The United Kingdom Home Secretary Suella Braverman warned against Islamist extremism and cautioned that 'political correctness' in the larger scheme of things for British national security has created a blind spot for such extremism to flourish.

UK Home Secy Suella Braverman: Political correctness created a blind spot for Islamist extremists

A Canadian professor at the&nbsp;University of Toronto (U of T)&nbsp;named Doctor Jordan Peterson&nbsp;is taking a highly-public&nbsp;stand against what he calls &quot;totalitarian political correctness&quot;, by refusing to use the pronouns with which transgendered people identify. The issue is his refusal to call&nbsp;somone &quot;their&quot; rather than &quot;he&quot; or &quot;she&quot;.

For this he has been called everything from a transphobic bigot who the university must&nbsp;fire, to&nbsp;a martyr for free speech. First, some background.

Campus context

U of T is perhaps the campus epicentre of Canadian social justice. I graduated from teacher&#39;s college there myself. There is a so-called &quot;war&quot; on campus. While it&#39;s a modern debate, it goes back decades on campuses around the world.&nbsp;&nbsp;

On the one side&nbsp;are&nbsp;social justice advocates&nbsp;who want radical&nbsp;changes to customary language,&nbsp;even enshrined in&nbsp;law, in an attempt to&nbsp;help people who, by social&nbsp;customar&nbsp;or the&nbsp;legal system, are&nbsp;marginalised. On the other&nbsp;is traditionally-minded&nbsp;people who find social justice&nbsp;terms and concepts either alien or appalling, and who take umbrage with the notion that not&nbsp;embracing them&nbsp;makes them necessarily&nbsp;less virtuous people.

This is an over-simplification of the extreme poles&nbsp;only worth describing because the convesation itself moves to these&nbsp;poles&nbsp;so quickly. Nuance here is not overly abundant:&nbsp;For all the talk of social justice &quot;warriors&quot; or a &quot;war&quot; against free spech,&nbsp;0 lives have been claimed.

&nbsp;

Canadian context

While the LGBT community has thankfully made some significant gains in terms of cultural acceptance the last few years, both&nbsp;legally and&nbsp;culturally, similar progress for transgendered people has been much slower.

In Canada and elsewhere, there is still confusion surrounding&nbsp;the gender spectrum and&nbsp;sexual orientation&nbsp;and in all the surrounding nomenclature.&nbsp;Seeking to address this, the&nbsp;Liberals expanded an existing Federal bill for human rights protection, called Bill C-16, to&nbsp;update the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code&nbsp;to&nbsp;include&nbsp;&quot;gender identity&quot; and &quot;gender expression&quot;. These were already covered&nbsp;under provincial legislation in Ontario, and in several other provinces.

Advocates of&nbsp;Bill C-16 welcome the&nbsp;effort to reach out to a marginalised group.&nbsp;But critics like Peterson believe the&nbsp;force of law is a strong tool, and however well-intended&nbsp;it may be&nbsp;it&#39;s wrong to outlaw certain words or force the usage of other ones.

Thus, it can be&nbsp;hard to identify whether a&nbsp;person using the wrong terminology is doing so out of visceral&nbsp;dislike&nbsp;for transgendered people or&nbsp;because they&nbsp;mean well&nbsp;but are simply confused. I spoke with Peterson&nbsp;and he fits into neither category.

&nbsp;

Dr Peterson

Doctor Peterson says he does not recognise a person&#39;s right to be referred to with genderless pronouns, like &quot;they&quot; instead of &quot;he&quot; or &quot;she&quot;. In one of his three&nbsp;hour-long YouTube lectures on the topic, the tenured clinical psychology professor has denounced the idea that a person can be something other than male or female.

When asked by CBC&#39;s Carol Off to describe his position,&nbsp;Doctor Peterson said: &quot;I don&#39;t recognise another person&#39;s right to decide what words I&#39;m going to use, especially when the words they want me to use, first of all, are non-standard elements of the English language and they are constructs of a small coterie of ideologically motivated people. They might have a point but I&#39;m not going to say their words for them.&quot;

Perhaps it&#39;s unsurprising that the man who stubbornly insists on gender as binary concept sees much else in black and white.&nbsp;In a YouTube lecture, he claimed that self-identifying as a Marxist was no better than a Nazi. The Communist Manifesto is not Mein Kampf. I haven&#39;t read Das Kapital, but nobody I&#39;ve spoken to who has said it contains incitement to, or celebration of, genocide.&nbsp;

Dr Peterson is obviously an intelligent man, but this topic has a way of creating a mental blocks that make it impossible for people on opposite sides to talk and hear each other.

