The Mistreatment of Jordan Peterson: How Cancel Culture Works

The case of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson illustrates how cancel culture works. The chilling effect is how and where most of the damage occurs.  Here is an excerpt of an article at The Free Press titled, "Jordan Peterson Goes to ‘War’: The psychologist sells out auditoriums. But he can be stripped of his clinical license because of his tweets. He tells TFP why he won’t back down:

Most of Peterson’s work is technical. (Even the titles of his research are intimidating, like his 2007 paper “Reducing memory distortions in egoistic self-enhancers: Effects of indirect social facilitation.”) Other projects by Peterson are completely anodyne, like his guide and program to improve essay writing.

That’s not what the Ontario Court has taken issue with.

The problem isn’t his clinical practice or his academic research. It’s his worldview. Specifically, his tweets and a few podcast comments, which the College of Psychologists of Ontario, a licensing body for psychologists in the province, considered “unprofessional.”

“The percentage of people who actively oppose what I’m saying is very, very tiny,” Peterson said. “But some of them are extremely committed. And so they can bring disproportionate sway to the decision.” ...

Even if Peterson ultimately loses his license, a man with his following on social media can’t ever be “cancelled.” (And he no longer sees patients anyway.) The more chilling effect of the court’s decision is that it acts as an intimidation toward all other clinical psychologists: self-censor if you share Peterson’s views, or face punishment.

“In all of the areas in which we see pervasive self-censorship, it only takes one example for people to become unwilling to speak their mind. Or even one threat,” Pamela Paresky, a psychologist and author, told The Free Press. “When people say that cancel culture isn’t real because they don’t see people that have legitimately been cancelled, they don’t understand that cancel culture isn't about the cancelling, it’s about the culture. And it’s a culture of fear.”

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The Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry: A Roadmap to Get American Universities Back on Track

As seen in some of my posts, more than a few American Universities have decided, officially and/or de facto, that their core mission does not include unbridled learning driven by curiosity. Here is a brief description of how the new Princeton Principles came to be:

On April 14-5, 2023, a group of eminent scholars and practitioners gathered at Princeton University to explore ways to strengthen and rebuild the open, rules-based international order. In the shadow of the COVID pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine, they searched for “first principles” and reform ideas for twenty-first century global governance architecture, focusing in particular on rules and institutions for the world economy and great power security cooperation.

The newly published Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry seek to "advance free inquiry, honor intellectual merit, and respect the diverse ideas that arise naturally from the pursuit of truth." These are detailed principles that address many of the problems that have bedeviled universities, especially over the past ten years.  Further, these Princeton Principles perfectly complement the Chicago Principles and the Kalven Committee Recommendations. 

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Warning About “Your” Data

Do you have secure copies of your data? I do. James Lindsey has this warning. I create pdfs of my books and the Internet articles I value. Saving only the links is precarious. I buy my books in paper. It's for this reason. Too many things are disappearing these days. Things can disappear off the internet for innocent reasons too, of course. Sometimes, website are shut down for financial reasons or because the person maintaining the website doesn't want to maintain it. But way too many documents are becoming inconvenient to persons unknown in recent years and then they are no more . . .

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Transgender Activism and the Road not Taken

ELIZA MONDEGREEN argues that we could have avoided most of the pandemonium we are currently witnessing about transgenderism. His article is titled: "Trans Activism and the Road Not Taken: The current conflict over trans rights was entirely avoidable."

Here an excerpt from Mondegreen's article, along with Colin Wright's illustration:

A conversation about reasonable accommodations is a nuanced conversation. Instead, we got a radical trans movement that wants to erase sex in law and society, put men in women's prisons and boys in girls' sports, and run an unregulated medical experiment on gender-nonconforming children. This has given rise to an absurd and dystopian reality where men are granted access to women’s prisons, sports, and other protected spaces, and where gender-nonconforming children have become the target of unregulated medical experiments that involve puberty blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and extreme surgeries.

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Internet COVID Censorship: Zero-for-Four

Dr. Vinay Prasad:

It is kinda a big problem when government asks social media to censor people opposed to masking toddlers, closing schools, mandating boosters in young men and people suspicious of the narrative of natural origin, and then turn out to be wrong on every single issue.

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