Why is my bedroom so crowded?

I was on the Oregon Trail in reverse for the last couple of days, it took so long to get home. I had to change planes once with the most awkwardly timed layover, and then I had to take a long shuttle ride with a couple of transfers, and then one of the oxen died and I was laid up with dysentery. Finally, though, a kindly lady picked me up and took me home to my home and my bed.

Except, then…

OK, not really (I also didn’t really get dysentery — was being dramatic). The “Modern Crusaders” are not getting anywhere near my house, but instead, are thriving on Twitter. They don’t seem to be trying to be ironic at all. Looking at their Twitter feed, which I am not linking to, their latest post announces that “There is no salvation outside the Catholic Church,” they include a link to a Telegram channel that declares their goal of “Elimination of the demonic forces dominating our people politically and spiritually. Promoting the establishment of a Catholic monarchy,” and what follows is a welter of posts declaring that “Abortion is Jewish,” linking to Nick Fuentes, and engaging in Holocaust denial and Hitler apologetics.

So…just ordinary Twitter, then.

I’m happy to have left that shithole, and I don’t understand how anyone can be a fan of that hateful twerp, Nick Fuentes.

Jordan Peterson v. the College of Psychologists of Ontario

There is a very widespread myth that ‘free speech’ somehow means the right to say or write absolutely anything without any consequences whatsoever, regardless of its accuracy or potential impact upon others. This is, of course, rubbish. Quite apart from the fact that rights have to be balanced against the rights of others in a ‘your freedom to swing your arm ends where my nose begins’ way and thus there are quite rightly legal limits on what people are allowed to say, there’s also the fact that speech does not exist in a consequence-devoid vacuum. The things you say are going to impact what people think of you, how they react to you, and, if you’re behaving in a particularly insulting or bigoted way, whether they can feasibly continue employing you.

However, there are a lot of people who either don’t get this or pretend not to, and will react to any adverse consequence for anything they or their heroes say – including insults and outright lies – as an outrageous impingement upon their rights and a crisis in society. I’m going to write about one such case which hit the headlines a few months ago, which, as you will likely have figured out from the post title, is Jordan Peterson’s unsuccessful showdown with the College of Psychologists of Ontario.

Background

Peterson, as many of you will know, is a right-wing social media influencer and professor who is known, among other things, for making offensive comments about various people on various forms of social media. He also used to work as a clinical psychologist, although he stopped this line of work six years ago, and he has chosen to maintain his licence with the College of Psychologists of Ontario.

Holding a licence with a professional college does, however, normally involve more than just choosing to do so; there are requirements to be met. In the case of the College of Psychologists of Ontario, the Standards of Conduct include requirements that members ‘comply with the regulatory authority of the College’ and ‘comply with those statutes and regulations that apply to the provision of psychological services’, including the Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists. The first principle of this code is ‘Respect for the Dignity of Persons and Peoples’, and spells out the following ban:

[Members shall] Not engage publicly (e.g., in public statements, presentations, research reports, with primary clients or other contacts) in degrading comments about others, including demeaning jokes based on such characteristics as culture, nationality, ethnicity, colour, race, religion, sex, gender, or sexual orientation.

In short, one of the conditions of remaining licenced to practice psychology in Canada is that you avoid public bigotry and don’t make ‘degrading comments’ or ‘demeaning jokes’ in public. Seems a reasonable enough requirement for an official licence to practice a profession that involves supporting and helping people through some of their most vulnerable moments.

However, this requirement has caused problems for Jordan Peterson, who does not want to give up publicly making degrading comments or demeaning jokes.

Timeline

This comes from the writeup of the eventual court decision, which is available here.

2018-ish to early 2020: the College received multiple complaints about Peterson. I can’t find any details of what complaints came in during this time period were (although, looking through Peterson’s history, there does not seem to have been a shortage of potential candidates for complaint among his public statements) except that apparently they included concerns that some of the things Peterson said were racist, sexist, or transphobic.

March 2020: the College’s Inquiries, Complaints, and Review Committee (the ICRC) held an investigation into said complaints. They did conclude that ‘the manner and tone in which Dr. Peterson espouses his public statements may reflect poorly on the profession of psychology’, but all that they did at this point was to issue a polite though slightly pointed reprimand.

