1.5 years ago, I interviewed Janice Fiamengo. This was in preparation for a film that I've written and directed called Better Left Unsaid. It's an upcoming documentary about to be released in one month. The trailer for which is below and the links to see the film are below. It's all about when does the left go too far or extremism on the left, though we do explore extremism on the right. This interview is from when I was less experienced as an interviewer. I was younger. I was a whippersnapper. I was nervously interrupting in an attempt to impress Janice.
Alright, I'm here with Janice with the unassailable, impregnable,
insurmountable, ineluctable, insuperable, Janice Villamengo. Do you say that for everyone? No. You can see I put them all online. It's true. I didn't remember that. Okay. Tell me about your writing process when it comes to these Studio Brule videos, or however you pronounce it. Yeah, Studio Brule, I think is how Steve pronounces it. My writing process, well,
You mean how it all begins? How I get the idea from the first place? Yes, so you come up with some idea, you just notice it online and you then start to write about it and then it takes months? Sometimes, yeah. You know, people send me things all of the time now, you know, outrageous articles, incidents on campus where either
Speaker has been prevented from giving a talk or has been protested or someone has been fired from his job for what seemed to be kind of dubious reasons or a particular course in toxic masculinity that's being taught somewhere. All these kinds of things and so then I think about whether, you know, what I might be able to say about it and then I just
Sometimes I try to link it to an aspect of feminist critical theory or social justice theory in general. Can you give us a rundown of what current feminist theory is and critical theory as well?
Well, whatever I say, feminists will say it's much more subtle and sophisticated than that. But as far as I can see, feminist theory is pretty much the same as it has always been, which is that it believes that we live in a patriarchy, which is a society that is
male-centered and in which men control and oppress women through discourse, through law, through culture, through even jokes, and in which women are in some way objectified or prevented from being their full selves. I think that it's fair to say.
feminism has become more sophisticated over time in that it claims now that it is intersectional, that's the really popular term, which means that there are all sorts of intersecting identity vectors that impact one's experience as a woman in patriarchy and also even impact one's experience as a man under patriarchy, depending on race,
on sexuality, on a whole variety of other identity categories. You started from a radical feminist to becoming the anti-feminist. How did that happen? Yeah, well, I've told that story now and it's hard to remember what's true from the story that I tell, but I think it was just a gradual process really of coming to see that that wasn't so.
I mean, I think I always knew in some way that it wasn't so because feminism posits that the experience of being a woman or a minority in North American society is an experience of having your very existence in some way under threat, feeling that your central elements of your identity are subjugated and denied and scorned.
And I never had that experience. From day one, I had many male and female mentors who encouraged me to use my gifts in whatever way was best for me. So I always knew that my experience was not an experience of being terrorized in any way or of having my central self questioned or denied.
I believe that some people must have that experience because feminist theory says it is and there are all sorts of stories of horrific things happening to women and members of minority groups. So that was what I believed as a grad student really and the thing that was most significant I think about becoming a feminist was that
You have this exhilarating sense of rebelling against an oppressive tyranny and so you feel that everything you do and say from a feminist perspective is really valuable and really important and that you can silence a room by telling your victim's story or by
referring to somebody else's victim story. And it's a very, very powerful, it's a heady, exhilarating kind of rush to accuse others of not being aware of the suffering of people in the society and to feel that you're speaking on their behalf. So I really like that. I think because, you know, we all want to feel that we're
We're good in some way and that what we're doing matters. And so I was very much caught up in that. I marched and take back the night marches and I denounce things that feminists denounce as damaging to women.
But then it just all began to, you know, it began to feel like a house of cards because I could, my experience had never been that. It had always been an experience of being treated with respect, with love, a feeling that my male friends, my male mentors, my male teachers obviously cared about me and wanted me to succeed and didn't want me to be hurt in any way and I wasn't hurt. So, and then I could see that when I became a teacher, I could see that
Women in my classes were not oppressed. They were full of self-confidence, even self-righteousness. And the men were not
privileged, you know, oppressive beings who scorned women. In fact, often they seemed kind of abashed and a bit ashamed and hesitant to speak and quite deferential to women. And in some ways I thought, well, that's good. It shows, you know, they're very respectful and kind and everything. But I also started to see they're being constantly told that they better be quiet and listen and that they're responsible for all these terrible things and that they should be ashamed about the, you know, the history of North American society and that somehow they were
responsible for so-called centuries of oppression
And so the whole enterprise at that point started to look dubious to me, because at least I felt it should be acknowledged that whatever the past had been, and even that I began to question, but whatever the past had been, even if we accepted the feminist story about the past, it was no longer that in the present, that was obvious. So what do you think motivates them, motivates the feminists to view the world in this way, even though, like you said, in classes at least, the men are the ones who are
more quiet and more docile compared to the women. Yeah. Well, I think it feels very good. It gives you a sense of purpose, gives you a reason to get up in the morning. It gives you a reason to
It makes you feel very courageous for speaking out against this so-called oppression. It gives you a sense of agency and it gives you a sense of power because you know that you can stand up in a room and say, my experience as a woman or my experience as a woman of
Color, my experience as a lesbian woman of color, whatever it is, and a hush will fall on the room. And whatever you say from that point is going to have incredible authority.
And no one is going to dare to contradict you or to dismiss what you say after that. So, you know, who wouldn't enjoy that and claim it? And I think once you come to believe, I mean, that suggests that all of this is very insincere, which I think some of it is insincere, actually, but a lot of it is also sincere. It's a sincerely held belief.
that this is the way the world is and once you believe that then you don't want to have someone you know you're not going to allow yourself to be talked out of that because then that would be to in some way surrender the the the righteousness of the struggle against oppression and it would be to side with the oppressors and of course nobody wants to do that so so you end up having to to keep on believing even when evidence is brought forward that your
What are some of the ways in which women are advantaged?
Well, they're advantaged in all sorts of ways. Specifically in academia, women have been advantaged for decades now through affirmative action hiring programs and through all sorts of special scholarships, special funding mechanisms to advance women's scholarship.
you know in every way the Academy has has tried to demonstrate over the last 25 to 30 years that it is an inclusive place for women and that means that and I've sat on many hiring committees where it was clear that we wanted to hire women and we wanted to hire especially women of color, lesbians, etc. and so if you fit in one of those identity categories you had a huge advantage
I know some professors even in the STEM fields, so people would say, well, the STEM fields are unaffected, but I'm talking about professors in the STEM field who said, if there's an application for a professor and it's a man, they can reject it, but if it's a woman, they have to have a very, very, very good reason why they're rejected. Oh, yes, absolutely. Yeah. We had, we operated in the English department and I know that STEM fields now are the ones that are really feeling that pressure. It's called an equity protocol.
and it means that if you have amongst the pool of applicants a number of women that yes not to hire the woman to hire a man over a woman you would have to you have to actually write
to the dean and explain why you made that decision.
There is a Cornell study from a couple of years ago specifically looking at STEM because STEM has been the area where feminists have been most adamant that equity has failed, that women haven't been hired.
So there was a very extensive, hundreds of universities surveyed that found that women were twice as likely to be hired as male applicants, even while feminists continue to insist that
more needs to be done. And there are all sorts of now women only positions also that are being advertised. So it's even more overt. The man doesn't even have a chance at all. In Australia, there have been many both in math and in physics, there have been women only positions advertised over the last few years. In Ireland, just this year, it was announced that over the next couple of years,
Ireland will hire many, many, a number of dozen of women only positions in an attempt to increase numbers.
Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. What are some ways in which women are disadvantaged?
You're talking to the wrong gal for that answer. What feminists will say, I don't think very many women who are not feminists will say this about their experience of academia, but I think what feminists will say is that they are treated differently as women, that they are condescended to, that people have different expectations of them as women.
you know, that they'll be assumed to be the secretary rather than the physics professor that they actually are, you know, that kind of thing. And they will claim that this is deeply devaluing, you know, that it really harms their ability to work in that environment, that it's a kind of microaggression is what they would say. And are there studies on that? Studies to validate what they said? So there are some studies that I know. How can it validate it though? I mean, if somebody thought I was a secretary,
It would mean nothing to me. I mean, I suppose if from the time I was six years old, I had been given a message both subtly and overtly that I could never be a professor at a university, that would obviously have a damaging impact. But if the message I had received from my culture at large was you can be anything you want to be as long as you work hard at it,
and occasionally someone assumed I was the secretary, I don't think it would have any impact at all. And I just don't see how anybody could actually legitimately claim that we live in a culture that discourages women from doing whatever they want to do. I've never met a man who wasn't enthusiastic about having women as colleagues as long as they were good enough. There are men who are resentful about all the
I don't know of the specific studies but I've heard, now this may be from feminist sources, I don't remember where I heard this
But if you have resumes that are sent out and they have female names versus men names and the men names are more likely to get called back. And same with sighted research. I'm not sure if that is true, but I want to know what your thoughts are. I mean, these studies, yeah, I've looked into some of those kinds of studies. There are also studies that
I looked at one study, it was a very small sample size, and it made that claim. I think this was a particular study, and I can't remember the exact details, but I think it had to do with a hiring of a lab supervisor in some science discipline.
and the claim was that the male applicants on identical resumes were more likely to be chosen. There were all sorts of problems. It was a very small sample size. The median age of those who were making the choice was quite old, actually. It was, I think, 50 years old. There were questions about the cultural background of those who were making the selections.
There's also the possibility that, and this is sacrilege, but there's also the possibility that in some cases the experience of those making the choice had been that a male lab supervisor had actually been more successful in the past than female lab supervisors. So there might actually be a reason why. It wasn't just pure sexism, but
Yeah, I mean, you know, there would have to be much more work done on a very large sample size, I think, before anybody could determine conclusively anything like that. Something I've been asking myself is, what evidence would have to exist in order for me to believe that there is systemic racism? As much as I look into systemic racism and the claims of the radical left, I don't see that it holds much water. And then I thought, okay, well, the best evidence that I've seen is the resumes between blacks and whites
You know, with the whiteness of the names. I don't know if you've seen that study. It's similar, where you send out resumes to different agencies and then the ones with black names get called less. But then if they change their black name to a white name, like Connor instead of O'Shane, then they're more likely to get called back. But when I looked at the studies, the actual studies, also Asian names got called less. So then you would expect that Asians would do worse in society, but then Asians tend to do better.
I was thinking more too about what you're saying about the female names on applications. We're now in a situation too where
A person and the thing that that that I remember the feminist claim to is that both women and men if they were making the choice about this lab supervisor tended to choose the man.
So, you know, what does that say about sexism if women make the same choices that men make? I mean, that gets really complicated. So then we have all this emphasis by feminists on hiring more women, but what difference would it make then if women themselves tended to prefer men in certain circumstances? But to go back to that, if you could prove, and I think it's very, very difficult, but if you could prove that there was a bias,
How could you prove what the source of the bias was? That's the real difficulty because I think we now live in a society where if I were a man and I was looking at two candidates and one was a woman and one was a man, I don't want to get into the racial thing because that seems different, but as a man, I would be very reluctant to hire a woman.
If the man was equally qualified, precisely because we live in this situation where every man knows he's just one false accusation away from reputational and career suicide. Who could blame a man from deciding he doesn't want the hassle? Sure, maybe he loves women and you know, in general what thinks they're
potentially just as brilliant as any man, but he knows that we now live in the Me Too era and have lived in that era for a lot longer than Me Too has been in action, where if he just happens to get one of the few women who is a little bit crazy about these kinds of things, who's hypersensitive about perceived sexism, and she makes an accusation against him, it's over for him. You know, his life is destroyed.
Who could blame a man for wanting to protect himself against that kind of grief? So sometimes, you know, feminist initiatives might have all sorts of unintended consequences. And I would think that resentment on the part of men and also, well, caution about exposing themselves to the hazards of having women in the workplace
Those would be possible unintended consequences. So the resentments on both sides then because there's as far as I see from the feminist theorists, it seems as though they're motivated by resentment and then that engenders resentment on the side of the men, which then breeds more resentment on the side of the women. Yeah, it's a vicious circle as far as I can see.
What can we do? Yeah, I don't know. Does it have to be the men that stops resenting the women or the women that stops resenting the men? I think that everybody should just stop resenting individually. So each person, each person should. But in your point of view, what do you think a feminist, what if there's a third year feminist watching this and she's understanding that you're making some sense. You're saying some things that she wanted to say and she has wanted to say and wants to continually wants to say but can't because
The repercussions, what advice would you give to her to not contribute? Because I see that they are contributing to the problem that they're trying to solve. Absolutely. I mean, that's the whole thing. And they make themselves deeply, deeply unhappy in the process. I mean, there are all sorts of studies
the internet where you take a look at someone before she became a radical feminist and she's you know happy and smiling and having a great time with her life and then after she becomes a radical feminist you know she's dyed her hair blue she's all pierced and she's got an extremely doer and angry look on her face. Do you think that's a causal effect or do you think that she starts to become now this is this is
Unpolitically correct, but she starts to become unattractive and then feminists start to appeal to her. It's probably a complicated case and it might well be because she had some bad experiences that turned her that way too, so one shouldn't be too superficial about it. Are there studies done on the attractiveness of feminists versus some other control group? I don't know if there have been any studies done.
What would you expect the results of that to be? I don't want to get you in any more hot water, but it seems like it doesn't matter to you. I don't know, I don't know. David and I have talked and laughed about this just recently actually. We were looking at some university presidents and other academics who were very strident feminists and noting that very few of them were very attractive. But I'm not sure about that.
I've had interviews, in fact, I think with Gad Saad, he tried to make that claim and I actually, I'm not sure, I've met many beautiful women who were also really angry feminists and so I don't feel that that's necessarily the cause or the result but I feel that women are in a position where
Women can back off feminism, because at least in my experience, and I don't know that this would be an experience accepted by most feminists, but in my experience, most men, despite their resentment about what has happened over the last 20 to 30 years, most men are willing to call off the gender war. Most men, even if they hate feminism with a passion,
are interested in living with women both on an individual personal level having relationships with women and working with women in a peaceable way in society. They're not interested in keeping women down or anything like that and all these claims about how they want women to go back into the kitchen or whatever. I've never met a man like that.
So I think men are willing to call off the war and if women would just be willing to, but I don't know, there just does seem to be that a deep resentment begins for women as soon as they encounter feminism, maybe it's there, maybe that's one of women's weaknesses, you know, I mean we know what men's
We know what men's weaknesses are. We know the shadow side of men and that is aggression, competitiveness, capacity for violence. What's women's shadow side? And we've never discussed that as a society. I don't think women are happy to look at women's shadow side and men aren't either. Men tend to put women on a pedestal. And I think one of women's shadowy elements is
a tendency to resentment, to self-pity, to blaming of others, to refusing responsibility for the things that make one happy in one's own life. And so I think feminism really plays into that because it says it's not, you know, none of this is your responsibility. Whatever happens in your life, whatever form of dissatisfaction or unhappiness, it all has this external source and you're just an innocent victim of it.
And that's both incredibly attractive and a recipe for continued unhappiness and anger and frustration. Were you using the word shadow in a Jungian sense or just shadow in a personality sense? Just in a general sense. Because that's something I'm actually exploring. I think that's the core question of the documentary because it does seem to be a political documentary on the face of it, which is when does the left go too far? But as I study it deeper and deeper, it seems to me to be more psychological and philosophical in that
When can excess unexamined compassion go too far? So where do you see it going too far? Give me some examples of particularly ruinous feminist theories that have gone too far off the deep end. In application, I mean.
ruined male lives. Both young men at university who have been investigated and expelled for various infractions or forms of misconduct. Sometimes even as insubstantial as one young man wrote to me, he'd been expelled from his school because two young women had complained about him that his gaze was too intense.
that he had looked at them too intensely. And there actually is built into sexual harassment policies at universities all across North America that looking can be a form of sexual harassment. So sexual harassment guidelines that have gone completely crazy is a really good example. And it has hurt young men. All it takes is for a woman to complain. I have heard from countless men who simply for
not picking up on women's very subtle social cues and I think you know this is one of those cases where men don't tend to pick up on those. Women are very very sensitive about these things and they think men should be able to pick up and so if a young man is interested in a young woman that he's met at college and he starts asking her out and that's what he thinks he should do and she's too shy or nervous or cowardly
to just say, look, I'm not interested in you. So she never really says that. She never says a definitive no. She never says, I'm busy, I'm sorry, I can't do it, I'm not feeling, whatever. So she never says no and he keeps pursuing her because that's what men do. Men have been conditioned to do that from day one.
and from our primitive ancestors and so he keeps pursuing her and then she complains about his behaviour to somebody at the school and that's the end of it for him. He's now charged with harassment and he's either disciplined in some way or even in some cases is expelled.
And so that, I would say, sexual harassment, the attempt to keep women safe, even if what that means, do you want me to move this guy? No, no, no. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, I'm moving. Just in case. Come down. What's his name again? That's Stanislav. Stanislav. Come down. Come down, Stanislav. So even if it means, like, the idea of safety is one of the things, I think, that feminism has gone crazy with the idea of safety. And that means not just physical safety,
but psychological and emotional safety, which really means that a woman should never feel uncomfortable even for a short period of time or even if the basis of her feeling of discomfort is completely irrational. So I think that's a terrible way that feminist theory about women's safety has just gone crazy and has ruined all sorts of lives.
Have you read Frankfurt's essay on bullshit? The technical bullshit? BS? No, no. Okay. That's from the 90s. It's Harry Frankfurt, I believe his name is. I believe he was a cognitive psychologist or just a regular psychologist. And then he said what bullshit is. Now it's technical, so I don't. It's something like there's a salience landscape, so I don't know how to explain this. Look, we see a chair. Okay. We look at that, we see chair. We look at that, we see tripod. We look at that, we see DVD.
A feminist might say, well, why are you putting them into the category of chair, into DVD, into tripod? Okay, that's a valid claim. Now that's related to something called the frame problem in AI, which is how do you categorize an infinite amount that's in front of you? How do you put it into categories? But then there's actually a pre-egoic response. So why do you even think of a chair as something to be put into a category? So there's something that happens pre-conscious.
And that's related to the landscape that's in front of you. What do you find salient? Or it's also called relevance realization. And Harry Frankfurt said that you can't lie to yourself. Now, I actually think you can lie to yourself and I think self-deception is a true phenomena. But he was saying, let's say you can't lie to yourself because you can't tell yourself, I want to be interested in X, Y or Z and then just become interested in it. Or you can't tell yourself if you have low self-esteem. No, no, I'm the most attractive woman there is or I'm the most attractive man there is.
So you can't lie to yourself if you don't believe it, but you can BS yourself. The way that you can BS yourself is that you can present something as salient. So you look at this pen. Now the pen has become salient to you. So you've looked at it. Remember, there's a landscape of salience. Now this is going to become more salient, which is going to make you pay attention to it, which is going to make it more salient. So there's a feedback loop of salience. You call that BS. The inappropriate hijacking of salience is BS. The most...
Common example is something from The Simpsons where politicians do this, where in The Simpsons, Cain was, or Kodos or Cain, the aliens were becoming presidents, and they were dressed as Bill Clinton, and he's like, ladies and gentlemen, we must move forward, not backwards, not sideways, not forwards, but upwards, and twirling, twirling, always twirling towards freedom, and the crowd just cheers, and it's because he's saying words that don't actually mean anything, but they evoke an emotional response. So something I'm wondering,
is the connection between BS and trigger words and this expansion of racism, sexism to mean things that are just benign or relatively benign compared to their original meaning. But yet the original evocation attached to these meanings, the connotations remain the same and the punishments also remain the same.
So that's something I was exploring. I want to know what your thoughts were on that. Well, I don't understand the theory very well probably, but yeah, I do think that that's what's going on, is that the idea that certain domains of expression can be very damaging for the vulnerable, the marginalized, the traditionally excluded or oppressed.
This is something that feminism has really attached itself to. And so whereas, yeah, I can see that, you know, a person advocating violence against women or something like that, or suggesting that all women's claims of violence are actually, you know, narcissistic projections or something like that. That would be pretty hideous.
But the category of what is harmful to women has been so dramatically expanded over the last couple of decades that there is almost nothing outside of actual feminist discourse that isn't considered deeply harmful. And so that would be, you know, to answer the question, the original question, where does the left go too far? Where does especially the feminist left go too far? It's by continually expanding
the category of harm and by claiming that words themselves harm and of course that's not entirely false since words do harm in certain kinds of ways in different kinds of contexts but by claiming that all sorts of previously quite harmless or maybe merely irritating
types of discourse that I might disagree with or that people could argue about, that they actually constitute some kind of existential threat to women or other categories of vulnerable people. And that's what's used then to deplatform and disinvite or it gives the impetus to shout people down because supposedly their speech is so heinous, so damaging
The campus is fundamentally unsafe.