His main point was that it&#39;s impractical for disempowered students to expect the world to transform itself, and orient itself around them. Well, it seems the world is trying to place the disempowered or vulnerable at the centre, but are stuck because of people like Dr Peterson.

&nbsp;

Language control:&nbsp;To help the powerful or powerless?

Peterson says the Bill has been crafted to permit broad&nbsp;interpretation, to transform what is&nbsp;today permissible&nbsp;speech to&nbsp;possibly&nbsp;hate crime tomorrow. [Quote about possible jail time, or murder...20 years from now, maybe.

&quot;People generate laws and don&#39;t necessarily understand their full consequence. But one of the things I learned from Solzhenitsyn [The famous Russian novelist/dissident], laws have their own life, and the intentions of the people who framed them and the consequences of the law are not necessarily the same thing,&quot; he told me.

The Soviet Union&#39;s attempt at uplifting the working class&nbsp;did not, shall we say, live up to expectations. This left-wing catastrophe is often cited as proof, that any attempt to improve working people&#39;s lives&nbsp;ends in a hideous police state and mass slaughter.

But America&#39;s&nbsp;so-called &quot;War on drugs&quot; was pitched as a moral crusade to clean up society, though&nbsp;actually its real purpose was basically&nbsp;to send minorities for minor crimes to generate income for&nbsp;for-profit prisons, and thus&nbsp;was a moral abomination and utter failure.&nbsp;

But yes, nobody should&nbsp;automatically assume&nbsp;a good intent behind a law is enough to&nbsp;bring about a good law. Either the law is disingenously pitched as human rights-directed,&nbsp;

The case of Jordan Peterson is not the case of&nbsp;Varlam Shalamov, the author of the immortal Kolyma Tales, who Stalin sent&nbsp;to the Kolyma gulag in Siberia for&nbsp;saying the classic Russian writer Ivan Bunin was a &quot;classic Russian writer&quot;.&nbsp;That&nbsp;is Totalitarian political correctness.&nbsp;

Peterson&nbsp;remains a tenured prof&nbsp;who posts&nbsp;lectures on the so-called taboo topic,&nbsp;before being&nbsp;invited to speak about it on several Canadian media platforms. At the time of writing, Peterson remains unimprisoned. That doesn&#39;t mean Peterson&#39;s&nbsp;concern&nbsp;about the law&#39;s implementation is misplaced. Not does it mean he is transphobic

While this disagreement is&nbsp;happening in an academic environment, this particular issue doesn&#39;t bear on academic freedom per se: it has nothing to do with the subject matter of Peterson&#39;s&nbsp;course. &nbsp;&nbsp;

Dear Leader

The proposed change here does not aim to control language to give&nbsp;the ruler more control, but the opposite. In North Korea, speech control is used to elevate the tyrant,&nbsp;Kim Jung Un&nbsp;

&nbsp;In North Korea the tyrant must be called &quot;Dear leader&quot;. It&#39;s healthy for free speech advocates to be concerned about just how the specifics of this&nbsp;bill are&nbsp;crafted. Yes, it&#39;s theoretically conceivable that the proposed language changes by Justin Trudeau&#39;s Liberals will only begin this&nbsp;

Moving Forward

Peterson told me he thinks the proposed rules have nothing to do with the well being or happiness of a particular individual, that they&#39;re politically motivated; this is the core of his opposition. If he thought switching pronouns&nbsp;would help a transgender person, I suspect he would. His opinion is that it doesn&#39;t, and that the people clamouring for the rule change aren&#39;t the marginalized people themselves, with whom he has experience dealing with in his practicev&nbsp;as a clinical psychologist.

Maybe, but I suppose the protesters are upset that he, being a professor, has&nbsp;power over them to determine how these people will identify themselves.

Peterson told me his job is not to comfort them, that his job is specifically to make them&nbsp;uncomfortable. In his class, when they discuss Nazism and crowd control, he makes the case to them that they would be the Nazis, not the brave ones fighting against the masses.&nbsp;

Maybe. He&#39;s in his right as an academic to call them Nazis. That&#39;s subject matter. But when it comes to the people themselves, he should call them what they want to be called.