January 2022 – June 2022: several further complaints came in. (This implies that there weren’t any between the first investigation and January 2022. I don’t know whether this is because Peterson actually did dial it back a bit after the first investigation or whether he just got lucky.) These ones are listed in the court decision; some examples include:

  • On a podcast, Peterson joked about the deaths and illnesses of children from overpollution by quipping that they were ‘just poor children’.
  • Following the eviction of a very disruptive anti-vaccine protest in Ottawa, a councillor made a comment on Twitter about how peaceful the city now felt, and Peterson responded by calling her an appalling self-righteous moralising thing.
  • He referred to a surgeon as a ‘criminal’ for performing top surgery (a bilateral mastectomy on a a trans man) even though mastectomies are perfectly legal and the person was an adult who had consented to it. (He also deliberately used the trans man’s former name and pronouns, knowing the man no longer wants to be addressed that way. This is called ‘deadnaming’ and is a known way of being pointedly and deliberately rude to trans people about their transgender status.)

March 2022 – July 2022: the ICRC investigated this further round of complaints. (There seems to have been some back-and-forth here with the ICRC issuing an initial report to which Peterson replied, and one of the above complaints coming in while this was all ongoing. Also, during this time the social media platform then known as Twitter suspended Peterson for his behaviour, although Elon Musk later reinstated his account.)

4th August 2022: the College wrote to Peterson to express their concerns about some of the statements in question, pointing out that ‘public statements that are demeaning, degrading, and unprofessional may cause harm, both to the people they are directed at, and to the impacted and other communities more broadly’. They advised him to ‘to reflect on these issues with a period of coaching’ with a person OK’d by the College. (‘Reflect on these issues with a period of coaching’ is, as far as I can see, college-speak for ‘we can’t just ignore this problem, but we still really want to resolve it without head-on conflict’. The College seem to have been trying very hard to take a route that didn’t involve moving directly to pulling Peterson’s licence.)

6th September 2022: Peterson wrote back to the college refusing this suggestion. He told them that instead he would surround himself with an echo chamber a ‘wide range’ of unspecified family members/acquaintances who could give him feedback on his tone and content.

13th September 2022: the College wrote back to point out that, as this would not be a college-approved course, they would have no guarantee of the quality of the advice being given to Peterson, so, no. Still had to be someone OK’d by the College. (They sent him contact details for two possibilities.)

Some time around this point, date unknown: Peterson got a lawyer to write to the College, apparently claiming that this was some sort of conflict with Peterson’s right to ‘free expression’. The summary in the court report doesn’t give the date or details of this letter, stating only that the College replied on 7th October to say that as a Member of the College he was expected to ‘conduct himself in a way that is consistent with professional standards and ethics’, and that his reported public statements had not met this standard.

21st October 2022: Peterson’s lawyer wrote to the College with Peterson’s official refusal to sign an agreement to attend the required course.

22nd November 2022: The ICRC issued their official decision. This included their concerns that Peterson’s comments could be seen as ‘degrading, demeaning, and unprofessional’, ‘inflammatory’, ‘disgraceful’, or ‘dishonourable’. They pointed out that ‘potential harms include undermining public trust in the profession of psychology, and trust in the College’s ability to regulate the profession in the public interest… Furthermore, public statements that are demeaning, degrading, and unprofessional may cause harm, both to the people they are directed at, and to the impacted and other communities more broadly.’ They felt there was a high risk of Peterson continuing to act this way.

In conclusion, they still required Peterson to go ahead with the coaching programme as previously requested. Not only that, but they were also going to require confirmation from the coach that Peterson actually seemed to be taking the advice on board and making the necessary changes in how he presented himself on public fora. Failure on Peterson’s part to do these things could potentially be considered professional misconduct. In other words, if Peterson wanted to maintain his psychologist’s licence, he was going to have to literally get with the programme.

Some point soon after this: Peterson took the College to court, claiming that the College were setting unreasonable restrictions that infringed on his right to free speech.

23rd August 2023: The court issued their judgement, which was that no, setting reasonable standards for approving the granting or continuation of a licence did not count as infringement on free speech, and, yes, the College’s requirements counted as reasonable standards. Therefore, the College’s judgement stood.