It's never made clear, supposedly because it encourages men to do terrible things, to run rampage and start raping women because they've heard something that contradicts a feminist doctrine. I mean it's just ludicrous or that it damages women so much that they won't be able to get out of bed the next morning. It's bizarre but you see that all the time.
In some way, you deny my right to exist. You see students saying that over and over again merely because the speaker is articulating a conservative view of
of gender or whatever it happens to be. So how do we overcome that argument, that rebuttal, which is you're denying my identity, which is me, which is my right to exist. So how do you overcome that? Like if you're a trans person, for instance, and somebody is saying that a trans identity is actually a form of mental illness or whatever, and so therefore that constitutes a fundamental threat to the person's very existence.
I mean, how do you overcome it? I don't know. I mean, you simply, I would think that as the administrators simply have to say, that's too bad, you know, that the university is a free speech zone, that that's the one thing sacred, that, you know, ideas about inclusion and safety and comfort are secondary when it comes to university discourse.
But it seems that universities aren't willing to do that, and most university professors aren't interested in that. Well, what about the counter argument, which is that if I'm a man and you're saying gender doesn't exist and I identify as a man, is that not an attack against my identity?
Well, I mean, attacks against men's identity are tolerated all the time. You know, if we took seriously the feminist and social justice warrior kind of discourse about harms to people... Is that it has to be against a historically oppressed... Yes, it has to be. Yeah, right. Because, you know, the things that are going on now in university classrooms all across North America are deeply harmful to men, I would say, but... What about somebody who is
Let's say the pinnacle of historically oppressed, so a black lesbian, a black trans person who is in a wheelchair and has glasses, and is extremely short, and is low on intelligence.
is the most oppressed of all the intersections. So we get down to the root. What if they're against the historical oppression narrative, like them themselves, and they say, by you telling me that I'm historically oppressed, that goes against my identity of not being historically oppressed. So what would they say then? They would say that, I mean, I don't know what they would say, but probably that that person has internalized their oppression and doesn't understand. And, you know, there are all sorts of cases of people... Then it seems like it's unfalsifiable.
It is, absolutely. That's why it's so powerful. Because it is unfalsifiable, it can always be reasserted. And that's what makes it so magical, is that no matter how many times you bring forward evidence to say that the claims are not true for various reasons,
The person making the original claim of oppression can always say but you know unbeknownst to you or they're all these invisible I mean that's the genius of all these social justice discourses that they've come up with ideas like microaggressions and unconscious bias and all sorts of things that can't really ever be measured but can still be asserted to exist especially in any case where
the performance, the outcomes of a particular identity group don't meet what the proponents say they should. If it happens to be feminists who say that the number of women in physics is not where it should be,
You can say, well, we've got all sorts of initiatives to encourage women to come into physics. It doesn't matter. They'll still claim that there is some kind of systemic bias or some kind of unconscious oppression. It can never be disproved. What if someone says, you're denying my identity, and you say, okay, maybe I am. Is that the end of the world? Because look, what if I say people who have had laser eye surgery, saw I've had laser eye surgery, trying to come up with an analogy. Okay, let's say people who have glasses.
People who have glasses
a claim that shuts down conversations, because any idea, if you attach yourself to it, can challenge an identity. Now they may come up with some sort of response, which is that if it's gender, sexuality, or ethnicity, those are the three primary. They will say that those are the... But there's an explosion of those now. So there's fat, and then there's unattractiveness, which is associated with fat. There's disability, there are all sorts of things. But yeah, you could say that to attack my religion is a far
greater harm. If I'm a devout Catholic and every time I go into the classroom my professor is mocking or even not mocking but simply attempting to disprove Catholic doctrine that would be deeply harmful and yet somehow that particular kind of attack on a person's core beliefs or deepest identity isn't one that social justice warriors worry about at all.
So yeah, you've just proved that it's completely artificial, it's completely socially constructed to use the SJW term. They would say, I mean, that's absolutely true, but the idea is that, I guess that the particular categories of identity that people in academia are most interested in now are the categories that they say are people whose life outcomes are
They would also have to show that just by challenging someone who's historically oppressed and their identity in the manner in which it's happening in civil discourse on university campuses that that has a deleterious effect instead of a positive one also especially compared to the alternative which is being indoctrinated in a feminist or radical left theories and seeing the effects of that on well-being on
on well-being than maybe monetary success. So one would have to demonstrate that. And you could never demonstrate it because you'd have to have some kind of control group that... Get some people from the STEM. Yeah, maybe. But yeah, that's the thing. Who's to say that having your identity, your core beliefs or some aspect of yourself that really matters, who's to say that having that attacked
doesn't make you stronger. I honestly think that that's what should happen on a semi-regular basis, especially at university, because you're not going in 18 thinking that you're going to come out the same person when you're 22. If you were, why go to university? There's no point. You're not growing. You're not changing.
So you should have your identity not necessarily attacked, but definitely challenged and then you assess and change based on what you're hearing. It is difficult because with everything there is a core of truth in feminist and other SJW kind of claims and it's true that if you are relentlessly told
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And so nobody wants a university to be a place where people are belittled or scorned or mocked either for reasons beyond their control because of characteristics that they were born with or indeed really for their beliefs either.
But, so there has to be some kind of balance where there's a kind of basic, a baseline of respect, but also respectful challenge. And that's what has been completely lost at universities. So there is no respectful challenge anymore. We know that it can go too far on one end, which is that the constant denial of someone's potential inside by saying you can't amount to anything, you're a woman and therefore you're never going to be good at spatial reasoning, so just don't bother. Yeah.
Good. No one would say that's good. Well, very few people would say that's good. Very few people would say that's good. That should ever be said to anybody for any reason, especially because of some characteristic that they can't control.
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So why don't you give me some more examples of feminist theory gone wrong in practice. So for example,
I remember you wrote about, well all of your studio brutal videos are this. Yeah, they're all about that. So many professors, male professors who've either lost their career altogether or have had terrible experiences as a result of claims mostly by women
that they've been committed some kind of misconduct. All of that is completely out of control right now. I did a case just recently, a man at Brock University, for example, who
It's not clear what he did, but he was investigated for sexual harassment and he was found guilty of sexual harassment. And the claim was that he went out drinking with a couple of his students. They were of drinking age. They went out drinking after class. Two of the students, one male, one female, came back to his office. The male left the office. I guess it was fairly late at night by this point. I think they were still drinking maybe in his office.
The woman stayed on, female student, and he approached her in some way. He went and sat next to her. He touched her, not sexually, from the sounds of it, but he touched her and he expressed some kind of desire. And for that, he was suspended for a number of years. He had to go through all sorts of training and, you know, he was publicly humiliated and he tried to come back to the classroom
about four years after this alleged incident occurred. A huge student protest. It was said that he was a perpetrator of violence. Again, there's that language, that he had perpetrated sexual violence and therefore he should not be allowed back into the classroom. So there's always this aliding of
very minor forms of misconduct with really serious forms of misconduct. He never did violence to anybody. There's absolutely no evidence that once the woman said no or left his office or whatever happened that he in any way, you know, tried to pursue her or didn't take no for an answer or was threatening or anything like that. And they actually cancelled his class as a result of the student protest. And it's not clear what's going to happen to this guy now, but his career is over.
He'll probably be quietly retired or something. It's doubtful he'll ever be back in the classroom and, you know, he's publicly disgraced for doing nothing or for what, you know, at worst it was a moment of drunken indiscretion. So things like that, you know, are happening all the time.
And, you know, there's a there's a whisper network in academia where a number of women can decide that they don't like a particular professor or graduate student or whatever it happens to be might be just because he's creepy or whatever it happens to be.
Here's where the inequality of sexual attractiveness really comes into play. It's a kind of bigotry in itself. A very handsome man can probably get away on a very sexually confident man, can probably get away with all sorts of things if the women find him attractive that a less attractive man can't get away with. I did a Femangophile just recently on a man, a very elderly man at UC Irvine who was
forced to retire at age 84, if you can imagine, and complaints had begun against him when he was in his 70s. The complaints were that he lavishly complimented women, sometimes with sexually tinged expressions of admiration. They were things like, he is alleged to have said to one woman, I've just been told that women don't like to hear that they're beautiful.
But I know that that isn't the case for you. The woman is reported to have been too intimidated to tell him that she didn't like to be complimented. Various women came forward and complained about him and said that they felt demeaned and undermined in their professional capacity because he would make these compliments. He also kissed them on both cheeks. He was a Spanish-born man, so this was his cultural context.
So what did they do go to his supervisors and then the supervisors had a talk or yeah, they they complained about him He was told to stop he didn't stop eventually it went to a you know a board of investigation that found him guilty of these of these various allegations No, I mean a bit of physical touching but nothing, you know, he would touch somebody on the shoulders, but it was essentially the compliments and
I can't imagine that he was teaching at this point in his late seventies, but he was still on campus. He had donated a lot of money to his faculty and he was in love with the discipline and also in love with women. And so eventually they forced him to retire. He's not allowed to return to campus. His name is being taken off two buildings
that he endowed financially with his own money, and it's also being taken off various scholarships and fellowships that he contributed to. And basically, you know, the final years of his life, he's now been completely disgraced because he complimented women and made some sexually tinged. At one point he said to somebody, I think the worst thing maybe he's alleged to have said, although he denies it, was that he said to one woman, you were so animated while you were making that presentation that I thought you were going to have an orgasm.
Oh my goodness, you know, how terrible he has to be ejected from the campus. So that kind of thing, I just think that is utterly ridiculous and excessive and it says something appalling about the delicate sensibilities of these women professors and graduate students. I mean, couldn't they have simply avoided the man? Couldn't they have actually said to him,
I would really prefer that you not speak to me in those ways because it makes me uncomfortable. I appreciate the compliment but please don't say it anymore. It seems none of them could. They had to go to a higher authority and then they had to have him dealt with in this very humiliating and demeaning way.
Things like that, you know, the constant redefining of ordinary human interactions. Oh, and the reason that I thought of him was that it goes back to, because someone actually wrote to me after he saw my video and he said that he had taken a class from this professor years and years ago in the 1980s. And when he was a younger man, he was really good looking and lots, you know, people loved him.
So probably this was a behavior, maybe he took it from Spain, I don't know, and this was a behavior that had been rewarded or at least happily tolerated for years and years while he was a professor. Then once he was a much more elderly man, and there was this younger cohort of women, it was no longer acceptable.
You know, it seems a kind of really flagrant bigotry that he happened to be an elderly man and this was no longer acceptable and so he had to be drummed out. So there's just so many examples of this where either false allegations, often allegations that could never be proved of things, you know, supposedly done or said behind closed doors, the man denies it, the woman insists it's the case, he has to go.
or cases where even if the man admits, it's nothing like sexual assault. It's nothing like a man saying, look, I'll give you an A if you sleep with me and if you don't sleep with me, I'm going to fail you in this course, which obviously is totally unacceptable. But there are cases of an older man usually falling in love with a beautiful woman and telling her that.
And that's it. That's enough to get him, you know, sometimes people write and say, well, you know, he shouldn't have done that. Okay, sure. But, you know, the ruination of a person's long respectable career because of one bit of misconduct that I cannot believe actually seriously damages the person who receives it. And that's the other thing is that feminism does really induce in those who embrace it.
Desire to be damaged by these basically non damaging actions and there are all sorts of articles where you read about how you know the woman was deeply depressed she couldn't finish her course of studies because this man told her that he was in love with her.
I don't know what to say about that. I just can't believe it that being told that you're so beautiful and attractive and desirable and this man's in love with you is going to make it impossible for you to get out of bed and continue your studies. It just doesn't make sense to me. But that is presented to us as the real harm of this what's called now sexual predation and so this man's life has to be ruined as a result.
And so the suggestion is that women are such frail reeds that they can't deal with anything at all. But of course, in other cases, if they had been themselves in love with the professor, then that would have been a very different kind of thing. So it's all based on the perception of the young woman. And depending on whether the advance is welcome or not,
It's either a harm or it isn't a harm, and the man's life is decided based on her perception. So I come across those kinds of things all the time and find them bizarre and disturbing. I see university as almost like a boot camp, like the SEALs have Hell Week. The SEALs have Hell Week, and university is like a timid version of Hell Week, but it's still a boot camp for four years, and you're supposed to prove yourself, and that's what the degree is.
Withstood this not necessarily some sort of sexual violence violence know you but
I went through this much stress. I went through this much cognitive effort and I came out. And it's a proxy for the real world. And so if you can't handle the university, then what are these faculty doing when they're shielding them in this bubble saying you're ready for the real world? And also, especially if feminism says that the real world is as bad as university. University is just a reflection of the real world. So you're sending them out in the real world where there is no
There is no agency to just expel somebody for giving you a compliment. Well, you know, I think that they want to create that and that is being created. There are all sorts of cases of, you know, in the workplace now where there are sexual harassment guidelines and I don't think it's possible to have a company anymore that doesn't have
sexual harassment guidelines and it's illegal, you know, to sexually harass anybody and what that means, of course, is not the terrible thing that, you know, where somebody insists on some kind of sexual favour from somebody, but, you know, anything, sexual joking, telling an off-colour joke, expressing
So what is their end game? Do they just want power? Is it all about power? They don't care about reason or logic or consistency?
Well, they certainly wouldn't accept that characterization. They would say that they want a world in which women don't have to feel vulnerable to male, sexual, or other kinds of harassment or intimidation. Okay, so what I would say would be something like, that sounds like an Oedipal mother, like you're just
You have to instantiate some sort of totalitarian regime in order to make sure that every interaction that a woman has with a man or another woman or a man with a man, although they don't seem to care about that too much, is peaceful. They would say that that's worth it. Also, they would say, well, look at progress. We used to be able to accept catcalling on a regular basis now. That's not socially acceptable.
So this is just in line with the march of progress. Okay. I'm not sure what to say to that because that does sound to me, if social values are just changed on a regular basis, which they are, does sound reasonable. Now, what would the counter argument to that be? Well, they have massive double standards in how all of this is going to be implemented because there is no reasonable standard of interaction.
If you are a hypersensitive, fainting couch feminist, there is no kind of interaction that might not potentially be offensive and discriminatory and damaging. If I make a sexual joke, okay, maybe I'm a man, I have to accept that I can no longer make a sexual joke. Can I come to your cubicle and make a non-sexual joke?
Maybe the woman is going to say that that made her feel undermined in some way or vulnerable or harassed. Can I contradict an idea that you have in a committee meeting when we're throwing around ideas? Can I interrupt you if I feel that you're going on too long? Can I point to you and say, what do you think? I mean, there's just so many different things. There was a recent case that you may have heard of, because I think it was fairly well known.
This is a meeting, I'm doing a few mango file on this. There's a meeting of a body called the International Studies Association. So this is people who do, you know, conflict analysis and basically experts in international affairs. They have a yearly meeting. They they're meeting last year in last April 2018.
They were at the conference and it was in a hotel. They were all in an elevator going up and a woman, a professor, a professor of gender studies asked everybody what floor they would like and she was you know standing near the whatever it's called and so she was going to punch everybody's floor in. One elderly man said ladies lingerie. I guess this is a joke referring to the time when there used to be
Is that an intolerable off-limits assault on a female sensibility? This woman felt it was.
confront him about it in the moment but she complained to the International Studies Association, I don't know, the body that makes decisions about membership and conduct and everything and they decided that he had contravened their code of conduct and that he would have to apologize to her. He didn't feel he wanted to apologize because he didn't feel he'd done anything wrong
and so he refused to apologize and that's it he's he's out of the the organization now that that person does not strike me as a sort of person she of course feels that you know she's striking a blow for women's dignity and what he said was you know clearly completely socially unacceptable that i don't want that person or a person with that kind of mentality adjudicating what kinds of interactions
adult scholars can have at a conference, because that is a person who would never be satisfied. That is not a reasonable person. That's not somebody that could ever really be satisfied. I can imagine that that person would find all sorts of reason to feel aggrieved and upset over however she was treated in the course of various academic conversations. What if you challenged her interpretation? Would she see that as
What if you challenged her feminist reading of some kind of situation? Anything would make a person like that. Well, you get accused of that just by challenging people's feminist opinions that you are inciting violence. Yeah, sure. Anytime you challenge anything that a feminist deeply believes, it's seen as a kind of personal assault with widespread damaging consequences.
So I don't want to live in that world. I mean, I guess it might be possible to imagine what that world would look like. And a feminist would say that's better than having to live, you know, with the day in day out sexism of the society we used to have, which I don't believe ever existed. You know, I've talked to all sorts of men who grew up in the 1950s and 60s. And they said, you know, there was never a time when it was acceptable.
to be really crude and horrible to women. There were always codes of conduct. And sure, some people broke them. But in general, people work things out. But this is the thing that the feminist and cis has never existed. And now, supposedly, it's as bad as it ever was. But yeah, I don't want those people in charge of human interaction.
So do they see it as being as bad now as it was back then, or do they see a line of progress? And if so, how do they measure that progress? Well, I, you know, you'd have to ask them. I don't know. I mean, I think many of them would say that nothing has really improved. Or that it's now changed. It's subtle. It's systemic. Yes.
Yeah, now it's much more subtle. Now it's microaggressions. Now it's, you know, a whole different range of ways that men assert their dominance over women or, you know, undermine women's sense of self or whatever. Yeah, that's what they'd say. That the sexism is constant at the form it takes probably changes. I've talked to another man speaking of the same association, the International Studies Association. He
Often it is older men who maybe don't quite understand all the nuances of what you're allowed to say and what you're not allowed to say. But that's always been the case. That's always been the case. Older people have always been disconnected with the younger generation in almost every respect. And what I find remarkable is the entire lack of tolerance or compassion on the part of younger women towards these older men.
This fellow, he was asked to be what's called a discussant, which means basically that he's tasked with, once there's a panel discussion, he's supposed to respond and ask them questions about their papers. And he was an expert in military intervention and they were all talking about women in conflict zones. So the first thing he did was he wanted to write an email to these women
and say, you know, I'm the discussant and just kind of introduce himself. So he wrote an email and the subject was hello women. I don't think he said ladies. I think he said women. Hello women. Immediately he got an email back from the chair of the panel saying, you know, some or all of these members may identify as women, but they don't appreciate, you know, being addressed in this kind of way. So he said, okay, okay, you know, I mean, he just didn't get it.
And then at the actual discussion, he questioned their feminist framework. They were all speaking from a feminist point of view. He questioned their feminist framework and asked them various questions about very basic things. Aren't women actually better off
in the West now as a result of centuries of progress than they are in certain other countries. They were outraged at the racism and the sexist assumptions. They complained about him too and he was investigated for some kind of vague harassment or just failure to respect their feminist principles.
What these cases to me indicate is that there's no way that you could ever, if you tried to create a rule book telling people what exactly constitutes respectful interaction, because that's what it always says in these codes of conduct. What constitutes treating someone with respect?
I might feel that treating me with respect means you never contradict me. You never challenge my ideas. Somebody else might say, that's not respect, that's condescension. I want to be challenged. I want to be challenged to defend my ideas and be treated like an equal. So basically there's no way that you could ever know for sure that you're not offending someone in a way that they're going to perceive to be sexist.