(WION)

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

but&nbsp;this points to an inconsistency in Peterson&#39;s thinking: In his first&nbsp;online lecture&nbsp;he&nbsp;plainly states that identifying as a Marxist is &quot;in my estimation no better than identifying as Nazis, given the murderousness of the Marxist doctrine and the fact that we know how it&#39;s turned out when implemented in multiple countries.&quot;

Marx&nbsp;calls for workers&#39; rights&nbsp;not religiously-determined&nbsp;mass murder, yet his writing&nbsp;has&nbsp;been hijacked by world&nbsp;leaders who were indeed murderous. Equating the opposition to economic exploitation with the desire for mass&nbsp;

Failing to make a distinction between the&nbsp;opposition to&nbsp;economic exploitation and an&nbsp;explicit call for systemic mass murder&nbsp;is a&nbsp;

&nbsp;

This is not a war: Chill out

The discussion between whether to include or ignore the suggestions of social justice advocates may get heated, but it is not literally a matter of life and death. The world is full of actual matters of life and death.&nbsp;

but at a time when militarised police arrest protesters or are acquited by the legal system after&nbsp;killing unarmed civilians. Why take a stand on the issue of pronouns, which i

&nbsp;

to kill minorities and others considered degenerates is a big failure.

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

The link to Russia is&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Dr Peterson&#39;s critics claim he&nbsp;can&#39;t&nbsp;create&nbsp;a safe classroom for people whose&nbsp;gender he does not recognise. They call him transphobic

&nbsp;

&quot;That&#39;s a uni-varied analysis of a multi-variant reality...and it&#39;s not a helpful one, because you don&#39;t know what the predictors are...I&#39;m sure it&#39;s a factor, but we don&#39;t know how much of a factor it is.&quot;

&quot;We don&#39;t understand what elicits discriminatory behaviour, and to assume it&#39;s prejudice per se is not helpful. It&#39;s not helpful to the transexuals, and it&#39;s an unbelievably unsophisticated analysis.

&quot;Here&#39;s a negative outcome. What causes it? Societal oppression.Like ya, societal oppression plays a role, but you have no idea how important the role is. You just don&#39;t know.&quot;

&quot;I don&#39;t believe for a minute these PC types are anything like the people at the bottom of the hierarchy, they just find them convenient to put forward their self-righteous worldview. Just because people say&nbsp;they are speaking for the opppressed does not indicate in&nbsp;

&nbsp;

However much you may disagree with Dr Peterson&#39;s views,&nbsp;he exalts&nbsp;peace and truth, while making a clear distinction between what you, or he, believes to be true is not necessarily correct but that&nbsp;it&#39;s essential to air the views we truly hold to arrive at the greater truth, and to have meaning in our lives. He wrote books on religious myth making, and there&#39;s a religious air to his exaltation of the spoken truth.

&nbsp;and he has put out a large enough body of&nbsp;well thought out opinion to support his claim.&nbsp;

 
. Peterson claims he is not the enemy of transgendered&nbsp;people, and that all he opposes is vaguely worded legal documents that can result in fines or imprisonment for saying certain things.

Is he masking transphobia in a noble-sounding crusade for free speech, or&nbsp;is the government overreaching in its&nbsp;well-intentioned attempt to support a maligned&nbsp;minority?

[I need quotes about his sympathies and refusals, about his hatred for PC and how this is basically a ]

I asked him, at a time when&nbsp;transgendered people are

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

To understand the issue, consider &quot;Free speech&quot; in two distinct ways;&nbsp;Free Speech versus speaking freely.&nbsp;The first is&nbsp;a guarantee that the government will not use its power to punish&nbsp;citizens for speaking how they want. The second&nbsp;is actually speaking or publishing&nbsp;without self-censorship,&nbsp;exploring ideas without restraint, something which often gives rise to mistakes that may or may not be revised later, and&nbsp;other kinds of&nbsp;messy or&nbsp;unpopular thoughts and&nbsp;speech.

These are both vital, vital concepts,&nbsp;but only the first is subject to&nbsp;the law. The government cannot encourage&nbsp;this second type, it can only bar it from existing by getting

&nbsp;

He says in one&nbsp;lecture &quot;I don&#39;t believe the reason for the changes is the stated reason&quot;. In other words, the changes aren&#39;t really to help transgendered people feel more included, there&#39;s some secret ulterior motive. In an email exchange with WION seeking to know about this supposed&nbsp;ulterior motive, Peterson declined to elaborate, and pointed instead to a recent op-ed carried in the Washington publication The Hill. (WION will update this article should he clarify this point, and )

&nbsp;remove the second type, but if the first is gone,&nbsp;

&nbsp;

second cannot exist without the first&nbsp;without which the second cannot be performed.