Aftermath

Peterson ranted. (Content warning for Peterson’s thoughts on transgender issues at that link. However, you can at least click on it without adding to his clicks, as I set it up as a web.archive link.)

His free speech rights were being infringed! He was being cancelled for his anti-trans stance! He will keep on boldy telling the truth in the face of adversity Just Like Those Noble Biblical Prophets Of Old! Describing a surgeon as a ‘criminal’ for doing top surgery on a consenting adult is perfectly appropriate since there are completely different kinds of surgery which it would be criminal to do on children, and of course that logic makes perfect sense! Anyone who still believes free speech exists in Canada is delusional!

(That, by the way, is not what ‘delusional’ means. Quite apart from anything else, I think Peterson’s apparent ignorance of the meaning of a normal psychiatric term should possibly raise at least some level of question over his fitness to work as a psychologist, not to mention his apparent belief that it’s appropriate to use it as a slur.)

(Also: No, in all this ranting he doesn’t seem to have mentioned his ‘joke’ about children dying from air pollution. Maybe he realised that that would be a harder one to spin as just his moral stance/perfectly legitimate opinion.)

Thoughts

Firstly; I know this observation has been made in similar cases before, but can we all take a moment to reflect on the irony that these claims of Peterson’s that he’s being ‘cancelled’ and deprived of his free speech rights are being made in an article in a national paper and in comments on internationally-read social media? Peterson not only very demonstrably still has free speech, he has about the widest platform for it imaginable.

Secondly, the right to free speech does not include a right to protection from its natural consequences. Peterson can speak freely all he wants. The College aren’t stopping him. Regardless of anything the College do or don’t do at this point, he will still have his various social media platforms and will still be able to express his views on them to his heart’s content. However, if he continues to choose to use that free speech to make degrading comments and demeaning jokes, then he will not be allowed to continue to hold a licence the conditions of which specifically require avoiding degrading comments and demeaning jokes.

Peterson’s actual issue here seems to be that he doesn’t have a right to a licence. Which he doesn’t, because holding a licence isn’t a right; licences are conditional on fulfilling the criteria set by the licencing body.

Thirdly, I’ve started to suspect Peterson’s not nearly as bothered as he claims. I suspect that he’s actually doing a good job playing everybody.

Peterson’s an intelligent man and quite capable of understanding the judge’s arguments. He’s also demonstrated, in the past, that he’s quite capable of understanding the impact of online criticism, at least when he’s on the receiving end of it. I’m not ruling out the possibility that he really is so self-centred and lacking in empathy that he genuinely cannot see why his style of speaking is a big problem for those people or groups on the receiving end, but, on the whole, I think it a lot more likely that he is consciously and deliberately playing the martyr here because he knows how well that will play to his audience.

Peterson knows perfectly well that his followers are the kind of people who will seize uncritically on the idea that their rights are being violated and how very dare anyone. And that, of course, is exactly what’s happened here. Articles have been written and hands wrung about how terrible it is that poor Peterson has been denied his rights and that it! could! happen! to! you! Outrage is being relished. Which all gets Peterson the clicks, the followers, and, I suspect, rather a lot in the way of donations and free advertising for his books.

And fourthly… it occurred to me to wonder how many, out of all the followers who are getting outraged on Peterson’s behalf, are actually working in some way towards supporting free speech rights for the people in the world who genuinely are denied them. And I’m guessing it’s… well, maybe not actually zero, but not all that many.

I get that. I really do. Getting outraged on someone else’s behalf is easy and satisfying, checking out the other side of the story is harder, and actually getting involved in activism about an issue… well, that’s a lot harder. I’m not good at that side of things myself. But, if you’re happy to shout about how this is an outrageous violation of free speech but don’t actually want to put any effort into supporting organisations that fight against actual outrageous violations of free speech – not ‘he will lose a licence he doesn’t need if he keeps violating the licence conditions’, but people who are facing arrest, imprisonment, and retaliation against themselves and their families – then it’s worth thinking about where your priorities really lie.

If you are someone who does want to support free speech for those who don’t have it, and you have a bit of spare time and/or money to do so, this is a list of links to Amnesty International’s campaigns which gives details of what you can do to support them and this is the link to donate money to them. Thank you for anything you can do.