For one thing, I don't agree that the utopian ideal of a world in which people never just sort of spontaneously say things to one another, I don't want to live in that world. I don't think things are bad as they are. I trust my fellow human beings to, if they say something appropriate,
Well, you also just said something interesting, which is trust. I trust my fellow human beings. And something I've been researching with regards to trust. First of all, trust is the number one resource of any country that's productive. And second, you can't have trust without allowing the other person the freedom to fail. To fail, exactly. Otherwise, there's no trust. That's why when you fall backwards, it doesn't mean anything if you're falling backwards on the couch. You have to have someone else there who could move their arms and you can get hurt.
yeah exactly so in order for there to be trust that means that you have to allow the other person to potentially hurt you yeah now if you're never allowing that then there is no trust no there's no trust and enforcement there's only exactly one road to walk down yeah it's going to be a very totalitarian environment and you're still not going to achieve what you say you want to achieve because you know there's a million ways i can offend you okay so part of the problem seems to me to be that
I have a problem already with
Well, I have a certain problem already with even trying to define what would be, you know, because in different contexts, you know, different things are appropriate and, you know, it's so incredibly complicated how human beings interact. And if we're not going to accept that women and other traditionally marginalized peoples are adult enough to be able to say in the moment, I would prefer that you not, you know, blah, blah, blah,
and deal with it in the moment. If we're not going to trust that people can do that, then I don't know that we have a basis to go forward at all. And that's what it seems that so many of these movements want to create is some sort of overlord, some sort of body that they control that determines when
others have stepped over the line but the line is constantly shifting and the person who is offended doesn't have to take responsibility for being offended because they can often you know what what these people want often is to be able to complain anonymously they don't even want to take responsibility for their own anger and hurt I mean it's
It just seems to me it's completely unworkable. It sounds like, I hate to make an exaggeration and point to the 1950s or 1940s, but I believe in East Germany, one-third of people were government informants. Yes, exactly, were informants. Yeah, and that's exactly what
Have you studied much about communism in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s? Not to the extent of an expert like Jordan Peterson. I mean, I was always fascinated by, as I think many people are, by those regimes and how they came into being and how people adapted themselves to them. And I do see that that's what we're often doing now, is just adapting ourselves to this ever-increasing panoply of rules of conduct.
and just trying to not be run over by this machine that is being created. Can you tell me about how the humanities are corrupt? Can you expound on that? Well, I think the basic thing I would say is that they're corrupt in that they're no longer about the subjects they claim to be about, that they've all been corrupted by
Let's restate that, but say humanities. Just in case I want to cut to this, I don't want people to say, what is she saying when she says they are corrupt? Yeah, the humanities, I think, have stopped being about the particular subject. So art history is not really about art anymore, not fundamentally. Art is the means to the end of social justice. That's the same thing for literary studies.
It's the same for various other classical studies even now. I've got a story about classical studies but I won't bore you with it. They all have essentially surrendered a commitment to the subject itself as valuable. We used to say that studying English literature was valuable in itself because there's something about reading great works of literature that
gives you access to the human experience in all of its complexity, and that in itself is valuable. You learn something about what it means to be human. You don't necessarily approach it from one particular angle, you approach it from a variety of angles, but it's valuable in itself to know this body of work, to read and to think about the human experience over time.
Now we read literature to understand the experience of marginalized peoples and to strive for social justice. So it has been, I don't want to say hijacked, but that's the word that comes to mind, but it's become less important
For its own self, it's a means to an end of this larger activist goal of becoming a better person, becoming a social justice warrior. So why is this such a big problem? Why isn't it just some esoteric squabblings between pedantic philosophers in university? Why does it not just stay there? Because it doesn't. Because, of course, if you believe that, once you embrace that ideology, you're not going to leave it in university. You're going to take it out wherever you go.
And because if your goal is to radically transform the world, and if you believe the world is a terrible, terrible place where all of these injustices are taking place every day, then of course you're not going to leave it. It's never going to be just an intellectual endeavor. It has to be an activist endeavor. It has to be something that you carry with you into everyday life. And these social justice warriors, these radical leftists,
have not been content to just attack the discipline of literary studies. They've gone after law. They're going after the core of Western civilization. For example? Well, they're interested in changing how we understand what the law is and how it should function. Changing the whole idea of what it means to live in a society governed by the rule of law. From what to what?
Well, feminist activists, for example, want to change, they want to essentially weaken the presumption of innocence in cases of sexual assaults, one of their primary goals, so that women don't have to, or that the system
doesn't have to prove a man guilty, that he will actually have to prove himself innocent. This is a fundamental transformation and this is seen as appropriate because women have for too long, according to feminists, not been able to get justice when they're sexually assaulted. So activists are taking their deeply held beliefs and taking them into all corners of the society.
Can you tell me how sexism has been redefined? I guess sexism has been redefined from explicit
clearly identifiable acts of injustice against women to something that is seen as systemic, that is present in all sorts of very subtle, often invisible forms of
objectification of demeaning of women, the creation of all sorts of invisible barriers to women. I'm kind of losing it now. It's okay. You can start over. Think about it. Think about it because I might want to just take this clear. I know this is a lot of pressure, but I want to include someone explaining what racism used to be. I know you're not talking about racism. That's not your field, but feminism
Well, I think the main thing is that it used to be something that could be very clearly measured. That it was specific and intentional acts of discrimination, bigotry or hatred against women.
Actions or or expressions or laws, you know that were discriminatory whereas now I think the idea is that it has become because
that kind of overt
In society as a whole, it's very difficult to point to legal instances of discriminatory treatment of women. In fact, what you find instead is cases where women are discriminated.
in favor of rather than against. Did you hear about Google and some woman was suing Google? Tell me about that. Well, I haven't read about it yet, but women in high tech are finally starting to speak out and to say that they've watched as highly qualified men are passed over for less qualified women and they're fed up with it. They think it's
I was talking about something else where I saw that a woman sued Google because she's being paid less than her male counterparts. Oh, I see. And then what happened was an investigation was conducted and it turns out that the men were being paid less. Yeah, I read about that too. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Well, I mean there are many cases in academia where there have been class action suits where women's pay has been raised across the board because they were in general being paid less
But it's far from clear that the reason they were being paid less had anything to do with sexism. There are all sorts of reasons why you might be paid, why one person might be paid more than another, even in academia, because you've taken on an administrative position, because you've done much more, because you've won a special award, you know, there's all sorts of reasons. And so this idea that sexism is to blame. And I guess that comes back then to your question about, you know, what is it about, you know, what has sexism become?
It's essentially become anything, any case where a woman can allege discrimination on the basis of any sort of unequal outcome. So I guess to simplify it, one could say that it has gone from being a case where one could point to inequality of opportunity that used to be where women were barred from certain things or whatever. Now it has become a case
of any time one can point to an unequal outcome, where the woman is disadvantaged, sexism is always what is alleged to be the cause. Only in cases, of course, where the woman is disadvantaged, you can also say, well, look, there are many, many more men in prison today than there are women. And nobody's going to say that because it's always been the case. I think it's 93 or 94 percent.
of prisoners are male. And if you ask a feminist about that, she'll say that's because men commit more crimes. But why are there more male Nobel Prize winners? Not because more men have done these brilliant things, it's because women were discriminated against. So there's always that double standard in operation.
You know, so if you find a case of a feminist will point to the number of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that's evidence that women are being held back because women do not operate or do not occupy 50% of those positions. But if you ask how many men and women are in, you know, coal mining or
Construction work or you know, whatever it happens to be work in the logging industry or the fishing industry with the very high Fatality and injury rates. Yeah And you say well, what how do you explain that? Well, that's a totally different thing and nobody is interested, but they would say that that's also the patriarchy acting
Yeah, they might, but they're not working very hard to get more women into those positions. I've never seen a group of women advocating that the number of women in logging be evened out so that more women can die or be maimed in these positions. So I guess that's probably maybe the truest definition is that we've gone from worrying about equality of opportunity and identifying barriers
to now worrying about equality of outcome. And whenever an outcome is seen to discriminate against women, sexism is what is alleged, even though it's impossible to prove that it's the case. And they use a little bit of sleight of hand here because they would say, we also actually care about equality of opportunity only, but we use evidence of the unequal outcomes as evidence. Evidence that there isn't equality of opportunity, exactly, yeah.
Yeah, even though you can never put your finger on in what way is a woman being held back from going into mathematics, they'll bring forward various types of arguments. So do you think feminists or the radical left, even though feminists are a particular subset of the radical left, let's talk about the radical left as a whole, do you think they care more about power or the destruction of the West? And this is something that I've been thinking about because they do talk about
The abolishment of ideals from the, yes, ideals from the Enlightenment. And that's the West, in a nutshell. Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, in its current form. And they seem to want to do away with that, but at the same time they want power. And so I wonder, do they care more about power? So that is, if you gave them this choice. You can have power, but the West is
Strengthened somehow whatever that means the hierarchies remain, but you have power or we can have the destruction of the West So no hierarchies, but you have no power which actually would be the case of you if there were no hierarchies because no one would have power Which one do you think they would want? Well, I don't think that they would see that it has to be a choice their power would be used to destroy
I've come to a similar conclusion. I see power as the means to destroying the West and not
I'm not sure how it is that all of these people, many of whom have very comfortable, affluent, secure, prosperous lives in the West, how they come to so deeply
Disassociate themselves from it to resent it so deeply to hate it to to prefer any other system even systems that have resulted in the deaths of
10s of millions of people to the Western system. Well, there's that Peterson's Slavoj Zizek debate recently. I don't know if you've seen it. Yeah, I didn't see it. No, but I heard about it. But at one point Peterson said that there is a bloody violent revolution. There would be a bloody violent revolution if so and so happened. And as soon as he said that, then the audience were like, yeah. And then he just paused and he was like, he didn't say anything. He didn't comment on it. But they're just clapping for bloody violent revolution. Yeah, it is quite astounding, really. It is astounding.
And I think there is an element of a death wish in that too. There's a kind of admiration for murderous regimes that kill dissidents because they're strong. And I think something happens to people in the West, a sickening contempt for the
the softness of
you know, relatively speaking, that simply isn't the case, that all other regimes have done a much poorer job of guaranteeing, you know, the basic opportunities of their citizens than Western democratic capitalism has done. But there is this, I think, a deep desire to see destruction and even maybe to be destroyed themselves.
There's a, I'm thinking of Jamie's book, there's a book, have you read Jamie Glazov's United in Hate? What's the subtitle? Do you remember? I can't remember the subtitle, but the main title is United in Hate. And that's what he posits. I haven't read the book now in a decade at least, but he posits that something happens in the radical leftist.
that propels him to identify with murderous regimes, actually because they are murderous, even though ostensibly the reason for the identification is because these are, you know, fairer, juster regimes, but that there is a deep knowledge that they actually aren't and that the radical leftist actually falls in love with violence and would go so far as to prefer to be killed
by one of these regimes, or at least to have his individuality erased in union with the collective.
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It's something there, it's some sort of deep disconnect from his own individuality in a free society and a desire for union with the collective. He was writing that about his experience or he's writing that about other people? Based on his study, especially of the Soviet Union and of Westerners who covered up
the crimes of the Soviet Union, various leftists who traveled to the Soviet Union and saw what was going on, or at least had a sense of what was going on, but lied about it when they came back, things like that. And, you know, he looks at celebrity leftists and various people who have been in love with, you know, with North Vietnam, with North Korea. There's always people willing to Sean Penn, you know,
I think went to North Korea and thought it was a wonderful place. Or no, he went to Iran, I think, and carried water for that regime. And there are always these people who, although you would think that they would feel some kind of basic gratitude to the country that has given them so much, but actually hate it and would like to see it destroyed, even if that resulted in their own destruction. It's deeply irrational.
Yeah, this ingratitude is something that I see even when it comes to literary work. It's not that Shakespeare is great and it sucks that he was also sexist or that there's sexist elements in his plays. It's not that. It's that Shakespeare is a white male and he's sexist and we despise him and I hate him.
Yeah, and a deep rejection of one's own intellectual and cultural inheritance. There's a celebration of the fact that there are other people who are racist because then they can point to them as the enemy and the source of their woes. It's a bizarre combination of
superiority because you're one who sees the racism and sexism of your own culture and you rise above it, you fight it, etc. So there's a kind of self-love in that. But there's also this deep self-hatred, I think, in that you become alienated from your own people, your own history, your own communities. It's a bizarre combination.
To recapitulate, what do you think is the line that separates the moderate left from the extreme left? I guess I would say the main... Okay, now I remember what you said before was something like when they go too far with expanding the domain of what constitutes an expression of hurt or a feeling of hurt and that is too vague because what's too large?
so if you could somehow make it more clear I think the main thing I would say about where the left definitely goes too far is that one it's the identification of words with violence and therefore a argument made for extreme censorship of words and the other thing is through the identification of words with violence
Therefore, there is a justification of using violent methods against those with whom one disagrees. And we see that in, you know, riots that have taken place in various places in Berkeley, for example, where a professor of situational ethics threw a bike lock at somebody for simply, you know, speaking in a way that he found repulsive or
or that he condemned. So I think those would be the two things I would say. The identification of words with violence and therefore the argument being made that those words can legitimately be censored, that whole swaths of
This course can be called off limits because they supposedly uphold an unjust status quo. Part of what the left often claims is that freedom of speech only should apply to what they identify as liberatory speech, not speech that reaffirms injustice. That goes way back to Marcuse.
The Canadian Supreme Court has tried to define hate speech and why a principle supporting freedom of speech doesn't apply to hate speech, but they just end up
You know, you can't write a logical explanation for why freedom of speech shouldn't apply to hate speech. They end up saying things like, well, hate speech doesn't contribute to freedom of speech. Therefore, it shouldn't be covered by freedom of speech because hate speech supposedly prevents others from being able to respond. And therefore it, you know, it isn't really free.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Okay, so now, this is pretty much for me. I had some questions that I was just personally interested in. Why don't you come in? Yeah, I'm still recording, so this will just be for me. You come and sit down. I need a sip of water. I should have got something. Maybe get Kurt his, yeah, ginger ale would be great. Just hot water.
I'm sorry, I don't think I was very good. Were you worried about how you performed? Yeah, I mean I was all muddled and I'm just terrible in those situations. Thank you. Some of what I wanted to ask you about was how, you're actually pretty quick on your feet. Even though you said that you're an introvert, which I am an introvert too. You are really? I don't think you think I am. No, you don't seem like it at all. You seem very gregarious to me.
and extroverted
They say people become more introverted over time. The definition of an introvert is that when you're out in the party, you'd rather go back home and recharge. Exactly, yeah. I find that. I get exhausted really quickly. I can spend months at home and never speak to someone else. We're like that too, both of us. I prefer that. Okay, so what I wanted to note is
On that Steve Paikin panel, was that your only Steve Paikin panel? Yeah, yeah. So the only lady beside you knows Brady. Yeah. And for me, if I'm being attacked, now I don't know as much about the subject matter as you, but I would get flummoxed and I wouldn't know if we were together. That's what I got, that's what I got. But you did a fantastic job. Wow, that's very nice. Yeah, Justin, he's very articulate, but he's very good. He was so composed. Thank you, thank you.
Did you see Karen Strong's comments about you?
Well, Karen's drawn would never be flummoxed. She's so good. But no, I did feel, I mean, there's pictures
There's some like film footage in that panel discussion where I'm just sitting there. I'm kind of I'm staring ahead. I just felt so I can't even describe it.
It's not that I don't like confrontation. I'm very dissatisfied with my own ability to respond. It's just like you said, I get flustered, flummoxed, I can't think of any words.
my vocabulary which you know when I'm just sitting on the couch I feel like I have a you know pretty much I might have to think for a while we always forget words but you know pretty much I can think of words but yeah in the moment it's like my vocabulary reduces to about one-tenth of its actual size it didn't present you properly
I was there and they made her up as if she was some kind of Japanese mannequin. She looked like a Japanese mannequin. Oh, they put on a whole bunch of makeup. I really lost it. She looked like she'd just stepped out for Halloween. I said, you can't do this because she's beautiful and just let her be. And then I was really upset with the way Steve Paik and I always call him the Pekinese. I can't help it.
the way in which he negotiated that confrontation, that discussion and I was really upset because he didn't seem to give Janice the opportunity to respond properly and they were two against her and Justin who was in the middle was pro and con you know it was I don't think it was a fair setup so afterwards I went into the back room the
green room or whatever it happens to be. And I verbally attacked Peyton. Oh yeah? He just took it with a neutral face? No, no, his Slavic, his Slavic, almost threatened to beat me up and I let him have it. And then I had this long email conversation exchange with
Even if I'd had more time, I wouldn't have been any good. No, because there were two others.
And Justin Trottier, you know, he was presumably cafe on her side, but on the other hand, he was attacking Anne Coulter. I would maybe agree with it now, because I think she's gone off the deep end. But at that time, she was an ally. And I just thought the whole way in which the proportions were arranged was completely, no, no, it was completely, you know, non-democratic, let us say, you know. Even if I'd had more time, I wouldn't have
I wouldn't, I couldn't, I didn't equip myself well and I wouldn't have been able to and I still don't really think I would be able to. It's just one of my weaknesses. In the moment when I really want to be able to marshal an argument, my mind just goes blank. I can hardly, you know, I've been thinking, yeah, I've been thinking about these issues for five years now. I've read all sorts, you know,
And in the moment I can hardly remember a name, I can't remember examples.
My ability to access any word in any order and even just I can even construct false arguments just to disprove the other person. Because I used to do stand-up comedy and so that's what you do as a comedian. Oh my goodness. Proving what's false.
And then I get to laugh like Seinfeld does that. I'm going to tell you why this is ridiculous. And then he proves it and usually there's some element of false, well there's some element of truth too, but it's ridiculous. I just proved something to be true that you know is not true and then you laugh. There's something incongruity. Right, incongruity. So that's what stand-ups do. But I can't do that when, I've never really been attacked though, although I do have someone in my family who's a part of the radical left and
She's also a part of my family so I can't just berate her. I have two sisters and so on, we don't talk to each other. I also found that whenever I talk to her, if I talk to her instead of in a manner that's...
that's conducive of conflict instead if it's a dialectic like we're just trying to get to some shared truth then the conversation goes so much smoother for both people i'm more articulate she is as well i understand so it's just better thinking okay yeah there's something that i don't i hold a partial truth you hold a partial truth what is just both you know some shared negotiation yeah you were just articulating
Is that why sometimes one doesn't rise to the challenge of an interview in the full way that one would like to? It's because there's too much information. There's just too much evidence to deal with at one time. It's like juggling medicine balls. You don't know what you're going to go. For example, this argument that you brought up or this question you brought up about
and yet you were discussing about does hate speech, oppression, unpleasant things said about other people, does it really affect one in such a way that one is no longer able to respond properly and as you said reduces the accidental dimension of your life and so on. I mean a perfect example of why that is false is Judaism.
I grew up in a little French-Canadian town, up there in Quebec. I was beaten up constantly for being a Muzi-Jewish, a bad Jew. I still have certain scars and that pebble there, slingshot, all kinds of stuff. My stepsister, to get into McGill, she had numerous causes. She had to have 80%.
other people would get in at 60 percent, 55 percent, but she had to have 80 percent. In my case it was just about that time too when I went to... So we studied hard and we led our classes and we were admitted afterwards that was dropped. You look, for me the chief example, it was so beautiful when you think of this Barron Bing High School in Montreal on St. Urban Street.
That was the very poor Jewish district. How did they make a living at that time, all these immigrants? They sold junk, they had little grocery stores in the front room of their little hovels and so on. Who came out of that? Our greatest poet, Irving Leighton, our greatest novelist, Mordecai Richler, one of our great, actually though he was NDP, politicians, David Lewis. They were all Jews.
grew up in absolute crushing penury, but had the Torah, the book behind them, the Bible behind them, they read, they studied, they did all kinds of ridiculous things too, and maybe things that weren't so acceptable. But these people, look what they became. And then when you get 0.08% of the world population winning 8% of the Nobel prizes,
And these are the people who have been oppressed since Mesopotamian times. And there are lots of stupid Jews. Arguably the most oppressed group. In the world. It's the only religion that has never ceased to exist. That's true.
So what happens there? People who have been attacked, who have been brutalized, who have been condemned, who have been reduced to non-entity, who have had to travel from country to country, who had their actual humanity questions, and their lives have been annihilated, these people
read steady whether it was Torah in synagogue or whether it was just the books at home or whether it was the sage grandfather whatever it happened to be and they made themselves through all that horror and terror and inflammatory rhetoric and devastation they made themselves into the leading intellectuals of our time also the great fools of our time too you know but there it is so
The attack on your sense of identity does not necessarily by any means mean that you're going to be deprivileged. It may mean, and it has for, it did for Irving, it did for Leonard Cohen, well, Leonard was rich, but he had his problems too. It did for David Lewis, it did for Mordecai Richler, it did for all these great writers of our time, and great scientists as well. What it did for them is they rose above.
All that condemnation and denunciation and all that, all that oppression and prejudice that they had to face. I mean, I grew up in Saint Agath. I couldn't swim in certain beaches. No Jews allowed. This is what I grew up with. I was ambushed every second day on a long walk to my high school and my public school by the French kids around me. And, you know, I even thought Maud-Z-Juif, damn Jew. I spoke French almost before I spoke English, but I thought it was one word.