Peterson feels the government is removing his ability to say mistaken things, making him and his opponents both correct. The government&nbsp;

&nbsp; The govern

&nbsp;

While homophobes and transgender trolls haunt twitter, they don&#39;t usually bother to make thoughtful lectures

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Is the government really going to fine people, or send them to jail, for using certain phrases?&nbsp; 
&nbsp;

&nbsp;

There are two separate issues to be sorted out from either side. One, what&nbsp;is&nbsp;the ideological motivation that Dr Peterson fears so badly? Is changing a pronoun a simple way to make transgendered people&nbsp;feel less hated by the world around them, or is it a conspiracy to control heteroseual people&#39;s&nbsp;free speech? OK, but whatever this is, surely people like Doctor Peterson shouldn&#39;t go to jail over their choice of pronoun...is&nbsp;he at risk or prison, or is this fear actually groundless and part of an attempt to make a trivial issue seem important?

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

University of Toronto prof Dr Peterson says the Liberal government might imprison him for denouncing 'totalitarian political correctness'

A Canadian professor at the University of Toronto (U of T) named Doctor Jordan Peterson is taking a highly-public stand against what he calls "totalitarian political correctness", by refusing to use the pronouns with which transgendered people identify. The issue is his refusal to call somone "their" rather than "he" or "she". For this he has been called everything from a transphobic bigot who the university must fire, to a martyr for free speech. First, some background. Campus context U of T is perhaps the campus epicentre of Canadian social justice. I graduated from teacher's college there myself. There is a so-called "war" on campus. While it's a modern debate, it goes back decades on campuses around the world. On the one side are social justice advocates who want radical changes to customary language, even enshrined in law, in an attempt to help people who, by social customar or the legal system, are marginalised. On the other is traditionally-minded people who find social justice terms and concepts either alien or appalling, and who take umbrage with the notion that not embracing them makes them necessarily less virtuous people. This is an over-simplification of the extreme poles only worth describing because the convesation itself moves to these poles so quickly. Nuance here is not overly abundant: For all the talk of social justice "warriors" or a "war" against free spech, 0 lives have been claimed. Canadian context While the LGBT community has thankfully made some significant gains in terms of cultural acceptance the last few years, both legally and culturally, similar progress for transgendered people has been much slower. In Canada and elsewhere, there is still confusion surrounding the gender spectrum and sexual orientation and in all the surrounding nomenclature. Seeking to address this, the Liberals expanded an existing Federal bill for human rights protection, called Bill C-16, to update the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code to include "gender identity" and "gender expression". These were already covered under provincial legislation in Ontario, and in several other provinces. Advocates of Bill C-16 welcome the effort to reach out to a marginalised group. But critics like Peterson believe the force of law is a strong tool, and however well-intended it may be it's wrong to outlaw certain words or force the usage of other ones. Thus, it can be hard to identify whether a person using the wrong terminology is doing so out of visceral dislike for transgendered people or because they mean well but are simply confused. I spoke with Peterson and he fits into neither category. Dr Peterson Doctor Peterson says he does not recognise a person's right to be referred to with genderless pronouns, like "they" instead of "he" or "she". In one of his three hour-long YouTube lectures on the topic, the tenured clinical psychology professor has denounced the idea that a person can be something other than male or female. When asked by CBC's Carol Off to describe his position, Doctor Peterson said: "I don't recognise another person's right to decide what words I'm going to use, especially when the words they want me to use, first of all, are non-standard elements of the English language and they are constructs of a small coterie of ideologically motivated people. They might have a point but I'm not going to say their words for them." Perhaps it's unsurprising that the man who stubbornly insists on gender as binary concept sees much else in black and white. In a YouTube lecture, he claimed that self-identifying as a Marxist was no better than a Nazi. The Communist Manifesto is not Mein Kampf. I haven't read Das Kapital, but nobody I've spoken to who has said it contains incitement to, or celebration of, genocide. Dr Peterson is obviously an intelligent man, but this topic has a way of creating a mental blocks that make it impossible for people on opposite sides to talk and hear each other. His main point was that it's impractical for disempowered students to expect the world to transform itself, and orient itself around them. Well, it seems the world is trying to place the disempowered or vulnerable at the centre, but are stuck because of people like Dr Peterson. Language control: To help the powerful or powerless? Peterson says the Bill has been crafted to permit broad interpretation, to transform what is today permissible speech to possibly hate crime tomorrow. [Quote about possible jail time, or murder...20 years from now, maybe. "People generate laws and don't necessarily understand their full consequence. But one of the things I learned from Solzhenitsyn [The famous Russian novelist/dissident], laws have their own life, and the intentions of the people who framed them and the consequences of the law are not necessarily the same thing," he told me. The Soviet Union's attempt at uplifting the working class did not, shall we say, live up to expectations. This left-wing catastrophe