"Be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress…"

It only took me three days, but I finally sat down and dedicated the hour and change to listen to the debate (at 1.5x speed).

It was an interesting debate, with intelligent people on each side making quite different points.

From Michelle Goldberg, you saw the argument effectively boil down to "Social media is creating all sorts of negative pressure on what we feel safe saying publicly that people conflate with political correctness, but what you (Jordan Peterson) and you (Stephen Fry) call political correctness, I would call progress." In the case of Mr. Peterson, Goldberg said that many of his attempts to define political correctness often rely on this concept of identity politics, which from the point of view of the people identifying with those groups is necessary because they're fighting for individual rights as a group, not for group rights at all like Mr. Peterson often claims. And in the case of Stephen Fry, the political correctness in the form of shifting standards of politeness represents progress in the same way that people don't call native americans "indians" anymore, and that hyphenated-americans are a polite way to refer to people who identify with a specific ethnicity under the American umbrella.

Mr. Peterson's response to the proposition was that the political left, in currently holding the institutional power to define what is and isn't acceptable and polite speech, is not at all very good at identifying the unhealthy extremes of what they were doing and could very easily slip into the sorts of harmful behaviors that he has already spent quite a bit of energy denouncing from the political right.

Dr. Michael Eric Dyson's core argument was that the term "political correctness," while created by the political left in self-criticism, has been consistently ignored and/or opposed by people who insist on total control over the right to speech, and in determining whose speech is important to listen to. He spends the most time denouncing the less reasonable positions from Mr. Peterson that the left is about to bring tyranny and chaos of a different order into the public domain through its dogmatic insistence on politeness.

And finally Stephen Fry's argument is all about rhetorical effectiveness of using a dogmatic insistence on language to frame the issues that are most important to the people seeking equal consideration. His definition of political correctness did change a couple times throughout the debate (which is understandable considering the broad umbrella of meanings it could have). Yet the issue he kept returning to effectively was that the partisan tribalism of the left has weaponized an understanding of political correctness that undercuts its persuasive ability to affect change.

I find myself in an odd space in this debate. I think they're all a little bit right. They are each also a little bit wrong too. But I found myself deeply annoyed with Jordan Peterson in a way I haven't been annoyed by anyone since Richard Dawkins. The guy is an asshole claiming to be an angel. It's nakedly apparent that he is at several points getting very close to debating in bad faith. He's sharp as a whip, but whenever someone is trying to make a point about historically ignored peoples, and you ignore that point to insist the other side hasn't addressed your point (when Goldberg directly answered it already, just not to your liking)--that's kind of proving the guy's point.

The proposition itself is a big problem for an audience because it requires a familiarity with what "you" call political correctness, with that you necessarily being the people opposed to the proposition (Stephen Fry and Jordan Peterson). That's a problem because it gives so much power over the definition of the central term over to people who may or may not keep consistent with their definition (and as I noted, one of them was not consistent with their definition).