They would call me a Moudzi Jouef, a damn Jew. It was only later on I realized there's two words, Moudzi, damn, Jouef, Jew. So it was one word, you know, because I got it all the time. Well, I don't know, maybe I didn't rise above those challenges, but I published 35 books. I represented Canada in the Department of External Affairs in Europe, stayed with ambassadors, lectured at universities. I have five degrees, which makes me unemployable at this point.
everything from a BA to a doctorate and three MA's and so on. What are the degrees then? My BA was in philosophy and English. My QMA was in drama and then I had a creative writing but that was just a joke just for salary purposes. I got a degree in education at the University of Sherbrooke
That was also a joke, but the degree is there, and I got my doctorate in North American Studies at Lyoskoschuk University in Debrecen, Hungary, where I've often lectured. How fast do you both read? I read one book a year. I mean, slow, slow, slow. Let's say you're here to read this. How long would this one page take you? It depends. I don't know. I'm pretty fast, I think. I don't know. I'm not sure. Have you always been fast? Yeah, I think so. Ever since you were a kid? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And what about you? Very slow.
Very, very slow. So you're faster at writing than you are at reading? No, I'm slow at both. I'm very slow at both. Because everything I write, for example, a thing just went up now at PJ Media Town Hall, it's up today or yesterday, called Life in the Biodome, which starts off, you know, when we went back, we were in Vancouver a month or two ago, and Jana stuck me to the biodome, and I thought, here's a metaphor for Western Civ.
but it was sitting there for the longest time because you know i think i couldn't come across some way of dealing with it and eventually i started to do it and sometimes it takes a day or two but it's because i've been thinking about it all of a sudden for two months and even when i don't think of it and janice knows this it comes up in my dreams i'm totally unconscious of it the words come up phrases come up
So I know there is something called the mind behind the mind. I've often said this. You have your mind, so-called, whatever it is that observes and makes decisions and judgments and so on. But behind that mind, there is another mind, which is you and not you. And it's that mind that never ceases, never sleeps. It creates your dreams.
She said we forget a word sometimes. Oh yeah. Do you ever have that? Two days before I wake up at three and say it's Lily and Hellman. Yeah. Two, three days later. I don't know. I haven't been thinking about it. So we have that mind that is a perpetual motion machine, constantly revolving and thinking behind the mind that is doing all the other things like right now.
And that's the mind. I don't know if everybody has that, I presume. It must be a natural human phenomenon. But I know I have it and I'm infinitely grateful for it because without that, what would I do? You know, it's what we call inspiration, it's what we call magic, it's what you call being in the zone. We have all these terms for it, you know. She has it too. She's an amazing writer. I mean, I can't believe she'll sit down with all this. Very slow, though. Very slow. No, well, because we go over things a million times.
Yeah, I don't even know what it is. My preference is actually to print things out, whatever it is I'm reading and responding to. I don't even know what my process is. I just start writing, but then I go over it and over it and over it and over it. And you construct your sentences. Does it come out of you in the same way that it is read? No, no, we hire a construction.
I don't know how I do it but I revise and revise and revise. I mean I really, Steve and I, you know with the videos we often talked about you know getting
Doing a certain number of videos that are on a contemporary subject, so if some issue breaks, try to do it right away while everybody's still.
I just can't do it. I've done it. I've tried. Like I really have a great admiration for journalists who do that because I find I can't do it. I'm very small. No, I'm interested. I just, I can't really, often I don't even know exactly what my argument is. You know, I've got an idea. I've got points I want to make, but I don't know. Like when, when I'm really happy with a piece of writing, it's when I feel that every part
fits together and it all makes one, not original, I mean nothing's really original, but what I feel is my original contribution.
And you know, and the ideal, which doesn't always happen even sometimes when I've worked on something for weeks, but the ideal is that it all, like it's intricately, it seems really natural the way it flows, but that it all works together and the various parts, you know, one part leads into another, and then that counter points off this, and then it all comes together with my final point.
But that's so hard. You see, we go back and forth, and we listen to everything she does. I don't know how many times, but she reviews it. This is one of the... All the different versions. And it's not all of it. It's just one of them. All of them are listed. Yeah. But everything, that's why we can't be journalists. Because you've made every word. And of course, you remember it for the synthesis and for computing.
like you try to make it seem simple and straightforward really because often the way I first write is quite turgid and long sentences and too many words you know long phrases all very complicated and then part of the revision process has to do with
it seems very natural and very straightforward, but so much work. I really admire it. Some journalists can just write one draft and
And that's it. And it reads really well and it makes their point and is well presented, but I can't do that. Often my stuff is really turgid and overly complex and not clear and maybe I'm going in a number of different directions and I haven't really decided how all those different directions work together. And so yeah, I'm constantly reworking. And it's really, it's fascinating. I mean, it is a fascinating process because sometimes I'll work all day on it and it's just, it's no good.
Going doesn't it doesn't know what it wants to do. I've got one point here It doesn't really connect with this other point and I don't even know what the relationship is And then I'll go to bed and like David was saying the mind behind the mind or whatever I'll wake up in the morning. I know exactly what it is I've figured it out and maybe it's just one sentence at the very beginning that then everything else Somehow fits together. All right, I see how that first point connects with the second point And so yeah, but it's just takes forever
yeah so i which is amazing because when you sit down and you just start writing i can't do that that's not true i need silence and i have to i have to take a contract on steve at the other side with his lawyer and go crazy that's not true he does that too no
But yeah, if I could I would do way more. Like I wish I could write.
way faster because so there's so many interesting things to write about but i have to let so many things go by because i
How much of your writing is research versus writing?
Yeah, there's that. I mean there's so many things to know and yeah, that can take forever. But that isn't, it's not so much that. I don't, you know, I do research but I don't extensively research. A lot of my stuff is fairly straightforward. I'm either dealing with a specific incident
that I want to say something about. Or sometimes I'm responding to a number of articles that are making some kind of claim about women in society or whatever that I want to counter. And so the thing that really takes the time is just figuring out
How to present it?
in an hour, you know, a quick response saying, you know, why this is wrong. I just can't do it. Like in the moment, often I'll, I just get so angry reading. That's part of it too. Or maybe it's more anxious, but it's both. Like I get angry and anxious. I think, Oh,
how like this is just nonsense so much of the stuff that's written is just you know it's it's fantasy or or you know it's ridiculous but to figure out how exactly to respond to it I'm often kind of at a loss I have to sit with it there's Megan oh yeah yeah anyway so yeah so so like there was you know there was a famous example
This woman, she's a university professor as so many of them are. Her name was Susanna Walters and she wrote an article about a...
About a year ago, or more than a year ago, called Why Can't We Hate Men? And it was actually not ironic, not joking, not anything. It was just a straightforward statement of why she hates men and why she thinks that's legitimate. Anytime you come across these, so there's Peggy McIntosh's white friend video. Yeah. Oh, do you want me to send you a few? Yeah. Because I'm going to at one point in the documentary just list off
I guess snippets after snippets of examples. Yeah. Okay. Sure. I'll send you some things. Hey, hi Megan. Come on in. We're just filming something for me and maybe it'll go on behind the scenes. If she approves, you'll look at it before it goes out. And we're done. This one died, which is fine. It died about one minute before we needed to end, so it was fine. Oh, okay. That's not bad. It's okay. Okay. Yep. And you were saying, oh, you know what I was thinking about is
That lady who's sitting next to you, the lady in the back, she was saying that one, it wasn't a violation of free speech what those people did, which is technically true in terms of law. It wasn't a violation of free speech to shut someone else's free speech up, but it definitely was a violation of the university's principles. Yeah, sure. So there's that. Yeah. I mean, that's just what do you say to that? See, I was dumbfounded. And the second is that she said, well, look, you benefited. Yeah. But then you can also make the counter claim. Well, what about the people of Me Too?
they're benefiting yeah exactly I mean what a ridiculous thing to say yeah so if my leg is cut off I will probably receive a lot of attention too I might be interviewed by by CBC or whatever yeah exactly yeah the guy cut off his arm so I'm gonna say that that was really a good thing then that it happened it benefited yeah I mean that's just ridiculous yeah
Yeah, I mean, what do you say to that? I mean, I didn't even know what to say in a way that it's exactly the same argument that was used for Lindsay Shepherd, you know, who was treated so terribly. And then a bunch of people said, Oh, but she benefited. She received far more attention than she would have otherwise. And everybody knows who she is. Yeah, but
That also could be an indication of how pathological the system is, that when you draw attention to it, people realize, okay, we need to pay more attention to it. So it's not necessarily that it's a net, I think it is a net positive. It ended up, so I do believe that when you speak your mind and you tell what you think to be true in a courageous manner like yourself or Lindsay Sheppard or Jordan Peterson or Brett Weinstein, Weinstein, I don't know. Yeah, I think it's Steen but I'm not sure.
that somehow therefore the injustice or the wrong is in any way lessened.
Because something good came out of it because you drew attention to it and people noticed you when you spoke about it. It's just bizarre. Yeah, it was all of the suggestion was that one would plan for these things to happen because they would help.
I'm going to be interviewing Debra So. You know Debra So? Actually, I don't know if I'm going to be interviewing her. I messaged her a long time ago about this documentary before I started interviewing anybody and she said, yes, let's do it. And then I just never contacted her again because I wasn't sure who she was. I just had a list of people I should contact. I contacted them to see who would get back to me and then I thought that she was somebody who wasn't
Credible I didn't know which I didn't check into her credentials. So I was like, okay, let me interview these other people first But now that I researched her. Oh, she has a yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah the sexual dimorphism between the differences between men and women neurologically, which is extremely interesting
It's very sex-positive apparently. That's what she says. I think sex should be talked about more. That goes opposite to the Jordan Peterson point of view, which has also turned out to my point of view, which is that sex is extremely serious and you shouldn't treat it as if there's such a thing as casual sex because you can't disentangle emotions.
Yeah.
Yeah, all based on what the woman wants and whether it's a positive experience for the woman. So if it's something she wants and she enjoys, then it's good for her to have a free for all. But if she then changes her mind afterwards and said it was damaging in some way, then all of a sudden it's sexual misconduct. It's totally crazy. Yeah.
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"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned? What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock."
},
{
"end_time": 106.664,
"index": 4,
"start_time": 96.834,
"text": " Alright, hello toe listeners, Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now."
},
{
"end_time": 133.422,
"index": 5,
"start_time": 107.398,
"text": " Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unified field theory of business. Whether you're a bedroom inventor or a global game changer, Shopify smooths your path. From a garage-based hobby to a bustling e-store, Shopify navigates all sales channels for you. With Shopify powering 10% of all US e-commerce and fueling your ventures in over"
},
{
"end_time": 157.722,
"index": 6,
"start_time": 133.422,
"text": " One hundred and seventy countries. Your business has global potential and their stellar support is as dependable as a law of physics. So don't wait. Launch your business with Shopify. Shopify has award winning service and has the Internet's best converting checkout. Sign up for a one dollar per month trial period at Shopify dot com slash theories. All lowercase that's Shopify dot com slash theories."
},
{
"end_time": 189.07,
"index": 7,
"start_time": 159.787,
"text": " Approximately 1.5 years ago, I interviewed Janice Fiamengo. This was in preparation for a film that I've written and directed called Better Left Unsaid. It's an upcoming documentary about to be released in one month. The trailer for which is below and the links to see the film are below. It's all about when does the left go too far or extremism on the left, though we do explore extremism on the right. This interview is from when I was less experienced as an interviewer. I was younger. I was a whippersnapper. I was nervously interrupting in an attempt to impress Janice."
},
{
"end_time": 218.507,
"index": 8,
"start_time": 189.07,
"text": " Alright, I'm here with Janice with the unassailable, impregnable,"
},
{
"end_time": 249.019,
"index": 9,
"start_time": 219.718,
"text": " insurmountable, ineluctable, insuperable, Janice Villamengo. Do you say that for everyone? No. You can see I put them all online. It's true. I didn't remember that. Okay. Tell me about your writing process when it comes to these Studio Brule videos, or however you pronounce it. Yeah, Studio Brule, I think is how Steve pronounces it. My writing process, well,"
},
{
"end_time": 270.538,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 249.019,
"text": " You mean how it all begins? How I get the idea from the first place? Yes, so you come up with some idea, you just notice it online and you then start to write about it and then it takes months? Sometimes, yeah. You know, people send me things all of the time now, you know, outrageous articles, incidents on campus where either"
},
{
"end_time": 296.664,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 270.828,
"text": " Speaker has been prevented from giving a talk or has been protested or someone has been fired from his job for what seemed to be kind of dubious reasons or a particular course in toxic masculinity that's being taught somewhere. All these kinds of things and so then I think about whether, you know, what I might be able to say about it and then I just"
},
{
"end_time": 312.927,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 296.664,
"text": " Sometimes I try to link it to an aspect of feminist critical theory or social justice theory in general. Can you give us a rundown of what current feminist theory is and critical theory as well?"
},
{
"end_time": 333.831,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 313.268,
"text": " Well, whatever I say, feminists will say it's much more subtle and sophisticated than that. But as far as I can see, feminist theory is pretty much the same as it has always been, which is that it believes that we live in a patriarchy, which is a society that is"
},
{
"end_time": 361.084,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 333.831,
"text": " male-centered and in which men control and oppress women through discourse, through law, through culture, through even jokes, and in which women are in some way objectified or prevented from being their full selves. I think that it's fair to say."
},
{
"end_time": 390.367,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 361.476,
"text": " feminism has become more sophisticated over time in that it claims now that it is intersectional, that's the really popular term, which means that there are all sorts of intersecting identity vectors that impact one's experience as a woman in patriarchy and also even impact one's experience as a man under patriarchy, depending on race,"
},
{
"end_time": 416.886,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 390.725,
"text": " on sexuality, on a whole variety of other identity categories. You started from a radical feminist to becoming the anti-feminist. How did that happen? Yeah, well, I've told that story now and it's hard to remember what's true from the story that I tell, but I think it was just a gradual process really of coming to see that that wasn't so."
},
{
"end_time": 445.162,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 417.534,
"text": " I mean, I think I always knew in some way that it wasn't so because feminism posits that the experience of being a woman or a minority in North American society is an experience of having your very existence in some way under threat, feeling that your central elements of your identity are subjugated and denied and scorned."
},
{
"end_time": 472.824,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 445.691,
"text": " And I never had that experience. From day one, I had many male and female mentors who encouraged me to use my gifts in whatever way was best for me. So I always knew that my experience was not an experience of being terrorized in any way or of having my central self questioned or denied."
},
{
"end_time": 499.753,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 473.422,
"text": " I believe that some people must have that experience because feminist theory says it is and there are all sorts of stories of horrific things happening to women and members of minority groups. So that was what I believed as a grad student really and the thing that was most significant I think about becoming a feminist was that"
},
{
"end_time": 521.783,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 500.384,
"text": " You have this exhilarating sense of rebelling against an oppressive tyranny and so you feel that everything you do and say from a feminist perspective is really valuable and really important and that you can silence a room by telling your victim's story or by"
},
{
"end_time": 543.473,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 522.142,
"text": " referring to somebody else's victim story. And it's a very, very powerful, it's a heady, exhilarating kind of rush to accuse others of not being aware of the suffering of people in the society and to feel that you're speaking on their behalf. So I really like that. I think because, you know, we all want to feel that we're"
},
{
"end_time": 562.278,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 543.985,
"text": " We're good in some way and that what we're doing matters. And so I was very much caught up in that. I marched and take back the night marches and I denounce things that feminists denounce as damaging to women."
},
{
"end_time": 591.22,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 562.5,
"text": " But then it just all began to, you know, it began to feel like a house of cards because I could, my experience had never been that. It had always been an experience of being treated with respect, with love, a feeling that my male friends, my male mentors, my male teachers obviously cared about me and wanted me to succeed and didn't want me to be hurt in any way and I wasn't hurt. So, and then I could see that when I became a teacher, I could see that"
},
{
"end_time": 601.561,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 591.988,
"text": " Women in my classes were not oppressed. They were full of self-confidence, even self-righteousness. And the men were not"
},
{
"end_time": 631.834,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 601.834,
"text": " privileged, you know, oppressive beings who scorned women. In fact, often they seemed kind of abashed and a bit ashamed and hesitant to speak and quite deferential to women. And in some ways I thought, well, that's good. It shows, you know, they're very respectful and kind and everything. But I also started to see they're being constantly told that they better be quiet and listen and that they're responsible for all these terrible things and that they should be ashamed about the, you know, the history of North American society and that somehow they were"
},
{
"end_time": 636.476,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 631.834,
"text": " responsible for so-called centuries of oppression"
},
{
"end_time": 666.34,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 636.852,
"text": " And so the whole enterprise at that point started to look dubious to me, because at least I felt it should be acknowledged that whatever the past had been, and even that I began to question, but whatever the past had been, even if we accepted the feminist story about the past, it was no longer that in the present, that was obvious. So what do you think motivates them, motivates the feminists to view the world in this way, even though, like you said, in classes at least, the men are the ones who are"
},
{
"end_time": 681.032,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 666.732,
"text": " more quiet and more docile compared to the women. Yeah. Well, I think it feels very good. It gives you a sense of purpose, gives you a reason to get up in the morning. It gives you a reason to"
},
{
"end_time": 700.367,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 681.425,
"text": " It makes you feel very courageous for speaking out against this so-called oppression. It gives you a sense of agency and it gives you a sense of power because you know that you can stand up in a room and say, my experience as a woman or my experience as a woman of"
},
{
"end_time": 712.176,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 700.367,
"text": " Color, my experience as a lesbian woman of color, whatever it is, and a hush will fall on the room. And whatever you say from that point is going to have incredible authority."
},
{
"end_time": 735.64,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 712.517,
"text": " And no one is going to dare to contradict you or to dismiss what you say after that. So, you know, who wouldn't enjoy that and claim it? And I think once you come to believe, I mean, that suggests that all of this is very insincere, which I think some of it is insincere, actually, but a lot of it is also sincere. It's a sincerely held belief."
},
{
"end_time": 764.889,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 735.93,
"text": " that this is the way the world is and once you believe that then you don't want to have someone you know you're not going to allow yourself to be talked out of that because then that would be to in some way surrender the the the righteousness of the struggle against oppression and it would be to side with the oppressors and of course nobody wants to do that so so you end up having to to keep on believing even when evidence is brought forward that your"
},
{
"end_time": 773.916,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 765.316,
"text": " What are some of the ways in which women are advantaged?"
},
{
"end_time": 797.329,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 774.599,
"text": " Well, they're advantaged in all sorts of ways. Specifically in academia, women have been advantaged for decades now through affirmative action hiring programs and through all sorts of special scholarships, special funding mechanisms to advance women's scholarship."
},
{
"end_time": 826.937,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 797.329,
"text": " you know in every way the Academy has has tried to demonstrate over the last 25 to 30 years that it is an inclusive place for women and that means that and I've sat on many hiring committees where it was clear that we wanted to hire women and we wanted to hire especially women of color, lesbians, etc. and so if you fit in one of those identity categories you had a huge advantage"
},
{
"end_time": 855.623,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 827.278,
"text": " I know some professors even in the STEM fields, so people would say, well, the STEM fields are unaffected, but I'm talking about professors in the STEM field who said, if there's an application for a professor and it's a man, they can reject it, but if it's a woman, they have to have a very, very, very good reason why they're rejected. Oh, yes, absolutely. Yeah. We had, we operated in the English department and I know that STEM fields now are the ones that are really feeling that pressure. It's called an equity protocol."
},
{
"end_time": 869.497,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 855.913,
"text": " and it means that if you have amongst the pool of applicants a number of women that yes not to hire the woman to hire a man over a woman you would have to you have to actually write"
},
{
"end_time": 886.118,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 870.145,
"text": " to the dean and explain why you made that decision."
},
{
"end_time": 910.828,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 886.118,
"text": " There is a Cornell study from a couple of years ago specifically looking at STEM because STEM has been the area where feminists have been most adamant that equity has failed, that women haven't been hired."
},
{
"end_time": 926.954,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 911.067,
"text": " So there was a very extensive, hundreds of universities surveyed that found that women were twice as likely to be hired as male applicants, even while feminists continue to insist that"
},
{
"end_time": 954.804,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 927.398,
"text": " more needs to be done. And there are all sorts of now women only positions also that are being advertised. So it's even more overt. The man doesn't even have a chance at all. In Australia, there have been many both in math and in physics, there have been women only positions advertised over the last few years. In Ireland, just this year, it was announced that over the next couple of years,"
},
{
"end_time": 976.63,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 955.52,
"text": " Ireland will hire many, many, a number of dozen of women only positions in an attempt to increase numbers."