So…how’s Xitter doing nowadays?

It’s just getting better and better.

Last week, Musk had said that “all” X Premium Plus subscribers would get access to “Grok,” a “rebellious” ChatGPT competitor with “fewer guardrails” that Musk has said was trained on Twitter’s own data, something that Microsoft once tried, creating the world’s most racist chatbot in less than 24 hours back in 2016.

Musk outright lied, saying Grok is “being opened up slowly to Premium+ users,” a statement he likely made because a popular account posted that Grok was a feature of Premium+ subscriptions, only to be met with a community note saying that “most users with X Premium+ still lack access to Grok,” despite Musk posting two days beforehand that you should “subscribe to Premium+ for no ads and access to our Grok AI.”

I am not at all interested in yet another chatbot, especially not one trained on Xitter content, and I’m not going to ever be a Premium+ subscriber, but I was entertained by this idea:

In the event that Grok is truly trained on Twitter’s posts (after all, this is an Elon Musk product), it will become what Jathan Sadowski calls a “habsburg AI,” a “system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AI’s that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.”

I, for one, look forward to the hideous, inbred, mutant essays that will be unleashed on the internet by this development. They can’t be worse than what mere humans can generate.

Kissinger gets the send-off he deserves

Once again, we need a comedy show (The Daily Show‘s Michelle Wolf, Ronny Chieng, and Michael Kosta) to give us the unvarnished truth about this monster who just died, and other US war criminals.

The late Anthony Bourdain, the much traveled chef, also had the right take on Kissinger way back in 2001.

One monster less

Henry Kissinger has died, 100 years old. He was a monster, who was held in high regards by the political elite in both US parties. He was undeservedly treated as a respectful elderly statesman, instead of the monster responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths all over the world.

Anthony Bourdain, a man who sadly lived fewer years than Kissinger, had a perfect description of Kissinger

Elon Musk is such a tough guy

Xitter is currently facing an advertiser boycott, all because Musk has been promoting, and contributing to, a culture of racism, misogyny, and hate. It was his anti-Semitic remarks that finally kicked me in the pants and convinced me I had to leave the platform. He’s mad about it now. He’s blaming the advertisers.

This is what happens when the richest person on Earth overdoses on redpills. A clammy, twitchy, agitated Elon Musk took the stage at The New York Times’ DealBook summit today and told former Twitter advertisers to “Go f*ck yourself.”

“Don’t advertise,” Musk told the brands who left because of Musk’s bizarre and offensive tweets. He jutted his chin and spoke in a clipped, more prominent-than-usual Afrikaans accent. His eyes glinted and snapped with aggression.

“You don’t want them to advertise?” asked the host, incredulously.

“No,” said Musk, turning his head and jutting his chin again.

“What do you mean?” asked the host.

Musk stuttered, then blurted, “If somebody tries to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money? Go f*ck yourself.”

The nonplussed host stammered, “But–”

Musk interrupted and said in a tight, robotic voice accompanied by stiff gesticulations, “GO. F*CK. YOURSELF. Is that clear?” he said, whipping his head back toward the host.

“I hope it is,” he added. He waved to the audience and said, “Hi, Bob,” referring to Disney CEO Bob Iger. “I’m sure you’re in the audience.”

This is madness. The man runs a social media company that makes money by selling advertising — it would be wonderful if someone came up with an alternative scheme, but Musk isn’t doing that. Instead, he’s telling all the people who would buy his product to go fuck themselves, all while acting like an angry five-year-old bully. Look for yourselves: does this seem to be a stable, mature, responsible grown-up?

He’s even saying that if his company goes belly-up and fails, then “Earth” will blame the advertisers and not the incompetent CEO/owner.

Yeah, you go on telling yourself that. I’m saying that it’s all the fault of the guy who decided single-handedly to shape the culture to be tolerant of racists.

The Friedman Doctrine and alternatives

One of the big criticisms of capitalism is that corporations are purely profit-seeking. If there’s ever an opportunity for a large corporation to work towards a social good, or to benefit the environment, the corporation won’t do it, except insofar as it benefits their stockholders. The corporation is practically obligated to be as greedy as possible. There’s a name for this: the Friedman Doctrine.

