What you are experiencing is called "the controversy bait-and-switch". Peterson is a master of it.
What he does is say something designed to look like a dog whistle to get people upset. Then when challenged on it, he say something reasonable to pull in fans. Then he says something else which is designed to be misunderstood, and repeats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKwSDqJAum8&t=244s explains it, and shows an actual example of how Peterson does it. This example had Peterson using the phrase "enforced monogamy" without context, causing people to assume that he wanted laws to enforce monogamy. Then, when challenged, he said, "Oh, no, what I meant was SOCIALLY enforced monogamy. All that I'm saying is that monogamy is a good thing!" Score 1 for Peterson. And people left sore about it are now primed to react doubly at whatever piece of bait he presents next.
Ngl, its a big PITA if you say thing A, and some people understand A, B, C and D and then get mad at you for supporting D. This happened to me some times before and i absolutely hate it. Seeing your argument that its a baddy thing makes me feel very uneasy.
And the "dog whistle" thing you mentioned is conceptually that, accusing someone of saying something they didn't exactly say. I hate this concept. How would someone even proove that something they said wasn't a "dog whistle"?
Let's say you support A, but know that many supporters of A also support B, C, and think that A implies D. Detractors also know that an argument that A implies D.
If you are arguing for A, and you are versed in basic argumentation (as anyone in Peterson's situation is), it is reasonable to expect that you understand the landscape of the argument. As such, if you know that this will be used to discredit your argument, it is incumbent on you to say, "I am arguing for A. I define A as such. With that definition, I am not arguing for D or that A implies D."
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As for dog whistles, you avoid having that problem by explicitly condemning the groups that use the dog whistle (if you indeed believe that group is wrong -- e.g. explicitly denouncing white nationalists), and by adjusting your argument to avoid any semblance of dog whistles as you learn about them.
Yes, it's more work, but this is the landscape of public discourse. Consider that minorities like Muslims have had to do this to the point of absurdity. (E.g. someone does not support the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian hospitals and the withholding of substantial relief aid to Gaza, but that does not mean they support Hamas or its taking of hostages.)
There's no indescriminate bombing of hospitals. Nice how you pushed this lie so casually.
There are very strong proofs that a hospital was hit by a failed rocket launch of a gazan militia against Israel. Plus Hamas and other militias keep their weapons under schools hospitals and mosques. When ever Israel bomb these sites it first gives notice to evacuate. It's in no way indescriminate.
As opposed to a surprise raid against civilians in they're homes butchering their families, mothers before children, babies beheaded before their mothers and children tied up and burnt alive.
Perhaps that is why ppl decrying the bombing of gaza while not mentioning what Hamas did get such strong condemnations
And, as you will notice, I did not say "I" on this. I said "someone."
The point of the argument is to say that someone who espouses A does not immediately support B, and used a contemporary example.
I could have as easily said, "someone who does not support the bombing and murder of 8,000 Gaza residents by Israel or the withholding of aid does not immediately support the hostage taking of 230 hostages by Hamas." Would that be a less controversial opinion for you?
Nope, you wrote murder, that's not a fact, that's editorializing.
This is a war, the first strike was the senseless butchery I described. The ideology that drew that strike calls for annihilation of all Jews. And yet, Israel doesn't indescriminatly murders civilians. Israel called all civilians to leave the bombarded area, Hamas called them to stay. you have no idea how many of those dead are combatants, So how is saying "murder of 8000" not controversial?
Israel has no obligation under any international law, or any moral obligation to give aid as long as the hostages are not released. Remember these hostages are as young as 9 MONTHS. Hamas have not let the red cross see them.
A person who says what you wrote indirectly supports Hamas by spreading their morally corrupt narrative.
But by the time you've built yourself a major brand based on doing this over and over again, your repeated protestations about "just being misunderstood" wear thin.
It's not difficult to show that a given statement was meant innocently, but it does require some effort.
To whit, Norse pagan iconography is a very common in white supremacist imagery. So while I find the Norse pagan imagery interesting and compelling, I can't just hang it on my wall without preparing to defend myself against accusations of being a neo-Nazi. Is it my fault? Is it the accusers fault? No, obviously, it's the Nazis fault; they're the ones that tied a neutral-by-way-of-antiquity symbol to ethnic cleansing.
Does Peterson see what he says as a dog whistle? Impossible to say, but also irrelevant: there are extremists who believe that what he says is in fact a dog whistle, and just like the Norse Pagan imagery, the awfulness of their beliefs taints Petersons beliefs by association. And it turns out that Peterson doesn't have much control over that usage, even if he had a problem with it: the dog whistle is in the promulgation of his ideas by others, not his expression of those ideas.
Just to be clear, I do think Peterson's observations (re: gender roles, amongst others) are just wrong on their face. But that's out of scope for this post.