},
{
"end_time": 997.108,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 977.125,
"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. What are some ways in which women are disadvantaged?"
},
{
"end_time": 1027.5,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 997.841,
"text": " You're talking to the wrong gal for that answer. What feminists will say, I don't think very many women who are not feminists will say this about their experience of academia, but I think what feminists will say is that they are treated differently as women, that they are condescended to, that people have different expectations of them as women."
},
{
"end_time": 1056.271,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1027.705,
"text": " you know, that they'll be assumed to be the secretary rather than the physics professor that they actually are, you know, that kind of thing. And they will claim that this is deeply devaluing, you know, that it really harms their ability to work in that environment, that it's a kind of microaggression is what they would say. And are there studies on that? Studies to validate what they said? So there are some studies that I know. How can it validate it though? I mean, if somebody thought I was a secretary,"
},
{
"end_time": 1082.415,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1057.602,
"text": " It would mean nothing to me. I mean, I suppose if from the time I was six years old, I had been given a message both subtly and overtly that I could never be a professor at a university, that would obviously have a damaging impact. But if the message I had received from my culture at large was you can be anything you want to be as long as you work hard at it,"
},
{
"end_time": 1108.916,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1082.79,
"text": " and occasionally someone assumed I was the secretary, I don't think it would have any impact at all. And I just don't see how anybody could actually legitimately claim that we live in a culture that discourages women from doing whatever they want to do. I've never met a man who wasn't enthusiastic about having women as colleagues as long as they were good enough. There are men who are resentful about all the"
},
{
"end_time": 1135.35,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1109.292,
"text": " I don't know of the specific studies but I've heard, now this may be from feminist sources, I don't remember where I heard this"
},
{
"end_time": 1152.022,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1135.691,
"text": " But if you have resumes that are sent out and they have female names versus men names and the men names are more likely to get called back. And same with sighted research. I'm not sure if that is true, but I want to know what your thoughts are. I mean, these studies, yeah, I've looked into some of those kinds of studies. There are also studies that"
},
{
"end_time": 1172.875,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1152.261,
"text": " I looked at one study, it was a very small sample size, and it made that claim. I think this was a particular study, and I can't remember the exact details, but I think it had to do with a hiring of a lab supervisor in some science discipline."
},
{
"end_time": 1201.476,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1173.234,
"text": " and the claim was that the male applicants on identical resumes were more likely to be chosen. There were all sorts of problems. It was a very small sample size. The median age of those who were making the choice was quite old, actually. It was, I think, 50 years old. There were questions about the cultural background of those who were making the selections."
},
{
"end_time": 1227.227,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1201.869,
"text": " There's also the possibility that, and this is sacrilege, but there's also the possibility that in some cases the experience of those making the choice had been that a male lab supervisor had actually been more successful in the past than female lab supervisors. So there might actually be a reason why. It wasn't just pure sexism, but"
},
{
"end_time": 1258.114,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1228.268,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, you know, there would have to be much more work done on a very large sample size, I think, before anybody could determine conclusively anything like that. Something I've been asking myself is, what evidence would have to exist in order for me to believe that there is systemic racism? As much as I look into systemic racism and the claims of the radical left, I don't see that it holds much water. And then I thought, okay, well, the best evidence that I've seen is the resumes between blacks and whites"
},
{
"end_time": 1287.585,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1258.302,
"text": " You know, with the whiteness of the names. I don't know if you've seen that study. It's similar, where you send out resumes to different agencies and then the ones with black names get called less. But then if they change their black name to a white name, like Connor instead of O'Shane, then they're more likely to get called back. But when I looked at the studies, the actual studies, also Asian names got called less. So then you would expect that Asians would do worse in society, but then Asians tend to do better."
},
{
"end_time": 1312.005,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1287.927,
"text": " I was thinking more too about what you're saying about the female names on applications. We're now in a situation too where"
},
{
"end_time": 1324.053,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1312.637,
"text": " A person and the thing that that that I remember the feminist claim to is that both women and men if they were making the choice about this lab supervisor tended to choose the man."
},
{
"end_time": 1350.811,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1324.48,
"text": " So, you know, what does that say about sexism if women make the same choices that men make? I mean, that gets really complicated. So then we have all this emphasis by feminists on hiring more women, but what difference would it make then if women themselves tended to prefer men in certain circumstances? But to go back to that, if you could prove, and I think it's very, very difficult, but if you could prove that there was a bias,"
},
{
"end_time": 1377.142,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1351.903,
"text": " How could you prove what the source of the bias was? That's the real difficulty because I think we now live in a society where if I were a man and I was looking at two candidates and one was a woman and one was a man, I don't want to get into the racial thing because that seems different, but as a man, I would be very reluctant to hire a woman."
},
{
"end_time": 1399.155,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1377.688,
"text": " If the man was equally qualified, precisely because we live in this situation where every man knows he's just one false accusation away from reputational and career suicide. Who could blame a man from deciding he doesn't want the hassle? Sure, maybe he loves women and you know, in general what thinks they're"
},
{
"end_time": 1425.845,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1399.974,
"text": " potentially just as brilliant as any man, but he knows that we now live in the Me Too era and have lived in that era for a lot longer than Me Too has been in action, where if he just happens to get one of the few women who is a little bit crazy about these kinds of things, who's hypersensitive about perceived sexism, and she makes an accusation against him, it's over for him. You know, his life is destroyed."
},
{
"end_time": 1451.954,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1426.305,
"text": " Who could blame a man for wanting to protect himself against that kind of grief? So sometimes, you know, feminist initiatives might have all sorts of unintended consequences. And I would think that resentment on the part of men and also, well, caution about exposing themselves to the hazards of having women in the workplace"
},
{
"end_time": 1471.63,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1452.329,
"text": " Those would be possible unintended consequences. So the resentments on both sides then because there's as far as I see from the feminist theorists, it seems as though they're motivated by resentment and then that engenders resentment on the side of the men, which then breeds more resentment on the side of the women. Yeah, it's a vicious circle as far as I can see."
},
{
"end_time": 1501.169,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1471.766,
"text": " What can we do? Yeah, I don't know. Does it have to be the men that stops resenting the women or the women that stops resenting the men? I think that everybody should just stop resenting individually. So each person, each person should. But in your point of view, what do you think a feminist, what if there's a third year feminist watching this and she's understanding that you're making some sense. You're saying some things that she wanted to say and she has wanted to say and wants to continually wants to say but can't because"
},
{
"end_time": 1517.944,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1501.664,
"text": " The repercussions, what advice would you give to her to not contribute? Because I see that they are contributing to the problem that they're trying to solve. Absolutely. I mean, that's the whole thing. And they make themselves deeply, deeply unhappy in the process. I mean, there are all sorts of studies"
},
{
"end_time": 1539.838,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1518.302,
"text": " the internet where you take a look at someone before she became a radical feminist and she's you know happy and smiling and having a great time with her life and then after she becomes a radical feminist you know she's dyed her hair blue she's all pierced and she's got an extremely doer and angry look on her face. Do you think that's a causal effect or do you think that she starts to become now this is this is"
},
{
"end_time": 1568.166,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1539.838,
"text": " Unpolitically correct, but she starts to become unattractive and then feminists start to appeal to her. It's probably a complicated case and it might well be because she had some bad experiences that turned her that way too, so one shouldn't be too superficial about it. Are there studies done on the attractiveness of feminists versus some other control group? I don't know if there have been any studies done."
},
{
"end_time": 1590.742,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1568.166,
"text": " What would you expect the results of that to be? I don't want to get you in any more hot water, but it seems like it doesn't matter to you. I don't know, I don't know. David and I have talked and laughed about this just recently actually. We were looking at some university presidents and other academics who were very strident feminists and noting that very few of them were very attractive. But I'm not sure about that."
},
{
"end_time": 1616.715,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1590.742,
"text": " I've had interviews, in fact, I think with Gad Saad, he tried to make that claim and I actually, I'm not sure, I've met many beautiful women who were also really angry feminists and so I don't feel that that's necessarily the cause or the result but I feel that women are in a position where"
},
{
"end_time": 1642.688,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1617.483,
"text": " Women can back off feminism, because at least in my experience, and I don't know that this would be an experience accepted by most feminists, but in my experience, most men, despite their resentment about what has happened over the last 20 to 30 years, most men are willing to call off the gender war. Most men, even if they hate feminism with a passion,"
},
{
"end_time": 1663.968,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1643.49,
"text": " are interested in living with women both on an individual personal level having relationships with women and working with women in a peaceable way in society. They're not interested in keeping women down or anything like that and all these claims about how they want women to go back into the kitchen or whatever. I've never met a man like that."
},
{
"end_time": 1685.913,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1664.411,
"text": " So I think men are willing to call off the war and if women would just be willing to, but I don't know, there just does seem to be that a deep resentment begins for women as soon as they encounter feminism, maybe it's there, maybe that's one of women's weaknesses, you know, I mean we know what men's"
},
{
"end_time": 1713.387,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1686.237,
"text": " We know what men's weaknesses are. We know the shadow side of men and that is aggression, competitiveness, capacity for violence. What's women's shadow side? And we've never discussed that as a society. I don't think women are happy to look at women's shadow side and men aren't either. Men tend to put women on a pedestal. And I think one of women's shadowy elements is"
},
{
"end_time": 1742.125,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1713.797,
"text": " a tendency to resentment, to self-pity, to blaming of others, to refusing responsibility for the things that make one happy in one's own life. And so I think feminism really plays into that because it says it's not, you know, none of this is your responsibility. Whatever happens in your life, whatever form of dissatisfaction or unhappiness, it all has this external source and you're just an innocent victim of it."
},
{
"end_time": 1770.845,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1742.483,
"text": " And that's both incredibly attractive and a recipe for continued unhappiness and anger and frustration. Were you using the word shadow in a Jungian sense or just shadow in a personality sense? Just in a general sense. Because that's something I'm actually exploring. I think that's the core question of the documentary because it does seem to be a political documentary on the face of it, which is when does the left go too far? But as I study it deeper and deeper, it seems to me to be more psychological and philosophical in that"
},
{
"end_time": 1793.439,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1771.305,
"text": " When can excess unexamined compassion go too far? So where do you see it going too far? Give me some examples of particularly ruinous feminist theories that have gone too far off the deep end. In application, I mean."
},
{
"end_time": 1822.892,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1793.677,
"text": " ruined male lives. Both young men at university who have been investigated and expelled for various infractions or forms of misconduct. Sometimes even as insubstantial as one young man wrote to me, he'd been expelled from his school because two young women had complained about him that his gaze was too intense."
},
{
"end_time": 1852.637,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1823.183,
"text": " that he had looked at them too intensely. And there actually is built into sexual harassment policies at universities all across North America that looking can be a form of sexual harassment. So sexual harassment guidelines that have gone completely crazy is a really good example. And it has hurt young men. All it takes is for a woman to complain. I have heard from countless men who simply for"
},
{
"end_time": 1882.892,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1852.944,
"text": " not picking up on women's very subtle social cues and I think you know this is one of those cases where men don't tend to pick up on those. Women are very very sensitive about these things and they think men should be able to pick up and so if a young man is interested in a young woman that he's met at college and he starts asking her out and that's what he thinks he should do and she's too shy or nervous or cowardly"
},
{
"end_time": 1903.643,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1883.507,
"text": " to just say, look, I'm not interested in you. So she never really says that. She never says a definitive no. She never says, I'm busy, I'm sorry, I can't do it, I'm not feeling, whatever. So she never says no and he keeps pursuing her because that's what men do. Men have been conditioned to do that from day one."
},
{
"end_time": 1923.848,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1903.643,
"text": " and from our primitive ancestors and so he keeps pursuing her and then she complains about his behaviour to somebody at the school and that's the end of it for him. He's now charged with harassment and he's either disciplined in some way or even in some cases is expelled."
},
{
"end_time": 1952.193,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1924.309,
"text": " And so that, I would say, sexual harassment, the attempt to keep women safe, even if what that means, do you want me to move this guy? No, no, no. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, I'm moving. Just in case. Come down. What's his name again? That's Stanislav. Stanislav. Come down. Come down, Stanislav. So even if it means, like, the idea of safety is one of the things, I think, that feminism has gone crazy with the idea of safety. And that means not just physical safety,"
},
{
"end_time": 1974.002,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1952.517,
"text": " but psychological and emotional safety, which really means that a woman should never feel uncomfortable even for a short period of time or even if the basis of her feeling of discomfort is completely irrational. So I think that's a terrible way that feminist theory about women's safety has just gone crazy and has ruined all sorts of lives."
},
{
"end_time": 2003.148,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 1974.002,
"text": " Have you read Frankfurt's essay on bullshit? The technical bullshit? BS? No, no. Okay. That's from the 90s. It's Harry Frankfurt, I believe his name is. I believe he was a cognitive psychologist or just a regular psychologist. And then he said what bullshit is. Now it's technical, so I don't. It's something like there's a salience landscape, so I don't know how to explain this. Look, we see a chair. Okay. We look at that, we see chair. We look at that, we see tripod. We look at that, we see DVD."
},
{
"end_time": 2030.674,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2003.336,
"text": " A feminist might say, well, why are you putting them into the category of chair, into DVD, into tripod? Okay, that's a valid claim. Now that's related to something called the frame problem in AI, which is how do you categorize an infinite amount that's in front of you? How do you put it into categories? But then there's actually a pre-egoic response. So why do you even think of a chair as something to be put into a category? So there's something that happens pre-conscious."
},
{
"end_time": 2060.896,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2030.981,
"text": " And that's related to the landscape that's in front of you. What do you find salient? Or it's also called relevance realization. And Harry Frankfurt said that you can't lie to yourself. Now, I actually think you can lie to yourself and I think self-deception is a true phenomena. But he was saying, let's say you can't lie to yourself because you can't tell yourself, I want to be interested in X, Y or Z and then just become interested in it. Or you can't tell yourself if you have low self-esteem. No, no, I'm the most attractive woman there is or I'm the most attractive man there is."
},
{
"end_time": 2088.541,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2061.186,
"text": " So you can't lie to yourself if you don't believe it, but you can BS yourself. The way that you can BS yourself is that you can present something as salient. So you look at this pen. Now the pen has become salient to you. So you've looked at it. Remember, there's a landscape of salience. Now this is going to become more salient, which is going to make you pay attention to it, which is going to make it more salient. So there's a feedback loop of salience. You call that BS. The inappropriate hijacking of salience is BS. The most..."
},
{
"end_time": 2117.79,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2089.087,
"text": " Common example is something from The Simpsons where politicians do this, where in The Simpsons, Cain was, or Kodos or Cain, the aliens were becoming presidents, and they were dressed as Bill Clinton, and he's like, ladies and gentlemen, we must move forward, not backwards, not sideways, not forwards, but upwards, and twirling, twirling, always twirling towards freedom, and the crowd just cheers, and it's because he's saying words that don't actually mean anything, but they evoke an emotional response. So something I'm wondering,"
},
{
"end_time": 2138.985,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2118.029,
"text": " is the connection between BS and trigger words and this expansion of racism, sexism to mean things that are just benign or relatively benign compared to their original meaning. But yet the original evocation attached to these meanings, the connotations remain the same and the punishments also remain the same."
},
{
"end_time": 2159.326,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2139.241,
"text": " So that's something I was exploring. I want to know what your thoughts were on that. Well, I don't understand the theory very well probably, but yeah, I do think that that's what's going on, is that the idea that certain domains of expression can be very damaging for the vulnerable, the marginalized, the traditionally excluded or oppressed."
},
{
"end_time": 2182.398,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2159.667,
"text": " This is something that feminism has really attached itself to. And so whereas, yeah, I can see that, you know, a person advocating violence against women or something like that, or suggesting that all women's claims of violence are actually, you know, narcissistic projections or something like that. That would be pretty hideous."
},
{
"end_time": 2212.432,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2182.585,
"text": " But the category of what is harmful to women has been so dramatically expanded over the last couple of decades that there is almost nothing outside of actual feminist discourse that isn't considered deeply harmful. And so that would be, you know, to answer the question, the original question, where does the left go too far? Where does especially the feminist left go too far? It's by continually expanding"
},
{
"end_time": 2234.923,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2212.654,
"text": " the category of harm and by claiming that words themselves harm and of course that's not entirely false since words do harm in certain kinds of ways in different kinds of contexts but by claiming that all sorts of previously quite harmless or maybe merely irritating"
},
{
"end_time": 2262.654,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2234.923,
"text": " types of discourse that I might disagree with or that people could argue about, that they actually constitute some kind of existential threat to women or other categories of vulnerable people. And that's what's used then to deplatform and disinvite or it gives the impetus to shout people down because supposedly their speech is so heinous, so damaging"
},
{
"end_time": 2275.879,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2263.046,
"text": " The campus is fundamentally unsafe."
},
{
"end_time": 2302.619,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2276.288,
"text": " It's never made clear, supposedly because it encourages men to do terrible things, to run rampage and start raping women because they've heard something that contradicts a feminist doctrine. I mean it's just ludicrous or that it damages women so much that they won't be able to get out of bed the next morning. It's bizarre but you see that all the time."
},
{
"end_time": 2312.927,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2303.046,
"text": " In some way, you deny my right to exist. You see students saying that over and over again merely because the speaker is articulating a conservative view of"
},
{
"end_time": 2341.357,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2313.336,
"text": " of gender or whatever it happens to be. So how do we overcome that argument, that rebuttal, which is you're denying my identity, which is me, which is my right to exist. So how do you overcome that? Like if you're a trans person, for instance, and somebody is saying that a trans identity is actually a form of mental illness or whatever, and so therefore that constitutes a fundamental threat to the person's very existence."
},
{
"end_time": 2367.892,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2341.834,
"text": " I mean, how do you overcome it? I don't know. I mean, you simply, I would think that as the administrators simply have to say, that's too bad, you know, that the university is a free speech zone, that that's the one thing sacred, that, you know, ideas about inclusion and safety and comfort are secondary when it comes to university discourse."
},
{
"end_time": 2383.592,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2368.882,
"text": " But it seems that universities aren't willing to do that, and most university professors aren't interested in that. Well, what about the counter argument, which is that if I'm a man and you're saying gender doesn't exist and I identify as a man, is that not an attack against my identity?"
},
{
"end_time": 2412.432,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2385.026,
"text": " Well, I mean, attacks against men's identity are tolerated all the time. You know, if we took seriously the feminist and social justice warrior kind of discourse about harms to people... Is that it has to be against a historically oppressed... Yes, it has to be. Yeah, right. Because, you know, the things that are going on now in university classrooms all across North America are deeply harmful to men, I would say, but... What about somebody who is"
},
{
"end_time": 2430.572,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2412.875,
"text": " Let's say the pinnacle of historically oppressed, so a black lesbian, a black trans person who is in a wheelchair and has glasses, and is extremely short, and is low on intelligence."
},
{
"end_time": 2459.428,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2430.964,
"text": " is the most oppressed of all the intersections. So we get down to the root. What if they're against the historical oppression narrative, like them themselves, and they say, by you telling me that I'm historically oppressed, that goes against my identity of not being historically oppressed. So what would they say then? They would say that, I mean, I don't know what they would say, but probably that that person has internalized their oppression and doesn't understand. And, you know, there are all sorts of cases of people... Then it seems like it's unfalsifiable."
},
{
"end_time": 2480.299,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2460.026,
"text": " It is, absolutely. That's why it's so powerful. Because it is unfalsifiable, it can always be reasserted. And that's what makes it so magical, is that no matter how many times you bring forward evidence to say that the claims are not true for various reasons,"
},
{
"end_time": 2505.009,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2480.776,
"text": " The person making the original claim of oppression can always say but you know unbeknownst to you or they're all these invisible I mean that's the genius of all these social justice discourses that they've come up with ideas like microaggressions and unconscious bias and all sorts of things that can't really ever be measured but can still be asserted to exist especially in any case where"
},
{
"end_time": 2523.916,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2505.009,
"text": " the performance, the outcomes of a particular identity group don't meet what the proponents say they should. If it happens to be feminists who say that the number of women in physics is not where it should be,"
},
{
"end_time": 2553.541,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2524.753,
"text": " You can say, well, we've got all sorts of initiatives to encourage women to come into physics. It doesn't matter. They'll still claim that there is some kind of systemic bias or some kind of unconscious oppression. It can never be disproved. What if someone says, you're denying my identity, and you say, okay, maybe I am. Is that the end of the world? Because look, what if I say people who have had laser eye surgery, saw I've had laser eye surgery, trying to come up with an analogy. Okay, let's say people who have glasses."
