For those not in the loop, this is a recording of Lindsay Shepherd, a teaching assistant at Canada's Laurier University, being berated by university officials (the thought police) for showing her class a clip of Jordan Peterson. The school claimed that multiple students came forward with complaints and accused her of pushing right-supremacy and discriminatory propaganda. It recently came to light that no students actually came forward. It was a lie perpetuated by the school to suppress free speech and to dictate a narrative.
The school's complaints effectively boil down to:
- Jordan Peterson is a right-wing extremist, comparable to Hitler
- Merely presenting Jordan Peterson's position is a form of gender rights oppression (comparable to racism or homophobia)
- Jordan Peterson's position is anti Canada's human rights statues (and therefore presenting his position is a violation of the law)
- Jordan Peterson is not credible because he's not widely cited in academia (the church of progressivism), comparable to those who don't believe in AGW
- Free speech is subservient to "academic credibility" in the public realm
Here's a clip of Jordan Peterson, for those who are generally unfamiliar with him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRPDGEgaATU
Thoughts? Isolated event or increasingly common place? Something to be worried about or is the school right?
To be candid, this sort of unfettered censorship is a malignancy that the Left needs to ablate and scrape out before the 2020 election, and I say that as somebody who has stridently supported the Left. I'm not familiar enough with this particular instance to comment on the details, so I'll steer my thoughts towards the continuing phenomenon of P.C. culture and censorship creep.
Stories such as these make me wonder whether the Left is intent on taking the high-road to oblivion, putting symbolic change above an agenda that pursues true, structural change. The fatal error here is conflating a fair but empathetic society with a polite one built on false pretenses and conformity.
The cruel irony of P.C. is that when you strip it of all its righteousness and lay it bare, its just a form of censorship, and censorship almost always favors the status quo. Then there is the obvious matter that the motivation behind most P.C. is less about protecting the interests and dignity of the afflicted and more about signaling the soaring morality of it's advocates.
The truth is that reality can be cruel and insensitive across all sorts of dimensions, including race, sex, orientation, economic standing, age, ect. To devote your life to trying to rectify the underlying causes that perpetuate these inequities is admirable. To dictate how the populace should think, feel, represent, or discuss these topics is not.
People naturally understand that they should not inflict something, speech or otherwise, that will cause severe pain to another person merely because they disagree with that person's reasons for finding it painful. This is basic civility that each and every person is capable of discerning for themselves. It's not, and should not be, the role of the Left to make a global determination on these topics and then impose them on everyone else.
Something to be worried about. As a libertarian I feel society is under threat by polarization, radicalization and authoritarianism on both the right and left. Freedom dwindles daily.
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