The Friedman Doctrine was coined by a 1970 article by economist Milton Friedman. Friedman argued that the social responsibility of a business executive is solely to increase the business’ profits. To prioritize anything else is to unilaterally take money from stockholders, employees, and/or customers, and spend the proceeds on whatever the business executive thinks is good. As a business philosophy, the Friedman Doctrine is considered to have been dominant from the 1980s to today.

[Read more…]

Conservative jerks like Rufo are pushovers

Chris Rufo strutted into a lecture at a school of business at the University of Texas, which you’d think would be a friendly environment for him. It wasn’t. He got torched to the ground.

Rufo brought his anti-DEI argument to UT on Monday and because he is – like many on the right – a catastrophist, he gave it an apocalyptic twist, claiming that initiatives like DEI have made public universities frightening, insecure places. I think people from across the political spectrum would acknowledge a sense of anxiety [at the universities], he said. A sense of fear. A sense of foreboding. Something has gone quite wrong.

I’m at a university. He’s got the atmosphere turned around about 180° — if there’s any foreboding, it’s over the fact that conservative cultists like Rufo are hell-bent on eviscerating liberal thought on campus — he said as much outright, announcing that “it is necessary to replace liberal voices with conservative ones at institutions like UT.” Combine that with Republican legislatures constantly cutting funding, and yeah, something has gone quite wrong. I’d start with the fact that philistines like Rufo get speaking engagements on campus.

I needn’t have worried, though. My professional colleagues stepped up to the plate and showed that Rufo was an idiot.

Afterward, Rufo took questions. Naomi Campa, a classics professor at UT, challenged Rufo to define what he meant by “truth, beauty, and goodness,” a standard he had repeatedly referred to in his remarks that he said higher education should re-prioritize. A numbing digression followed in which Rufo complained that leftists reject the concept of beauty. He did not, however, offer any insight into what he considers truth, beauty, and goodness to consist of. “I would like some actual examples,” Campa replied with a note of impatience, “not some argument that says beauty is anti-diversity. … I agree that people give word-salad as answers but I challenge you not to do the same thing – because that was word salad.”

I would like to see examples, too. Leftists do not reject the concept of beauty at all — after all, I find beauty in spiders. I suspect that what he means is that we reject beauty because we can see beauty where he can’t, because, like Jordan Peterson, he thinks the only true beauty is white.

He couldn’t give a specific answer because it would give away the game when he specified a bunch of white supremacist ideals.

Ten minutes later, Polly Strong, an anthropology professor and the president of the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Rufo that she believed in intellectual diversity but that a commitment to the concept wasn’t what she heard from him. She said her personal hero is John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher who advocated for academic freedom, due process, and neutrality in higher learning and asked if Rufo supported those values.

Rufo thanked Strong for her question but his words came faster and more insistent than before. He derided Dewey, saying it would have been better if he’d never been born, and dismissed his values. “Academic freedom, due process, neutrality – those are means, not ends,” Rufo said. “If you have an erasure of ends, what you get is sheer power politics, you get everything reducible to will and domination, and then you get an academic life that drifts into witchcraft, into phrenology, into gender studies.” Rufo concluded by saying that academics who continue to adhere to Dewey’s principles, “frankly, deserve what’s coming.”

Strong was completely unawed by the implied threat. “The ‘ends’ of academic freedom, due process, and shared governance is education for a democratic society,” she said simply. “That is the basis of John Dewey’s vision and many, many university professors believe that today.”

Oh, man, I could have told her ahead of time that conservatives despise John Dewey. The guy who said “Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous”? They hate democracy. “A society with too few independent thinkers is vulnerable to control by disturbed and opportunistic leaders. A society which wants to create and maintain a free and democratic social system must create responsible independence of thought among its young” — they want students who recite cant.

I do wonder what Rufo thinks is “coming.” Is he already planning the pogroms?

The phrenology remark is amusing, because it’s the people who are backing him who believe in genetic determinism, that race is quantifiable, and who publish in their favorite ‘journal’ of phrenology, Quillette.

The audience was silent after Strong’s remark. It had become clear that Rufo wasn’t dominating his opponents. It got worse for him when Samuel Baker, a UT English professor, came to the mic. Baker reiterated that Rufo’s veneration of beauty and truth was meaningless if he provided no idea of what the concepts mean to him, and he criticized Rufo’s use of violent imagery like “laying siege” and deserving “what’s coming.”