},
{
"end_time": 2572.688,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2553.848,
"text": " People who have glasses"
},
{
"end_time": 2599.991,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2573.114,
"text": " a claim that shuts down conversations, because any idea, if you attach yourself to it, can challenge an identity. Now they may come up with some sort of response, which is that if it's gender, sexuality, or ethnicity, those are the three primary. They will say that those are the... But there's an explosion of those now. So there's fat, and then there's unattractiveness, which is associated with fat. There's disability, there are all sorts of things. But yeah, you could say that to attack my religion is a far"
},
{
"end_time": 2624.462,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2600.282,
"text": " greater harm. If I'm a devout Catholic and every time I go into the classroom my professor is mocking or even not mocking but simply attempting to disprove Catholic doctrine that would be deeply harmful and yet somehow that particular kind of attack on a person's core beliefs or deepest identity isn't one that social justice warriors worry about at all."
},
{
"end_time": 2653.729,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2624.855,
"text": " So yeah, you've just proved that it's completely artificial, it's completely socially constructed to use the SJW term. They would say, I mean, that's absolutely true, but the idea is that, I guess that the particular categories of identity that people in academia are most interested in now are the categories that they say are people whose life outcomes are"
},
{
"end_time": 2681.203,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2654.155,
"text": " They would also have to show that just by challenging someone who's historically oppressed and their identity in the manner in which it's happening in civil discourse on university campuses that that has a deleterious effect instead of a positive one also especially compared to the alternative which is being indoctrinated in a feminist or radical left theories and seeing the effects of that on well-being on"
},
{
"end_time": 2704.206,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2681.613,
"text": " on well-being than maybe monetary success. So one would have to demonstrate that. And you could never demonstrate it because you'd have to have some kind of control group that... Get some people from the STEM. Yeah, maybe. But yeah, that's the thing. Who's to say that having your identity, your core beliefs or some aspect of yourself that really matters, who's to say that having that attacked"
},
{
"end_time": 2717.79,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2704.206,
"text": " doesn't make you stronger. I honestly think that that's what should happen on a semi-regular basis, especially at university, because you're not going in 18 thinking that you're going to come out the same person when you're 22. If you were, why go to university? There's no point. You're not growing. You're not changing."
},
{
"end_time": 2739.531,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2718.012,
"text": " So you should have your identity not necessarily attacked, but definitely challenged and then you assess and change based on what you're hearing. It is difficult because with everything there is a core of truth in feminist and other SJW kind of claims and it's true that if you are relentlessly told"
},
{
"end_time": 2757.056,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2739.94,
"text": " Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 2784.121,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2758.046,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 2810.282,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2784.121,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 2836.032,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2810.282,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
{
"end_time": 2863.285,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2836.032,
"text": " And so nobody wants a university to be a place where people are belittled or scorned or mocked either for reasons beyond their control because of characteristics that they were born with or indeed really for their beliefs either."
},
{
"end_time": 2893.592,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2863.712,
"text": " But, so there has to be some kind of balance where there's a kind of basic, a baseline of respect, but also respectful challenge. And that's what has been completely lost at universities. So there is no respectful challenge anymore. We know that it can go too far on one end, which is that the constant denial of someone's potential inside by saying you can't amount to anything, you're a woman and therefore you're never going to be good at spatial reasoning, so just don't bother. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 2909.974,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2893.848,
"text": " Good. No one would say that's good. Well, very few people would say that's good. Very few people would say that's good. That should ever be said to anybody for any reason, especially because of some characteristic that they can't control."
},
{
"end_time": 2928.302,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2910.503,
"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 2950.111,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2928.302,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business,"
},
{
"end_time": 2970.128,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 2950.111,
"text": " So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades and no planned obsolescence. It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime."
},
{
"end_time": 2999.616,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 2970.128,
"text": " So why don't you give me some more examples of feminist theory gone wrong in practice. So for example,"
},
{
"end_time": 3022.739,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3000.282,
"text": " I remember you wrote about, well all of your studio brutal videos are this. Yeah, they're all about that. So many professors, male professors who've either lost their career altogether or have had terrible experiences as a result of claims mostly by women"
},
{
"end_time": 3039.104,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3022.978,
"text": " that they've been committed some kind of misconduct. All of that is completely out of control right now. I did a case just recently, a man at Brock University, for example, who"
},
{
"end_time": 3066.988,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3039.923,
"text": " It's not clear what he did, but he was investigated for sexual harassment and he was found guilty of sexual harassment. And the claim was that he went out drinking with a couple of his students. They were of drinking age. They went out drinking after class. Two of the students, one male, one female, came back to his office. The male left the office. I guess it was fairly late at night by this point. I think they were still drinking maybe in his office."
},
{
"end_time": 3094.224,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3067.329,
"text": " The woman stayed on, female student, and he approached her in some way. He went and sat next to her. He touched her, not sexually, from the sounds of it, but he touched her and he expressed some kind of desire. And for that, he was suspended for a number of years. He had to go through all sorts of training and, you know, he was publicly humiliated and he tried to come back to the classroom"
},
{
"end_time": 3117.585,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3094.599,
"text": " about four years after this alleged incident occurred. A huge student protest. It was said that he was a perpetrator of violence. Again, there's that language, that he had perpetrated sexual violence and therefore he should not be allowed back into the classroom. So there's always this aliding of"
},
{
"end_time": 3147.432,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3118.183,
"text": " very minor forms of misconduct with really serious forms of misconduct. He never did violence to anybody. There's absolutely no evidence that once the woman said no or left his office or whatever happened that he in any way, you know, tried to pursue her or didn't take no for an answer or was threatening or anything like that. And they actually cancelled his class as a result of the student protest. And it's not clear what's going to happen to this guy now, but his career is over."
},
{
"end_time": 3168.609,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3147.841,
"text": " He'll probably be quietly retired or something. It's doubtful he'll ever be back in the classroom and, you know, he's publicly disgraced for doing nothing or for what, you know, at worst it was a moment of drunken indiscretion. So things like that, you know, are happening all the time."
},
{
"end_time": 3184.872,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3168.951,
"text": " And, you know, there's a there's a whisper network in academia where a number of women can decide that they don't like a particular professor or graduate student or whatever it happens to be might be just because he's creepy or whatever it happens to be."
},
{
"end_time": 3214.48,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3185.316,
"text": " Here's where the inequality of sexual attractiveness really comes into play. It's a kind of bigotry in itself. A very handsome man can probably get away on a very sexually confident man, can probably get away with all sorts of things if the women find him attractive that a less attractive man can't get away with. I did a Femangophile just recently on a man, a very elderly man at UC Irvine who was"
},
{
"end_time": 3244.275,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3214.889,
"text": " forced to retire at age 84, if you can imagine, and complaints had begun against him when he was in his 70s. The complaints were that he lavishly complimented women, sometimes with sexually tinged expressions of admiration. They were things like, he is alleged to have said to one woman, I've just been told that women don't like to hear that they're beautiful."
},
{
"end_time": 3271.869,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3244.77,
"text": " But I know that that isn't the case for you. The woman is reported to have been too intimidated to tell him that she didn't like to be complimented. Various women came forward and complained about him and said that they felt demeaned and undermined in their professional capacity because he would make these compliments. He also kissed them on both cheeks. He was a Spanish-born man, so this was his cultural context."
},
{
"end_time": 3296.732,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3272.961,
"text": " So what did they do go to his supervisors and then the supervisors had a talk or yeah, they they complained about him He was told to stop he didn't stop eventually it went to a you know a board of investigation that found him guilty of these of these various allegations No, I mean a bit of physical touching but nothing, you know, he would touch somebody on the shoulders, but it was essentially the compliments and"
},
{
"end_time": 3321.664,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3297.142,
"text": " I can't imagine that he was teaching at this point in his late seventies, but he was still on campus. He had donated a lot of money to his faculty and he was in love with the discipline and also in love with women. And so eventually they forced him to retire. He's not allowed to return to campus. His name is being taken off two buildings"
},
{
"end_time": 3350.606,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3321.92,
"text": " that he endowed financially with his own money, and it's also being taken off various scholarships and fellowships that he contributed to. And basically, you know, the final years of his life, he's now been completely disgraced because he complimented women and made some sexually tinged. At one point he said to somebody, I think the worst thing maybe he's alleged to have said, although he denies it, was that he said to one woman, you were so animated while you were making that presentation that I thought you were going to have an orgasm."
},
{
"end_time": 3374.872,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3351.391,
"text": " Oh my goodness, you know, how terrible he has to be ejected from the campus. So that kind of thing, I just think that is utterly ridiculous and excessive and it says something appalling about the delicate sensibilities of these women professors and graduate students. I mean, couldn't they have simply avoided the man? Couldn't they have actually said to him,"
},
{
"end_time": 3392.432,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3374.872,
"text": " I would really prefer that you not speak to me in those ways because it makes me uncomfortable. I appreciate the compliment but please don't say it anymore. It seems none of them could. They had to go to a higher authority and then they had to have him dealt with in this very humiliating and demeaning way."
},
{
"end_time": 3421.015,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3393.046,
"text": " Things like that, you know, the constant redefining of ordinary human interactions. Oh, and the reason that I thought of him was that it goes back to, because someone actually wrote to me after he saw my video and he said that he had taken a class from this professor years and years ago in the 1980s. And when he was a younger man, he was really good looking and lots, you know, people loved him."
},
{
"end_time": 3443.37,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3421.271,
"text": " So probably this was a behavior, maybe he took it from Spain, I don't know, and this was a behavior that had been rewarded or at least happily tolerated for years and years while he was a professor. Then once he was a much more elderly man, and there was this younger cohort of women, it was no longer acceptable."
},
{
"end_time": 3471.476,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3444.872,
"text": " You know, it seems a kind of really flagrant bigotry that he happened to be an elderly man and this was no longer acceptable and so he had to be drummed out. So there's just so many examples of this where either false allegations, often allegations that could never be proved of things, you know, supposedly done or said behind closed doors, the man denies it, the woman insists it's the case, he has to go."
},
{
"end_time": 3494.087,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3471.817,
"text": " or cases where even if the man admits, it's nothing like sexual assault. It's nothing like a man saying, look, I'll give you an A if you sleep with me and if you don't sleep with me, I'm going to fail you in this course, which obviously is totally unacceptable. But there are cases of an older man usually falling in love with a beautiful woman and telling her that."
},
{
"end_time": 3521.032,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3494.087,
"text": " And that's it. That's enough to get him, you know, sometimes people write and say, well, you know, he shouldn't have done that. Okay, sure. But, you know, the ruination of a person's long respectable career because of one bit of misconduct that I cannot believe actually seriously damages the person who receives it. And that's the other thing is that feminism does really induce in those who embrace it."
},
{
"end_time": 3536.749,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3521.323,
"text": " Desire to be damaged by these basically non damaging actions and there are all sorts of articles where you read about how you know the woman was deeply depressed she couldn't finish her course of studies because this man told her that he was in love with her."
},
{
"end_time": 3563.217,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3537.824,
"text": " I don't know what to say about that. I just can't believe it that being told that you're so beautiful and attractive and desirable and this man's in love with you is going to make it impossible for you to get out of bed and continue your studies. It just doesn't make sense to me. But that is presented to us as the real harm of this what's called now sexual predation and so this man's life has to be ruined as a result."
},
{
"end_time": 3592.363,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3563.78,
"text": " And so the suggestion is that women are such frail reeds that they can't deal with anything at all. But of course, in other cases, if they had been themselves in love with the professor, then that would have been a very different kind of thing. So it's all based on the perception of the young woman. And depending on whether the advance is welcome or not,"
},
{
"end_time": 3620.094,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3592.756,
"text": " It's either a harm or it isn't a harm, and the man's life is decided based on her perception. So I come across those kinds of things all the time and find them bizarre and disturbing. I see university as almost like a boot camp, like the SEALs have Hell Week. The SEALs have Hell Week, and university is like a timid version of Hell Week, but it's still a boot camp for four years, and you're supposed to prove yourself, and that's what the degree is."
},
{
"end_time": 3628.217,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3620.452,
"text": " Withstood this not necessarily some sort of sexual violence violence know you but"
},
{
"end_time": 3658.422,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3629.121,
"text": " I went through this much stress. I went through this much cognitive effort and I came out. And it's a proxy for the real world. And so if you can't handle the university, then what are these faculty doing when they're shielding them in this bubble saying you're ready for the real world? And also, especially if feminism says that the real world is as bad as university. University is just a reflection of the real world. So you're sending them out in the real world where there is no"
},
{
"end_time": 3679.155,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3658.729,
"text": " There is no agency to just expel somebody for giving you a compliment. Well, you know, I think that they want to create that and that is being created. There are all sorts of cases of, you know, in the workplace now where there are sexual harassment guidelines and I don't think it's possible to have a company anymore that doesn't have"
},
{
"end_time": 3699.718,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3679.548,
"text": " sexual harassment guidelines and it's illegal, you know, to sexually harass anybody and what that means, of course, is not the terrible thing that, you know, where somebody insists on some kind of sexual favour from somebody, but, you know, anything, sexual joking, telling an off-colour joke, expressing"
},
{
"end_time": 3716.749,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3700.094,
"text": " So what is their end game? Do they just want power? Is it all about power? They don't care about reason or logic or consistency?"
},
{
"end_time": 3739.224,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3717.363,
"text": " Well, they certainly wouldn't accept that characterization. They would say that they want a world in which women don't have to feel vulnerable to male, sexual, or other kinds of harassment or intimidation. Okay, so what I would say would be something like, that sounds like an Oedipal mother, like you're just"
},
{
"end_time": 3766.92,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3739.548,
"text": " You have to instantiate some sort of totalitarian regime in order to make sure that every interaction that a woman has with a man or another woman or a man with a man, although they don't seem to care about that too much, is peaceful. They would say that that's worth it. Also, they would say, well, look at progress. We used to be able to accept catcalling on a regular basis now. That's not socially acceptable."
},
{
"end_time": 3793.677,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3767.005,
"text": " So this is just in line with the march of progress. Okay. I'm not sure what to say to that because that does sound to me, if social values are just changed on a regular basis, which they are, does sound reasonable. Now, what would the counter argument to that be? Well, they have massive double standards in how all of this is going to be implemented because there is no reasonable standard of interaction."
},
{
"end_time": 3823.575,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3794.121,
"text": " If you are a hypersensitive, fainting couch feminist, there is no kind of interaction that might not potentially be offensive and discriminatory and damaging. If I make a sexual joke, okay, maybe I'm a man, I have to accept that I can no longer make a sexual joke. Can I come to your cubicle and make a non-sexual joke?"
},
{
"end_time": 3850.213,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3823.985,
"text": " Maybe the woman is going to say that that made her feel undermined in some way or vulnerable or harassed. Can I contradict an idea that you have in a committee meeting when we're throwing around ideas? Can I interrupt you if I feel that you're going on too long? Can I point to you and say, what do you think? I mean, there's just so many different things. There was a recent case that you may have heard of, because I think it was fairly well known."
},
{
"end_time": 3870.913,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3850.606,
"text": " This is a meeting, I'm doing a few mango file on this. There's a meeting of a body called the International Studies Association. So this is people who do, you know, conflict analysis and basically experts in international affairs. They have a yearly meeting. They they're meeting last year in last April 2018."
},
{
"end_time": 3898.439,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3871.357,
"text": " They were at the conference and it was in a hotel. They were all in an elevator going up and a woman, a professor, a professor of gender studies asked everybody what floor they would like and she was you know standing near the whatever it's called and so she was going to punch everybody's floor in. One elderly man said ladies lingerie. I guess this is a joke referring to the time when there used to be"
},
{
"end_time": 3917.978,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3898.66,
"text": " Is that an intolerable off-limits assault on a female sensibility? This woman felt it was."
},
{
"end_time": 3944.974,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3918.319,
"text": " confront him about it in the moment but she complained to the International Studies Association, I don't know, the body that makes decisions about membership and conduct and everything and they decided that he had contravened their code of conduct and that he would have to apologize to her. He didn't feel he wanted to apologize because he didn't feel he'd done anything wrong"
},
{
"end_time": 3974.821,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 3945.265,
"text": " and so he refused to apologize and that's it he's he's out of the the organization now that that person does not strike me as a sort of person she of course feels that you know she's striking a blow for women's dignity and what he said was you know clearly completely socially unacceptable that i don't want that person or a person with that kind of mentality adjudicating what kinds of interactions"
},
{
"end_time": 4003.08,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 3975.043,
"text": " adult scholars can have at a conference, because that is a person who would never be satisfied. That is not a reasonable person. That's not somebody that could ever really be satisfied. I can imagine that that person would find all sorts of reason to feel aggrieved and upset over however she was treated in the course of various academic conversations. What if you challenged her interpretation? Would she see that as"
},
{
"end_time": 4027.125,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4003.422,
"text": " What if you challenged her feminist reading of some kind of situation? Anything would make a person like that. Well, you get accused of that just by challenging people's feminist opinions that you are inciting violence. Yeah, sure. Anytime you challenge anything that a feminist deeply believes, it's seen as a kind of personal assault with widespread damaging consequences."
},
{
"end_time": 4050.555,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4027.125,
"text": " So I don't want to live in that world. I mean, I guess it might be possible to imagine what that world would look like. And a feminist would say that's better than having to live, you know, with the day in day out sexism of the society we used to have, which I don't believe ever existed. You know, I've talked to all sorts of men who grew up in the 1950s and 60s. And they said, you know, there was never a time when it was acceptable."
},
{
"end_time": 4072.807,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4050.879,
"text": " to be really crude and horrible to women. There were always codes of conduct. And sure, some people broke them. But in general, people work things out. But this is the thing that the feminist and cis has never existed. And now, supposedly, it's as bad as it ever was. But yeah, I don't want those people in charge of human interaction."
},
{
"end_time": 4089.65,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4072.841,
"text": " So do they see it as being as bad now as it was back then, or do they see a line of progress? And if so, how do they measure that progress? Well, I, you know, you'd have to ask them. I don't know. I mean, I think many of them would say that nothing has really improved. Or that it's now changed. It's subtle. It's systemic. Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 4115.145,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4089.838,
"text": " Yeah, now it's much more subtle. Now it's microaggressions. Now it's, you know, a whole different range of ways that men assert their dominance over women or, you know, undermine women's sense of self or whatever. Yeah, that's what they'd say. That the sexism is constant at the form it takes probably changes. I've talked to another man speaking of the same association, the International Studies Association. He"
},
{
"end_time": 4141.067,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4115.503,
"text": " Often it is older men who maybe don't quite understand all the nuances of what you're allowed to say and what you're not allowed to say. But that's always been the case. That's always been the case. Older people have always been disconnected with the younger generation in almost every respect. And what I find remarkable is the entire lack of tolerance or compassion on the part of younger women towards these older men."
},
{
"end_time": 4168.251,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4141.374,
"text": " This fellow, he was asked to be what's called a discussant, which means basically that he's tasked with, once there's a panel discussion, he's supposed to respond and ask them questions about their papers. And he was an expert in military intervention and they were all talking about women in conflict zones. So the first thing he did was he wanted to write an email to these women"
},
{
"end_time": 4197.346,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4168.814,
"text": " and say, you know, I'm the discussant and just kind of introduce himself. So he wrote an email and the subject was hello women. I don't think he said ladies. I think he said women. Hello women. Immediately he got an email back from the chair of the panel saying, you know, some or all of these members may identify as women, but they don't appreciate, you know, being addressed in this kind of way. So he said, okay, okay, you know, I mean, he just didn't get it."
},
{
"end_time": 4214.667,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4197.722,
"text": " And then at the actual discussion, he questioned their feminist framework. They were all speaking from a feminist point of view. He questioned their feminist framework and asked them various questions about very basic things. Aren't women actually better off"
},
{
"end_time": 4237.841,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4214.957,
"text": " in the West now as a result of centuries of progress than they are in certain other countries. They were outraged at the racism and the sexist assumptions. They complained about him too and he was investigated for some kind of vague harassment or just failure to respect their feminist principles."
},
{
"end_time": 4258.302,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4238.439,
"text": " What these cases to me indicate is that there's no way that you could ever, if you tried to create a rule book telling people what exactly constitutes respectful interaction, because that's what it always says in these codes of conduct. What constitutes treating someone with respect?"
