Back to the point of the thread, if there is one. @EnolaStraight indicated it was to clear the air, and apologize. Several posters have given clear advice on how to acknowledge the error you were being judged on, and how to improve your existing apology.
Now, not everyone logs in daily, but just a helpful nudge to remind you that we’re waiting on you to clear up your actual intent.
Buuuut . . . you were last seen 2 hours ago as of the time of this post, and those suggested corrections were 6ish hours ago.
So, here’s hoping you’re thinking about the how and whys and having a transformative experience, rather than hoping it will all just go away.
I’m honestly disappointed that EnolaStraight hasn’t come back here and make a real apology (as opposed to the cliché “I’m sorry if anyone was offended”).
I might be assuming too much, like even if Enola had done too little homework on what Peterson believed and the disgusting things he’d said… by now there’s been time to read up (at the very least a few of the links in this thread).
Unless… you’re all in favor of the hate speech Peterson’s spewed for years. But if you’re not, c’mon back.
Yes, you’ve made it very clear over the years that you believe that it’s unfair for anyone on the right, yourself included, to be held accountable for their words and actions.
Yes, defending a hateful transphobic asshole like JP will tend to have that effect.
And for the record, transphobia is not the only thing he is hatefully wrong about. His catalog of naked bigotry is … lengthy.
If you do not want yourself to be branded with equivalent judgement, then you should forcefully reconsider your interest in and association with JP’s teachings.
If you were to do a little exercise of spelling out the steps of what you think has occurred here with respect to Jordan Peterson’s license, I think you’d realize a few things. One is that you have very close to no information, and probably don’t have a basis for certain things you’ve assumed. Another, maybe, would be that the median most likely scenario, based on the facts you do have, does not involve his speech being regulated, except in the same way that any professional person’s speech is regulated.
Or in the same way, say, that my freedom to drink alcohol is regulated by virtue of the fact that if I drive while loaded, I might hear about my driving privileges.
I think that would be more analogous with Petersen using unapproved techniques with patients in a clinical setting. But this blow up exclusively concerns his social media postings. If you were a model of professionalism in the classroom, but posted 1 + 1 = 11 on Twitter, I don’t think you should be censured. That would be an infringement on your freedom of speech.
I’m sure that we all agree with that, in a very broad sense of “freedom of speech.”
What’s your understanding of what is actually happening with Peterson? I think if nobody actually says what they think is happening, it’s easy to end up just spouting generalities at each other.
What I think is happening is that a professional licensing authority received lots and lots of complaints about a guy that makes lots and lots of offensive statements which he broadly presents as stemming from his professional expertise. Eventually, they wrote him a letter and said hey man, if you want to hold yourself out as a part of our club of guys who know things, we need to talk to you about your public proclamations related to what we know and what we do. Just so you know, if you don’t do that, eventually you could be punished, up to and including revocation of the license we gave you. I think the reason they did that is that by giving him a license, they’re authorizing him to make public statements that he’s an expert on things, and it’s costly to them if someone uses that authority in ways that, oh I don’t know, lead to massive lawsuits.
The “1+1=11” example is much more trivial than the other one, though. What if after hours I posted on social media a racist screed about how students of a certain race were genetically inferior, that they would never amount to anything, that the sooner they landed in prison the better, and so on? If I went on speaking tours to persuade people that there was no point in trying to educate students of that race?
If your child were a member of that race and were assigned to my classroom, you’d believe everything was in order? Or would you advocate for my removal from the classroom because my professed beliefs were clearly at odds with my professional obligations?
In any case, though, you’re setting up a distinction that octopus has not. He hasn’t said that freedom of speech is contingent, he has said that it’s fundamental, and suggested no grounds on which a governing body ought to be able to limit said speech. We’re trying to figure out if he, not you, set any such limits.
Again, “infringement of freedom of speech” is one of those phrases that sounds like you mean “unconstitutional violation of civil liberties”—which is not the case here—although you may just be using it to mean “more restrictive about speech than I personally consider appropriate”.
And I disagree that a professional standards organization should be automatically barred from taking into account any online behavior of a public figure. For example, as a college math professor, if I became extremely notorious for online advocacy of completely discredited mathematical crankery (like claiming that I had a valid Euclidean proof of squaring the circle or some such), my institution and professional bodies I belong to would have a hell of a lot to say about it.
Even if I was teaching math correctly in the classroom and confining my crankery to my personal social media accounts, I would be damaging the academic reputation of my institution and my colleagues. That is not looked on with favor, and there’s nothing in the Constitution that automatically shields me from the consequences of that. (An analogous setup for LHoD might be if he were teaching his students acceptably in the classroom but also running a very high-profile private tutoring enterprise where he screams at his students and teaches them that 1+1=11. No, his employer is not unaffected by that behavior and is not ethically obligated to ignore it just because it’s taking place off school property and outside of school hours.)
The heart of the matter is that for public figures, there’s really no way of cleanly segregating what they say about their profession as a private individual from what they say about their profession as a professional practitioner. Jordan Peterson used his academic position and reputation to help achieve and bolster up his personal fame. He is exploiting his official status and his professional credentials with every tweet he posts, because his personal public identity is “licensed psychologist and Professor Jordan Peterson”.
It’s not reasonable to expect the institutions he’s exploiting to pretend that his misbehavior is none of their business as long as he’s not expressing these views in his formal official capacity. His ability to function in his formal official capacity is not separate from his “private individual” expression of views on professional issues.
Years ago I was friends with a guy who was a grad student in mathematics. Over the summer, he got a gig teaching remedial mathematics to elementary school teachers. One afternoon I visited him and asked how his day had gone.
He slumped.
One of the teachers had gotten in an argument with him that day. In order to add fractions, she insisted that you add the top numbers and the bottom numbers. 1/2 + 1/2 = 2/4, she believed.
“Did you show it to her with pizzas?” I asked, because pizzas were basically invented to help children understand how fractions work.
“Of course I showed it to her with pizzas!” he said. “She said pizzas are different!”
If I understand @octopus’s position (and there’s no guarantee that I do), he seems to be saying that nothing in this conversation should be held against her, that if a governing body concluded that she was unfit to teach math based on her speech, they’d be overreaching. Is that correct?
To make it more analogous, you have to have the stupid teacher posting on social media and going on tours saying that 1/2 + 1/2 = 2/4 and that people who don’t agree are lying about math.
I’ll reiterate what I said before; your posting history suggests you don’t have a problem with trans people or the community. And your posts here in this thread back that up.
Improved apology accepted. No new shoe will drop from this issue.
But the Dope always remembers. So lets hope that @EnolaStraight (and the rest of us!) do our best to go forth, spread accurate knowledge and try to be less hurtful to those who really don’t deserve it.
As for the people who really, Really deserve it, DEEP HURTING.