“I just want to be honest with you,” Baker said, “your rhetoric in relation to barbarism and the way you smugly say that the university is not going to like what’s coming – I think that in the context of the world right now, where there is a lot of really tragic violence, that we ought to be careful to remove ourselves from that and from groups with white supremacist associations. I really think you should rethink the glibness.”

Wait for it. Baker doesn’t just point out how shallow Rufo’s ideas are, he nails Rufo on his racist, fascist underpinnings.

By “white supremacist associations,” Baker was referring to reports linking Rufo to the figures who constitute a new alt-right bro culture, including the recently disgraced Richard Hanania – a visiting professor of the Salem Center who was, in his words, canceled after revelations that he’d written pseudonymously for white supremacist publications a decade earlier. Rufo also associates with anti-democratic voices like Bronze Age Pervert, as well as people from the Claremont Institute, who advocate for the overthrow of the 2020 presidential election, and Charles Haywood, an extremist who has called for a war of extinction against the left through his “No Enemies to the Right” philosophy. (Haywood is speaking at a far-right conference in Austin next month, by the way.)

Rufo responded to Baker’s remarks directly: “Well, well – be straightforward. What are you saying? You’re alluding, you’re insinuating –”

“That you hang around with fascists?” Baker replied. “Is that what you’re insinuating I’m insinuating?”

And there it was. The colloquy between Rufo and Baker continued for a moment more before Rufo launched into a strident self-defense, claiming he is more sensitive to fascists than anyone because of his family’s history in Italy. But the damage was done. Minutes later the Salem Center’s Carlos Carvalho hustled him out of the building as Baker and Campa tried to continue the back and forth.

Excellent. I’m proud of my professorial colleagues for smacking that lying poseur around. Do more of that, everyone!

Idea for Some Content

During the October FtB Poddish Sortacast, I told a story off the cuff with nothing but a slim outline (and some personal memories) to guide me.  I feel like I did a pretty good job at it, and I enjoyed it, which has me wanting to do it again.  Great American Satan, yewchoob content creator.  I know a lot of people want words to put in their ears, while doing mindless tasks like exercise, or while trying to sleep.  Would you like to get rhapsodized by this beast?  Wanna get lulled by the dulcet tones of Satan?

More importantly, would you toss a plinky coin into a patreon for that sort of thing?  I would not have the time to make patreon exclusives happen, it’d just be an incentive for me to carve out the time for this, while I’m still making my living nine-to-fivin’ for The Man.  I promise I wouldn’t spend all day on twitter and stop producing content for years at a time like the usual leftesque yewchoob comedians do.  Pinkie swear.

If I go for it, I’d aim to do two to four videos a month, at the upper end if a story runs over to being more than one video.  Most of the time I’d do short stories like Len Ross, but sometimes I might even serialize something to low novel length.  Don’t know, we’ll see or we won’t.  I would do my best to keep the videos ad-free or at least having no mid-roll ads, assuming google’s evil asses even allow that for less than a jillion dollars a month.  Also, comments will be disabled on yt completely.  I don’t have time to moderate the mass of hate I could attract there.

–

We won’t have Michael Voris to kick around anymore

I’ve featured Michael Voris several times here — he was the front man for an organization called the Church Militant, a small mob of disgruntled TradCaths, and Voris does a YouTube show called The Vortex which is usually him complaining about the gays, the liberals, the Pope, that sort of thing.

Michael Voris has resigned. Can you guess why?

I still don’t know. He rambles on about “demons” and “moral failings” and “horrible stuff” without dishing out any details.

Here’s another Church Militant weirdo who makes an empty statement on his resignation. Near as I can tell from this evasive complaint, Voris stopped praying with the staff a few years ago. Prayer is so important! No wonder he lapsed in some mysterious way.

We do know that he was “asked to resign for breaching the Church Militant morality clause,” so there was probably something sordid going on, like that he kissed a boy or donated to a social justice organization or, you know, didn’t pray enough. As much as I would be entertained by a tale of decadence and degeneracy, I suspect that his downfall was brought about by some simple thing that the rest of the world would find quaint, but that his insane community would have been horrified by.