},
{
"end_time": 4284.155,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4258.848,
"text": " I might feel that treating me with respect means you never contradict me. You never challenge my ideas. Somebody else might say, that's not respect, that's condescension. I want to be challenged. I want to be challenged to defend my ideas and be treated like an equal. So basically there's no way that you could ever know for sure that you're not offending someone in a way that they're going to perceive to be sexist."
},
{
"end_time": 4304.258,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4284.514,
"text": " For one thing, I don't agree that the utopian ideal of a world in which people never just sort of spontaneously say things to one another, I don't want to live in that world. I don't think things are bad as they are. I trust my fellow human beings to, if they say something appropriate,"
},
{
"end_time": 4327.892,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4304.77,
"text": " Well, you also just said something interesting, which is trust. I trust my fellow human beings. And something I've been researching with regards to trust. First of all, trust is the number one resource of any country that's productive. And second, you can't have trust without allowing the other person the freedom to fail. To fail, exactly. Otherwise, there's no trust. That's why when you fall backwards, it doesn't mean anything if you're falling backwards on the couch. You have to have someone else there who could move their arms and you can get hurt."
},
{
"end_time": 4353.848,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4327.892,
"text": " yeah exactly so in order for there to be trust that means that you have to allow the other person to potentially hurt you yeah now if you're never allowing that then there is no trust no there's no trust and enforcement there's only exactly one road to walk down yeah it's going to be a very totalitarian environment and you're still not going to achieve what you say you want to achieve because you know there's a million ways i can offend you okay so part of the problem seems to me to be that"
},
{
"end_time": 4372.756,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4354.189,
"text": " I have a problem already with"
},
{
"end_time": 4402.227,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4373.848,
"text": " Well, I have a certain problem already with even trying to define what would be, you know, because in different contexts, you know, different things are appropriate and, you know, it's so incredibly complicated how human beings interact. And if we're not going to accept that women and other traditionally marginalized peoples are adult enough to be able to say in the moment, I would prefer that you not, you know, blah, blah, blah,"
},
{
"end_time": 4424.974,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4403.234,
"text": " and deal with it in the moment. If we're not going to trust that people can do that, then I don't know that we have a basis to go forward at all. And that's what it seems that so many of these movements want to create is some sort of overlord, some sort of body that they control that determines when"
},
{
"end_time": 4445.538,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4425.452,
"text": " others have stepped over the line but the line is constantly shifting and the person who is offended doesn't have to take responsibility for being offended because they can often you know what what these people want often is to be able to complain anonymously they don't even want to take responsibility for their own anger and hurt I mean it's"
},
{
"end_time": 4464.462,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4445.964,
"text": " It just seems to me it's completely unworkable. It sounds like, I hate to make an exaggeration and point to the 1950s or 1940s, but I believe in East Germany, one-third of people were government informants. Yes, exactly, were informants. Yeah, and that's exactly what"
},
{
"end_time": 4491.357,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4464.462,
"text": " Have you studied much about communism in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s? Not to the extent of an expert like Jordan Peterson. I mean, I was always fascinated by, as I think many people are, by those regimes and how they came into being and how people adapted themselves to them. And I do see that that's what we're often doing now, is just adapting ourselves to this ever-increasing panoply of rules of conduct."
},
{
"end_time": 4516.92,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4491.988,
"text": " and just trying to not be run over by this machine that is being created. Can you tell me about how the humanities are corrupt? Can you expound on that? Well, I think the basic thing I would say is that they're corrupt in that they're no longer about the subjects they claim to be about, that they've all been corrupted by"
},
{
"end_time": 4543.422,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4517.449,
"text": " Let's restate that, but say humanities. Just in case I want to cut to this, I don't want people to say, what is she saying when she says they are corrupt? Yeah, the humanities, I think, have stopped being about the particular subject. So art history is not really about art anymore, not fundamentally. Art is the means to the end of social justice. That's the same thing for literary studies."
},
{
"end_time": 4571.8,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4543.797,
"text": " It's the same for various other classical studies even now. I've got a story about classical studies but I won't bore you with it. They all have essentially surrendered a commitment to the subject itself as valuable. We used to say that studying English literature was valuable in itself because there's something about reading great works of literature that"
},
{
"end_time": 4595.196,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4572.278,
"text": " gives you access to the human experience in all of its complexity, and that in itself is valuable. You learn something about what it means to be human. You don't necessarily approach it from one particular angle, you approach it from a variety of angles, but it's valuable in itself to know this body of work, to read and to think about the human experience over time."
},
{
"end_time": 4612.944,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4595.606,
"text": " Now we read literature to understand the experience of marginalized peoples and to strive for social justice. So it has been, I don't want to say hijacked, but that's the word that comes to mind, but it's become less important"
},
{
"end_time": 4641.169,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4613.166,
"text": " For its own self, it's a means to an end of this larger activist goal of becoming a better person, becoming a social justice warrior. So why is this such a big problem? Why isn't it just some esoteric squabblings between pedantic philosophers in university? Why does it not just stay there? Because it doesn't. Because, of course, if you believe that, once you embrace that ideology, you're not going to leave it in university. You're going to take it out wherever you go."
},
{
"end_time": 4669.497,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4641.596,
"text": " And because if your goal is to radically transform the world, and if you believe the world is a terrible, terrible place where all of these injustices are taking place every day, then of course you're not going to leave it. It's never going to be just an intellectual endeavor. It has to be an activist endeavor. It has to be something that you carry with you into everyday life. And these social justice warriors, these radical leftists,"
},
{
"end_time": 4697.892,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4669.889,
"text": " have not been content to just attack the discipline of literary studies. They've gone after law. They're going after the core of Western civilization. For example? Well, they're interested in changing how we understand what the law is and how it should function. Changing the whole idea of what it means to live in a society governed by the rule of law. From what to what?"
},
{
"end_time": 4715.708,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4698.422,
"text": " Well, feminist activists, for example, want to change, they want to essentially weaken the presumption of innocence in cases of sexual assaults, one of their primary goals, so that women don't have to, or that the system"
},
{
"end_time": 4742.944,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4715.708,
"text": " doesn't have to prove a man guilty, that he will actually have to prove himself innocent. This is a fundamental transformation and this is seen as appropriate because women have for too long, according to feminists, not been able to get justice when they're sexually assaulted. So activists are taking their deeply held beliefs and taking them into all corners of the society."
},
{
"end_time": 4769.514,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4743.166,
"text": " Can you tell me how sexism has been redefined? I guess sexism has been redefined from explicit"
},
{
"end_time": 4789.104,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4770.179,
"text": " clearly identifiable acts of injustice against women to something that is seen as systemic, that is present in all sorts of very subtle, often invisible forms of"
},
{
"end_time": 4815.879,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4789.36,
"text": " objectification of demeaning of women, the creation of all sorts of invisible barriers to women. I'm kind of losing it now. It's okay. You can start over. Think about it. Think about it because I might want to just take this clear. I know this is a lot of pressure, but I want to include someone explaining what racism used to be. I know you're not talking about racism. That's not your field, but feminism"
},
{
"end_time": 4844.036,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4815.879,
"text": " Well, I think the main thing is that it used to be something that could be very clearly measured. That it was specific and intentional acts of discrimination, bigotry or hatred against women."
},
{
"end_time": 4854.991,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4844.633,
"text": " Actions or or expressions or laws, you know that were discriminatory whereas now I think the idea is that it has become because"
},
{
"end_time": 4876.203,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4855.247,
"text": " that kind of overt"
},
{
"end_time": 4890.435,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 4876.203,
"text": " In society as a whole, it's very difficult to point to legal instances of discriminatory treatment of women. In fact, what you find instead is cases where women are discriminated."
},
{
"end_time": 4918.985,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 4891.015,
"text": " in favor of rather than against. Did you hear about Google and some woman was suing Google? Tell me about that. Well, I haven't read about it yet, but women in high tech are finally starting to speak out and to say that they've watched as highly qualified men are passed over for less qualified women and they're fed up with it. They think it's"
},
{
"end_time": 4947.534,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 4919.138,
"text": " I was talking about something else where I saw that a woman sued Google because she's being paid less than her male counterparts. Oh, I see. And then what happened was an investigation was conducted and it turns out that the men were being paid less. Yeah, I read about that too. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Well, I mean there are many cases in academia where there have been class action suits where women's pay has been raised across the board because they were in general being paid less"
},
{
"end_time": 4976.22,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 4947.824,
"text": " But it's far from clear that the reason they were being paid less had anything to do with sexism. There are all sorts of reasons why you might be paid, why one person might be paid more than another, even in academia, because you've taken on an administrative position, because you've done much more, because you've won a special award, you know, there's all sorts of reasons. And so this idea that sexism is to blame. And I guess that comes back then to your question about, you know, what is it about, you know, what has sexism become?"
},
{
"end_time": 5004.138,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 4976.22,
"text": " It's essentially become anything, any case where a woman can allege discrimination on the basis of any sort of unequal outcome. So I guess to simplify it, one could say that it has gone from being a case where one could point to inequality of opportunity that used to be where women were barred from certain things or whatever. Now it has become a case"
},
{
"end_time": 5030.401,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5004.428,
"text": " of any time one can point to an unequal outcome, where the woman is disadvantaged, sexism is always what is alleged to be the cause. Only in cases, of course, where the woman is disadvantaged, you can also say, well, look, there are many, many more men in prison today than there are women. And nobody's going to say that because it's always been the case. I think it's 93 or 94 percent."
},
{
"end_time": 5048.814,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5030.828,
"text": " of prisoners are male. And if you ask a feminist about that, she'll say that's because men commit more crimes. But why are there more male Nobel Prize winners? Not because more men have done these brilliant things, it's because women were discriminated against. So there's always that double standard in operation."
},
{
"end_time": 5072.807,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5049.343,
"text": " You know, so if you find a case of a feminist will point to the number of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that's evidence that women are being held back because women do not operate or do not occupy 50% of those positions. But if you ask how many men and women are in, you know, coal mining or"
},
{
"end_time": 5091.493,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5073.285,
"text": " Construction work or you know, whatever it happens to be work in the logging industry or the fishing industry with the very high Fatality and injury rates. Yeah And you say well, what how do you explain that? Well, that's a totally different thing and nobody is interested, but they would say that that's also the patriarchy acting"
},
{
"end_time": 5122.432,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5092.517,
"text": " Yeah, they might, but they're not working very hard to get more women into those positions. I've never seen a group of women advocating that the number of women in logging be evened out so that more women can die or be maimed in these positions. So I guess that's probably maybe the truest definition is that we've gone from worrying about equality of opportunity and identifying barriers"
},
{
"end_time": 5149.906,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5122.824,
"text": " to now worrying about equality of outcome. And whenever an outcome is seen to discriminate against women, sexism is what is alleged, even though it's impossible to prove that it's the case. And they use a little bit of sleight of hand here because they would say, we also actually care about equality of opportunity only, but we use evidence of the unequal outcomes as evidence. Evidence that there isn't equality of opportunity, exactly, yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 5175.469,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5150.299,
"text": " Yeah, even though you can never put your finger on in what way is a woman being held back from going into mathematics, they'll bring forward various types of arguments. So do you think feminists or the radical left, even though feminists are a particular subset of the radical left, let's talk about the radical left as a whole, do you think they care more about power or the destruction of the West? And this is something that I've been thinking about because they do talk about"
},
{
"end_time": 5205.657,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5176.374,
"text": " The abolishment of ideals from the, yes, ideals from the Enlightenment. And that's the West, in a nutshell. Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, in its current form. And they seem to want to do away with that, but at the same time they want power. And so I wonder, do they care more about power? So that is, if you gave them this choice. You can have power, but the West is"
},
{
"end_time": 5226.118,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5205.845,
"text": " Strengthened somehow whatever that means the hierarchies remain, but you have power or we can have the destruction of the West So no hierarchies, but you have no power which actually would be the case of you if there were no hierarchies because no one would have power Which one do you think they would want? Well, I don't think that they would see that it has to be a choice their power would be used to destroy"
},
{
"end_time": 5255.947,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5226.561,
"text": " I've come to a similar conclusion. I see power as the means to destroying the West and not"
},
{
"end_time": 5279.172,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5256.817,
"text": " I'm not sure how it is that all of these people, many of whom have very comfortable, affluent, secure, prosperous lives in the West, how they come to so deeply"
},
{
"end_time": 5289.514,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5280.162,
"text": " Disassociate themselves from it to resent it so deeply to hate it to to prefer any other system even systems that have resulted in the deaths of"
},
{
"end_time": 5318.899,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5290.247,
"text": " 10s of millions of people to the Western system. Well, there's that Peterson's Slavoj Zizek debate recently. I don't know if you've seen it. Yeah, I didn't see it. No, but I heard about it. But at one point Peterson said that there is a bloody violent revolution. There would be a bloody violent revolution if so and so happened. And as soon as he said that, then the audience were like, yeah. And then he just paused and he was like, he didn't say anything. He didn't comment on it. But they're just clapping for bloody violent revolution. Yeah, it is quite astounding, really. It is astounding."
},
{
"end_time": 5343.507,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5319.309,
"text": " And I think there is an element of a death wish in that too. There's a kind of admiration for murderous regimes that kill dissidents because they're strong. And I think something happens to people in the West, a sickening contempt for the"
},
{
"end_time": 5358.046,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5343.865,
"text": " the softness of"
},
{
"end_time": 5383.865,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5359.002,
"text": " you know, relatively speaking, that simply isn't the case, that all other regimes have done a much poorer job of guaranteeing, you know, the basic opportunities of their citizens than Western democratic capitalism has done. But there is this, I think, a deep desire to see destruction and even maybe to be destroyed themselves."
},
{
"end_time": 5410.384,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5383.865,
"text": " There's a, I'm thinking of Jamie's book, there's a book, have you read Jamie Glazov's United in Hate? What's the subtitle? Do you remember? I can't remember the subtitle, but the main title is United in Hate. And that's what he posits. I haven't read the book now in a decade at least, but he posits that something happens in the radical leftist."
},
{
"end_time": 5439.258,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5411.186,
"text": " that propels him to identify with murderous regimes, actually because they are murderous, even though ostensibly the reason for the identification is because these are, you know, fairer, juster regimes, but that there is a deep knowledge that they actually aren't and that the radical leftist actually falls in love with violence and would go so far as to prefer to be killed"
},
{
"end_time": 5454.019,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5439.65,
"text": " by one of these regimes, or at least to have his individuality erased in union with the collective."
},
{
"end_time": 5481.118,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5454.974,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the Internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 5507.193,
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"start_time": 5481.118,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone"
},
{
"end_time": 5530.555,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5507.193,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 5540.811,
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"text": " Go to shopify.com."
},
{
"end_time": 5565.606,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5543.473,
"text": " It's something there, it's some sort of deep disconnect from his own individuality in a free society and a desire for union with the collective. He was writing that about his experience or he's writing that about other people? Based on his study, especially of the Soviet Union and of Westerners who covered up"
},
{
"end_time": 5593.763,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5565.606,
"text": " the crimes of the Soviet Union, various leftists who traveled to the Soviet Union and saw what was going on, or at least had a sense of what was going on, but lied about it when they came back, things like that. And, you know, he looks at celebrity leftists and various people who have been in love with, you know, with North Vietnam, with North Korea. There's always people willing to Sean Penn, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 5619.241,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5594.087,
"text": " I think went to North Korea and thought it was a wonderful place. Or no, he went to Iran, I think, and carried water for that regime. And there are always these people who, although you would think that they would feel some kind of basic gratitude to the country that has given them so much, but actually hate it and would like to see it destroyed, even if that resulted in their own destruction. It's deeply irrational."
},
{
"end_time": 5636.425,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5619.582,
"text": " Yeah, this ingratitude is something that I see even when it comes to literary work. It's not that Shakespeare is great and it sucks that he was also sexist or that there's sexist elements in his plays. It's not that. It's that Shakespeare is a white male and he's sexist and we despise him and I hate him."
},
{
"end_time": 5661.067,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5637.005,
"text": " Yeah, and a deep rejection of one's own intellectual and cultural inheritance. There's a celebration of the fact that there are other people who are racist because then they can point to them as the enemy and the source of their woes. It's a bizarre combination of"
},
{
"end_time": 5687.722,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5661.425,
"text": " superiority because you're one who sees the racism and sexism of your own culture and you rise above it, you fight it, etc. So there's a kind of self-love in that. But there's also this deep self-hatred, I think, in that you become alienated from your own people, your own history, your own communities. It's a bizarre combination."
},
{
"end_time": 5718.063,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5688.422,
"text": " To recapitulate, what do you think is the line that separates the moderate left from the extreme left? I guess I would say the main... Okay, now I remember what you said before was something like when they go too far with expanding the domain of what constitutes an expression of hurt or a feeling of hurt and that is too vague because what's too large?"
},
{
"end_time": 5746.408,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5718.404,
"text": " so if you could somehow make it more clear I think the main thing I would say about where the left definitely goes too far is that one it's the identification of words with violence and therefore a argument made for extreme censorship of words and the other thing is through the identification of words with violence"
},
{
"end_time": 5770.282,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5746.954,
"text": " Therefore, there is a justification of using violent methods against those with whom one disagrees. And we see that in, you know, riots that have taken place in various places in Berkeley, for example, where a professor of situational ethics threw a bike lock at somebody for simply, you know, speaking in a way that he found repulsive or"
},
{
"end_time": 5788.66,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5770.708,
"text": " or that he condemned. So I think those would be the two things I would say. The identification of words with violence and therefore the argument being made that those words can legitimately be censored, that whole swaths of"
},
{
"end_time": 5812.654,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 5789.002,
"text": " This course can be called off limits because they supposedly uphold an unjust status quo. Part of what the left often claims is that freedom of speech only should apply to what they identify as liberatory speech, not speech that reaffirms injustice. That goes way back to Marcuse."
},
{
"end_time": 5843.166,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 5813.456,
"text": " The Canadian Supreme Court has tried to define hate speech and why a principle supporting freedom of speech doesn't apply to hate speech, but they just end up"
},
{
"end_time": 5866.783,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 5843.575,
"text": " You know, you can't write a logical explanation for why freedom of speech shouldn't apply to hate speech. They end up saying things like, well, hate speech doesn't contribute to freedom of speech. Therefore, it shouldn't be covered by freedom of speech because hate speech supposedly prevents others from being able to respond. And therefore it, you know, it isn't really free."
},
{
"end_time": 5896.237,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 5867.312,
"text": " Thank you so much. I appreciate it."
},
{
"end_time": 5924.906,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 5898.319,
"text": " Okay, so now, this is pretty much for me. I had some questions that I was just personally interested in. Why don't you come in? Yeah, I'm still recording, so this will just be for me. You come and sit down. I need a sip of water. I should have got something. Maybe get Kurt his, yeah, ginger ale would be great. Just hot water."
},
{
"end_time": 5954.309,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 5925.52,
"text": " I'm sorry, I don't think I was very good. Were you worried about how you performed? Yeah, I mean I was all muddled and I'm just terrible in those situations. Thank you. Some of what I wanted to ask you about was how, you're actually pretty quick on your feet. Even though you said that you're an introvert, which I am an introvert too. You are really? I don't think you think I am. No, you don't seem like it at all. You seem very gregarious to me."
},
{
"end_time": 5961.425,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 5954.787,
"text": " and extroverted"
},
{
"end_time": 5987.073,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 5961.92,
"text": " They say people become more introverted over time. The definition of an introvert is that when you're out in the party, you'd rather go back home and recharge. Exactly, yeah. I find that. I get exhausted really quickly. I can spend months at home and never speak to someone else. We're like that too, both of us. I prefer that. Okay, so what I wanted to note is"
},
{
"end_time": 6016.169,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 5988.251,
"text": " On that Steve Paikin panel, was that your only Steve Paikin panel? Yeah, yeah. So the only lady beside you knows Brady. Yeah. And for me, if I'm being attacked, now I don't know as much about the subject matter as you, but I would get flummoxed and I wouldn't know if we were together. That's what I got, that's what I got. But you did a fantastic job. Wow, that's very nice. Yeah, Justin, he's very articulate, but he's very good. He was so composed. Thank you, thank you."
},
{
"end_time": 6031.834,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6016.834,
"text": " Did you see Karen Strong's comments about you?"