The only time I hear about dog whistles is when liberals say that alt right or similar with opposing viewpoints use them. I start to wonder if it is in their head only, or a rhetorical tool so that they can say "did you hear that? it was a dog whistle! tread carefully!"
I hope for better times when we can take what people say at face value and stop second-guessing what they supposedly mean.
This term pre-dates the alt-right by decades. The term "dog whistle" was popularized by William Safire in 1988, who campaigned for Richard Nixon among other things. It's historically understood to be a tool used primarily by social conservatives.
"In 1981, former Republican Party strategist Lee Atwater, when giving an anonymous interview discussing former president Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, speculated that terms like "states' rights" were used for dog-whistling"
One that I think about a lot is the "ok" symbol, when its not being held up as a separate symbol (that is, not held up like the peace sign or a middle finger). If you'd normally put the palms of your hands on your knees while sitting, but instead put the o of the symbol on there, then you're doing the thing that's a dog whistle.
And what's insidious about it is that to some extent, people do it just because they know it winds up liberals. Hell, there's a picture of 16-year old me making the sign that way, specifically because the photographer told us not to. That was 25 years ago, so I'm not sure if the symbol had been overloaded at that time. I certainly had no idea about that extra connotation.
Its never clear in isolation if a person using the symbol semi-covertly is doing so because they want to confuse liberals, or to advertise to neo-nazis. Its the same as wearing a red shoelaces in certain parts of Los Angeles. Are you doing it because you're a Blood? Or because you think it goes well with your outfit? What if its both? And if you're not in the context where that extra connotation matters, then no one assumes that there might be that extra connotation. You see the exact same sort of bonkers nitpicking from e.g. QAnon about how every little thing is just code for "this politician is involved in the child sex trade, and want others in the child sex trade to know". Sometimes the accusation of dog-whistling is just bonkers. But I have also seen neo-nazi militias advertising in neutral spaces, and the only reason I was tipped off is because they called themselves the 1488th Civil Defense Militia or some such. As the saying goes, if you know, YOU KNOW.
There are also more explicit dog-whistles, where the word people want to use is deemed politically incorrect. Think "urban" when somebody really means "black" in the late 80s into the 90s.
This is also called the "motte-and-bailey fallacy", and it's utterly insufferable.
It's the off-internet equivalent of 'I'm just trolling, bro, why do you haff to be mad ;)'
What confuses the matter further is that some of his advice is actually common-sense good-advice. He's not famous or controversial for giving that common-sense good-advice, though.
There comes a point where a taxonomy of fallacies is just splitting hairs. But these two are ones that I would choose to distinguish, even though they have a lot of sympathy.
The point of a controversy bait-and-switch is to draw attention and followers based on how reasonable you are. I already explained how it works above.
A motte-and-bailey fallacy, for those who don't know, is that you have two statements that you equivocate between. The motte is very easy to defend. The bailey is an attack. When you are attacking you switch to the bailey. When you are defending you switch to the motte. And then you switch back by pretending that your defense of the motte actually advanced your bailey.
I see this as different because you actually DO intend to convince people of the bailey if you can. And while in the controversy bait and switch you make it clear when you flip between positions, in the mott-and-bailey you equivocate and attempt to leave people confused.
Unfortunatelly, the video is incomplete.
The presenter explains what Peterson said and shows a video of his reaction to the accusations.
What is missing is the actual video snippet of Peterson performing the fallacy - i.e. show me what Peterson said, don't tell me what he said.
Preferably at least a few the seconds leading up and shortly after the timerange in question should be included to minimize the risk of an out-of-context citation.
As it is now I have to go searching for the interview in question if I want to check for myself if he actually did a bait-and-switch, as only evidence for the switch part is actually presented.
If the video featured proper citations, one for the bait and one for the switch, I might've been able to form an opinion, but alas, for now it is not meant to be.
That presenter eventually learned not to make that mistake. His recent videos all include links to the original videos exactly so that people who want additional context can get it. But he didn't do that back then.
However, in my experience, Drew goes out of his way to fairly represent people's positions. Based on that I would trust that he's fairly representing his understanding of what other people actually did. Drew's mistakes are far more likely to be from honest error than malice.
I never thought "enforced monogamy" to be a reference to laws, because that is absurd. I always thought it meant socially enforced, and then not even by any particular sex.
What he does is say something designed to look like a dog whistle to get people upset. Then when challenged on it, he say something reasonable to pull in fans. Then he says something else which is designed to be misunderstood, and repeats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKwSDqJAum8&t=244s explains it, and shows an actual example of how Peterson does it. This example had Peterson using the phrase "enforced monogamy" without context, causing people to assume that he wanted laws to enforce monogamy. Then, when challenged, he said, "Oh, no, what I meant was SOCIALLY enforced monogamy. All that I'm saying is that monogamy is a good thing!" Score 1 for Peterson. And people left sore about it are now primed to react doubly at whatever piece of bait he presents next.