},
{
"end_time": 6058.2,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6032.108,
"text": " Well, Karen's drawn would never be flummoxed. She's so good. But no, I did feel, I mean, there's pictures"
},
{
"end_time": 6073.643,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6058.507,
"text": " There's some like film footage in that panel discussion where I'm just sitting there. I'm kind of I'm staring ahead. I just felt so I can't even describe it."
},
{
"end_time": 6090.196,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6073.78,
"text": " It's not that I don't like confrontation. I'm very dissatisfied with my own ability to respond. It's just like you said, I get flustered, flummoxed, I can't think of any words."
},
{
"end_time": 6116.305,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6090.196,
"text": " my vocabulary which you know when I'm just sitting on the couch I feel like I have a you know pretty much I might have to think for a while we always forget words but you know pretty much I can think of words but yeah in the moment it's like my vocabulary reduces to about one-tenth of its actual size it didn't present you properly"
},
{
"end_time": 6140.538,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6116.63,
"text": " I was there and they made her up as if she was some kind of Japanese mannequin. She looked like a Japanese mannequin. Oh, they put on a whole bunch of makeup. I really lost it. She looked like she'd just stepped out for Halloween. I said, you can't do this because she's beautiful and just let her be. And then I was really upset with the way Steve Paik and I always call him the Pekinese. I can't help it."
},
{
"end_time": 6162.722,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6140.538,
"text": " the way in which he negotiated that confrontation, that discussion and I was really upset because he didn't seem to give Janice the opportunity to respond properly and they were two against her and Justin who was in the middle was pro and con you know it was I don't think it was a fair setup so afterwards I went into the back room the"
},
{
"end_time": 6185.384,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6163.08,
"text": " green room or whatever it happens to be. And I verbally attacked Peyton. Oh yeah? He just took it with a neutral face? No, no, his Slavic, his Slavic, almost threatened to beat me up and I let him have it. And then I had this long email conversation exchange with"
},
{
"end_time": 6209.224,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6185.794,
"text": " Even if I'd had more time, I wouldn't have been any good. No, because there were two others."
},
{
"end_time": 6239.292,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6209.633,
"text": " And Justin Trottier, you know, he was presumably cafe on her side, but on the other hand, he was attacking Anne Coulter. I would maybe agree with it now, because I think she's gone off the deep end. But at that time, she was an ally. And I just thought the whole way in which the proportions were arranged was completely, no, no, it was completely, you know, non-democratic, let us say, you know. Even if I'd had more time, I wouldn't have"
},
{
"end_time": 6262.142,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6240.282,
"text": " I wouldn't, I couldn't, I didn't equip myself well and I wouldn't have been able to and I still don't really think I would be able to. It's just one of my weaknesses. In the moment when I really want to be able to marshal an argument, my mind just goes blank. I can hardly, you know, I've been thinking, yeah, I've been thinking about these issues for five years now. I've read all sorts, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6280.077,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6263.285,
"text": " And in the moment I can hardly remember a name, I can't remember examples."
},
{
"end_time": 6295.094,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6280.077,
"text": " My ability to access any word in any order and even just I can even construct false arguments just to disprove the other person. Because I used to do stand-up comedy and so that's what you do as a comedian. Oh my goodness. Proving what's false."
},
{
"end_time": 6321.834,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6295.094,
"text": " And then I get to laugh like Seinfeld does that. I'm going to tell you why this is ridiculous. And then he proves it and usually there's some element of false, well there's some element of truth too, but it's ridiculous. I just proved something to be true that you know is not true and then you laugh. There's something incongruity. Right, incongruity. So that's what stand-ups do. But I can't do that when, I've never really been attacked though, although I do have someone in my family who's a part of the radical left and"
},
{
"end_time": 6339.753,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6323.439,
"text": " She's also a part of my family so I can't just berate her. I have two sisters and so on, we don't talk to each other. I also found that whenever I talk to her, if I talk to her instead of in a manner that's..."
},
{
"end_time": 6363.968,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6340.828,
"text": " that's conducive of conflict instead if it's a dialectic like we're just trying to get to some shared truth then the conversation goes so much smoother for both people i'm more articulate she is as well i understand so it's just better thinking okay yeah there's something that i don't i hold a partial truth you hold a partial truth what is just both you know some shared negotiation yeah you were just articulating"
},
{
"end_time": 6384.172,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6364.599,
"text": " Is that why sometimes one doesn't rise to the challenge of an interview in the full way that one would like to? It's because there's too much information. There's just too much evidence to deal with at one time. It's like juggling medicine balls. You don't know what you're going to go. For example, this argument that you brought up or this question you brought up about"
},
{
"end_time": 6408.66,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6384.172,
"text": " and yet you were discussing about does hate speech, oppression, unpleasant things said about other people, does it really affect one in such a way that one is no longer able to respond properly and as you said reduces the accidental dimension of your life and so on. I mean a perfect example of why that is false is Judaism."
},
{
"end_time": 6432.978,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6409.138,
"text": " I grew up in a little French-Canadian town, up there in Quebec. I was beaten up constantly for being a Muzi-Jewish, a bad Jew. I still have certain scars and that pebble there, slingshot, all kinds of stuff. My stepsister, to get into McGill, she had numerous causes. She had to have 80%."
},
{
"end_time": 6456.357,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6433.422,
"text": " other people would get in at 60 percent, 55 percent, but she had to have 80 percent. In my case it was just about that time too when I went to... So we studied hard and we led our classes and we were admitted afterwards that was dropped. You look, for me the chief example, it was so beautiful when you think of this Barron Bing High School in Montreal on St. Urban Street."
},
{
"end_time": 6481.357,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6457.039,
"text": " That was the very poor Jewish district. How did they make a living at that time, all these immigrants? They sold junk, they had little grocery stores in the front room of their little hovels and so on. Who came out of that? Our greatest poet, Irving Leighton, our greatest novelist, Mordecai Richler, one of our great, actually though he was NDP, politicians, David Lewis. They were all Jews."
},
{
"end_time": 6509.701,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6481.357,
"text": " grew up in absolute crushing penury, but had the Torah, the book behind them, the Bible behind them, they read, they studied, they did all kinds of ridiculous things too, and maybe things that weren't so acceptable. But these people, look what they became. And then when you get 0.08% of the world population winning 8% of the Nobel prizes,"
},
{
"end_time": 6523.609,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6510.179,
"text": " And these are the people who have been oppressed since Mesopotamian times. And there are lots of stupid Jews. Arguably the most oppressed group. In the world. It's the only religion that has never ceased to exist. That's true."
},
{
"end_time": 6541.357,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6523.933,
"text": " So what happens there? People who have been attacked, who have been brutalized, who have been condemned, who have been reduced to non-entity, who have had to travel from country to country, who had their actual humanity questions, and their lives have been annihilated, these people"
},
{
"end_time": 6566.817,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6541.357,
"text": " read steady whether it was Torah in synagogue or whether it was just the books at home or whether it was the sage grandfather whatever it happened to be and they made themselves through all that horror and terror and inflammatory rhetoric and devastation they made themselves into the leading intellectuals of our time also the great fools of our time too you know but there it is so"
},
{
"end_time": 6590.589,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6567.5,
"text": " The attack on your sense of identity does not necessarily by any means mean that you're going to be deprivileged. It may mean, and it has for, it did for Irving, it did for Leonard Cohen, well, Leonard was rich, but he had his problems too. It did for David Lewis, it did for Mordecai Richler, it did for all these great writers of our time, and great scientists as well. What it did for them is they rose above."
},
{
"end_time": 6618.814,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6590.811,
"text": " All that condemnation and denunciation and all that, all that oppression and prejudice that they had to face. I mean, I grew up in Saint Agath. I couldn't swim in certain beaches. No Jews allowed. This is what I grew up with. I was ambushed every second day on a long walk to my high school and my public school by the French kids around me. And, you know, I even thought Maud-Z-Juif, damn Jew. I spoke French almost before I spoke English, but I thought it was one word."
},
{
"end_time": 6647.108,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6619.804,
"text": " They would call me a Moudzi Jouef, a damn Jew. It was only later on I realized there's two words, Moudzi, damn, Jouef, Jew. So it was one word, you know, because I got it all the time. Well, I don't know, maybe I didn't rise above those challenges, but I published 35 books. I represented Canada in the Department of External Affairs in Europe, stayed with ambassadors, lectured at universities. I have five degrees, which makes me unemployable at this point."
},
{
"end_time": 6671.766,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 6647.483,
"text": " everything from a BA to a doctorate and three MA's and so on. What are the degrees then? My BA was in philosophy and English. My QMA was in drama and then I had a creative writing but that was just a joke just for salary purposes. I got a degree in education at the University of Sherbrooke"
},
{
"end_time": 6700.981,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 6672.142,
"text": " That was also a joke, but the degree is there, and I got my doctorate in North American Studies at Lyoskoschuk University in Debrecen, Hungary, where I've often lectured. How fast do you both read? I read one book a year. I mean, slow, slow, slow. Let's say you're here to read this. How long would this one page take you? It depends. I don't know. I'm pretty fast, I think. I don't know. I'm not sure. Have you always been fast? Yeah, I think so. Ever since you were a kid? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And what about you? Very slow."
},
{
"end_time": 6728.951,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 6701.323,
"text": " Very, very slow. So you're faster at writing than you are at reading? No, I'm slow at both. I'm very slow at both. Because everything I write, for example, a thing just went up now at PJ Media Town Hall, it's up today or yesterday, called Life in the Biodome, which starts off, you know, when we went back, we were in Vancouver a month or two ago, and Jana stuck me to the biodome, and I thought, here's a metaphor for Western Civ."
},
{
"end_time": 6752.739,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 6729.377,
"text": " but it was sitting there for the longest time because you know i think i couldn't come across some way of dealing with it and eventually i started to do it and sometimes it takes a day or two but it's because i've been thinking about it all of a sudden for two months and even when i don't think of it and janice knows this it comes up in my dreams i'm totally unconscious of it the words come up phrases come up"
},
{
"end_time": 6775.009,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 6752.995,
"text": " So I know there is something called the mind behind the mind. I've often said this. You have your mind, so-called, whatever it is that observes and makes decisions and judgments and so on. But behind that mind, there is another mind, which is you and not you. And it's that mind that never ceases, never sleeps. It creates your dreams."
},
{
"end_time": 6801.032,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 6775.503,
"text": " She said we forget a word sometimes. Oh yeah. Do you ever have that? Two days before I wake up at three and say it's Lily and Hellman. Yeah. Two, three days later. I don't know. I haven't been thinking about it. So we have that mind that is a perpetual motion machine, constantly revolving and thinking behind the mind that is doing all the other things like right now."
},
{
"end_time": 6830.93,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 6801.408,
"text": " And that's the mind. I don't know if everybody has that, I presume. It must be a natural human phenomenon. But I know I have it and I'm infinitely grateful for it because without that, what would I do? You know, it's what we call inspiration, it's what we call magic, it's what you call being in the zone. We have all these terms for it, you know. She has it too. She's an amazing writer. I mean, I can't believe she'll sit down with all this. Very slow, though. Very slow. No, well, because we go over things a million times."
},
{
"end_time": 6861.749,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 6832.159,
"text": " Yeah, I don't even know what it is. My preference is actually to print things out, whatever it is I'm reading and responding to. I don't even know what my process is. I just start writing, but then I go over it and over it and over it and over it. And you construct your sentences. Does it come out of you in the same way that it is read? No, no, we hire a construction."
},
{
"end_time": 6884.428,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 6862.073,
"text": " I don't know how I do it but I revise and revise and revise. I mean I really, Steve and I, you know with the videos we often talked about you know getting"
},
{
"end_time": 6892.585,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 6884.667,
"text": " Doing a certain number of videos that are on a contemporary subject, so if some issue breaks, try to do it right away while everybody's still."
},
{
"end_time": 6921.357,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 6893.302,
"text": " I just can't do it. I've done it. I've tried. Like I really have a great admiration for journalists who do that because I find I can't do it. I'm very small. No, I'm interested. I just, I can't really, often I don't even know exactly what my argument is. You know, I've got an idea. I've got points I want to make, but I don't know. Like when, when I'm really happy with a piece of writing, it's when I feel that every part"
},
{
"end_time": 6935.435,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 6921.664,
"text": " fits together and it all makes one, not original, I mean nothing's really original, but what I feel is my original contribution."
},
{
"end_time": 6956.493,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 6935.811,
"text": " And you know, and the ideal, which doesn't always happen even sometimes when I've worked on something for weeks, but the ideal is that it all, like it's intricately, it seems really natural the way it flows, but that it all works together and the various parts, you know, one part leads into another, and then that counter points off this, and then it all comes together with my final point."
},
{
"end_time": 6984.155,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 6956.766,
"text": " But that's so hard. You see, we go back and forth, and we listen to everything she does. I don't know how many times, but she reviews it. This is one of the... All the different versions. And it's not all of it. It's just one of them. All of them are listed. Yeah. But everything, that's why we can't be journalists. Because you've made every word. And of course, you remember it for the synthesis and for computing."
},
{
"end_time": 7003.643,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 6984.548,
"text": " like you try to make it seem simple and straightforward really because often the way I first write is quite turgid and long sentences and too many words you know long phrases all very complicated and then part of the revision process has to do with"
},
{
"end_time": 7017.09,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7003.643,
"text": " it seems very natural and very straightforward, but so much work. I really admire it. Some journalists can just write one draft and"
},
{
"end_time": 7045.196,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7017.619,
"text": " And that's it. And it reads really well and it makes their point and is well presented, but I can't do that. Often my stuff is really turgid and overly complex and not clear and maybe I'm going in a number of different directions and I haven't really decided how all those different directions work together. And so yeah, I'm constantly reworking. And it's really, it's fascinating. I mean, it is a fascinating process because sometimes I'll work all day on it and it's just, it's no good."
},
{
"end_time": 7074.309,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7045.674,
"text": " Going doesn't it doesn't know what it wants to do. I've got one point here It doesn't really connect with this other point and I don't even know what the relationship is And then I'll go to bed and like David was saying the mind behind the mind or whatever I'll wake up in the morning. I know exactly what it is I've figured it out and maybe it's just one sentence at the very beginning that then everything else Somehow fits together. All right, I see how that first point connects with the second point And so yeah, but it's just takes forever"
},
{
"end_time": 7098.285,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7075.145,
"text": " yeah so i which is amazing because when you sit down and you just start writing i can't do that that's not true i need silence and i have to i have to take a contract on steve at the other side with his lawyer and go crazy that's not true he does that too no"
},
{
"end_time": 7126.971,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7100.862,
"text": " But yeah, if I could I would do way more. Like I wish I could write."
},
{
"end_time": 7135.111,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7127.244,
"text": " way faster because so there's so many interesting things to write about but i have to let so many things go by because i"
},
{
"end_time": 7158.166,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7136.169,
"text": " How much of your writing is research versus writing?"
},
{
"end_time": 7186.647,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7158.166,
"text": " Yeah, there's that. I mean there's so many things to know and yeah, that can take forever. But that isn't, it's not so much that. I don't, you know, I do research but I don't extensively research. A lot of my stuff is fairly straightforward. I'm either dealing with a specific incident"
},
{
"end_time": 7203.302,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7187.039,
"text": " that I want to say something about. Or sometimes I'm responding to a number of articles that are making some kind of claim about women in society or whatever that I want to counter. And so the thing that really takes the time is just figuring out"
},
{
"end_time": 7221.817,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7203.575,
"text": " How to present it?"
},
{
"end_time": 7237.278,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7222.125,
"text": " in an hour, you know, a quick response saying, you know, why this is wrong. I just can't do it. Like in the moment, often I'll, I just get so angry reading. That's part of it too. Or maybe it's more anxious, but it's both. Like I get angry and anxious. I think, Oh,"
},
{
"end_time": 7262.005,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7237.278,
"text": " how like this is just nonsense so much of the stuff that's written is just you know it's it's fantasy or or you know it's ridiculous but to figure out how exactly to respond to it I'm often kind of at a loss I have to sit with it there's Megan oh yeah yeah anyway so yeah so so like there was you know there was a famous example"
},
{
"end_time": 7272.585,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7262.944,
"text": " This woman, she's a university professor as so many of them are. Her name was Susanna Walters and she wrote an article about a..."
},
{
"end_time": 7298.268,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7272.995,
"text": " About a year ago, or more than a year ago, called Why Can't We Hate Men? And it was actually not ironic, not joking, not anything. It was just a straightforward statement of why she hates men and why she thinks that's legitimate. Anytime you come across these, so there's Peggy McIntosh's white friend video. Yeah. Oh, do you want me to send you a few? Yeah. Because I'm going to at one point in the documentary just list off"
},
{
"end_time": 7327.654,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7300.35,
"text": " I guess snippets after snippets of examples. Yeah. Okay. Sure. I'll send you some things. Hey, hi Megan. Come on in. We're just filming something for me and maybe it'll go on behind the scenes. If she approves, you'll look at it before it goes out. And we're done. This one died, which is fine. It died about one minute before we needed to end, so it was fine. Oh, okay. That's not bad. It's okay. Okay. Yep. And you were saying, oh, you know what I was thinking about is"
},
{
"end_time": 7356.698,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7327.875,
"text": " That lady who's sitting next to you, the lady in the back, she was saying that one, it wasn't a violation of free speech what those people did, which is technically true in terms of law. It wasn't a violation of free speech to shut someone else's free speech up, but it definitely was a violation of the university's principles. Yeah, sure. So there's that. Yeah. I mean, that's just what do you say to that? See, I was dumbfounded. And the second is that she said, well, look, you benefited. Yeah. But then you can also make the counter claim. Well, what about the people of Me Too?"
},
{
"end_time": 7387.398,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7359.753,
"text": " they're benefiting yeah exactly I mean what a ridiculous thing to say yeah so if my leg is cut off I will probably receive a lot of attention too I might be interviewed by by CBC or whatever yeah exactly yeah the guy cut off his arm so I'm gonna say that that was really a good thing then that it happened it benefited yeah I mean that's just ridiculous yeah"
},
{
"end_time": 7405.247,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7387.654,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, what do you say to that? I mean, I didn't even know what to say in a way that it's exactly the same argument that was used for Lindsay Shepherd, you know, who was treated so terribly. And then a bunch of people said, Oh, but she benefited. She received far more attention than she would have otherwise. And everybody knows who she is. Yeah, but"
},
{
"end_time": 7434.599,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7405.572,
"text": " That also could be an indication of how pathological the system is, that when you draw attention to it, people realize, okay, we need to pay more attention to it. So it's not necessarily that it's a net, I think it is a net positive. It ended up, so I do believe that when you speak your mind and you tell what you think to be true in a courageous manner like yourself or Lindsay Sheppard or Jordan Peterson or Brett Weinstein, Weinstein, I don't know. Yeah, I think it's Steen but I'm not sure."
},
{
"end_time": 7457.517,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7434.855,
"text": " that somehow therefore the injustice or the wrong is in any way lessened."
},
{
"end_time": 7472.944,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7457.927,
"text": " Because something good came out of it because you drew attention to it and people noticed you when you spoke about it. It's just bizarre. Yeah, it was all of the suggestion was that one would plan for these things to happen because they would help."
},
{
"end_time": 7497.756,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 7473.285,
"text": " I'm going to be interviewing Debra So. You know Debra So? Actually, I don't know if I'm going to be interviewing her. I messaged her a long time ago about this documentary before I started interviewing anybody and she said, yes, let's do it. And then I just never contacted her again because I wasn't sure who she was. I just had a list of people I should contact. I contacted them to see who would get back to me and then I thought that she was somebody who wasn't"
},
{
"end_time": 7514.889,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 7497.892,
"text": " Credible I didn't know which I didn't check into her credentials. So I was like, okay, let me interview these other people first But now that I researched her. Oh, she has a yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah the sexual dimorphism between the differences between men and women neurologically, which is extremely interesting"
},
{
"end_time": 7544.514,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 7514.889,
"text": " It's very sex-positive apparently. That's what she says. I think sex should be talked about more. That goes opposite to the Jordan Peterson point of view, which has also turned out to my point of view, which is that sex is extremely serious and you shouldn't treat it as if there's such a thing as casual sex because you can't disentangle emotions."
},
{
"end_time": 7561.101,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 7545.009,
"text": " Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 7580.998,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 7561.374,
"text": " Yeah, all based on what the woman wants and whether it's a positive experience for the woman. So if it's something she wants and she enjoys, then it's good for her to have a free for all. But if she then changes her mind afterwards and said it was damaging in some way, then all of a sudden it's sexual misconduct. It's totally crazy. Yeah."
}
]
}No transcript available.