is often cited as proof, that any attempt to improve working people's lives ends in a hideous police state and mass slaughter. But America's so-called "War on drugs" was pitched as a moral crusade to clean up society, though actually its real purpose was basically to send minorities for minor crimes to generate income for for-profit prisons, and thus was a moral abomination and utter failure. But yes, nobody should automatically assume a good intent behind a law is enough to bring about a good law. Either the law is disingenously pitched as human rights-directed, The case of Jordan Peterson is not the case of Varlam Shalamov, the author of the immortal Kolyma Tales, who Stalin sent to the Kolyma gulag in Siberia for saying the classic Russian writer Ivan Bunin was a "classic Russian writer". That is Totalitarian political correctness. Peterson remains a tenured prof who posts lectures on the so-called taboo topic, before being invited to speak about it on several Canadian media platforms. At the time of writing, Peterson remains unimprisoned. That doesn't mean Peterson's concern about the law's implementation is misplaced. Not does it mean he is transphobic While this disagreement is happening in an academic environment, this particular issue doesn't bear on academic freedom per se: it has nothing to do with the subject matter of Peterson's course. Dear Leader The proposed change here does not aim to control language to give the ruler more control, but the opposite. In North Korea, speech control is used to elevate the tyrant, Kim Jung Un In North Korea the tyrant must be called "Dear leader". It's healthy for free speech advocates to be concerned about just how the specifics of this bill are crafted. Yes, it's theoretically conceivable that the proposed language changes by Justin Trudeau's Liberals will only begin this Moving Forward Peterson told me he thinks the proposed rules have nothing to do with the well being or happiness of a particular individual, that they're politically motivated; this is the core of his opposition. If he thought switching pronouns would help a transgender person, I suspect he would. His opinion is that it doesn't, and that the people clamouring for the rule change aren't the marginalized people themselves, with whom he has experience dealing with in his practicev as a clinical psychologist. Maybe, but I suppose the protesters are upset that he, being a professor, has power over them to determine how these people will identify themselves. Peterson told me his job is not to comfort them, that his job is specifically to make them uncomfortable. In his class, when they discuss Nazism and crowd control, he makes the case to them that they would be the Nazis, not the brave ones fighting against the masses. Maybe. He's in his right as an academic to call them Nazis. That's subject matter. But when it comes to the people themselves, he should call them what they want to be called. (WION) but this points to an inconsistency in Peterson's thinking: In his first online lecture he plainly states that identifying as a Marxist is "in my estimation no better than identifying as Nazis, given the murderousness of the Marxist doctrine and the fact that we know how it's turned out when implemented in multiple countries." Marx calls for workers' rights not religiously-determined mass murder, yet his writing has been hijacked by world leaders who were indeed murderous. Equating the opposition to economic exploitation with the desire for mass Failing to make a distinction between the opposition to economic exploitation and an explicit call for systemic mass murder is a This is not a war: Chill out The discussion between whether to include or ignore the suggestions of social justice advocates may get heated, but it is not literally a matter of life and death. The world is full of actual matters of life and death. but at a time when militarised police arrest protesters or are acquited by the legal system after killing unarmed civilians. Why take a stand on the issue of pronouns, which i to kill minorities and others considered degenerates is a big failure. The link to Russia is Dr Peterson's critics claim he can't create a safe classroom for people whose gender he does not recognise. They call him transphobic "That's a uni-varied analysis of a multi-variant reality...and it's not a helpful one, because you don't know what the predictors are...I'm sure it's a factor, but we don't know how much of a factor it is." "We don't understand what elicits discriminatory behaviour, and to assume it's prejudice per se is not helpful. It's not helpful to the transexuals, and it's an unbelievably unsophisticated analysis. "Here's a negative outcome. What causes it? Societal oppression.Like ya, societal oppression plays a role, but you have no idea how important the role is. You just don't know." "I don't believe for a minute these PC types are anything like the people at the bottom of the hierarchy, they just find them convenient to put forward their self-righteous worldview. Just because people say they are speaking for the opppressed does not indicate in However much you may disagree with Dr Peterson's views, he exalts peace and truth, while making a clear distinction between what you, or he, believes to be true is not necessarily correct but that it's essential to air the views we truly hold to arrive at the greater truth, and to have meaning in our lives. He wrote books on religious myth making, and there's a religious air to his exaltation of the spoken truth. and he has put out a large enough body of well thought out opinion to support his claim. . Peterson claims he is not the enemy of transgendered people, and that all he opposes is vaguely worded legal documents that can result in fines or imprisonment for saying certain things. Is he masking transphobia in a noble-sounding crusade for free speech, or is the government overreaching in its well-intentioned attempt to support a maligned minority? [I need quotes about his sympathies and refusals, about his hatred for PC and how this is basically a ] I asked him, at a time when transgendered people are To understand the issue, consider "Free speech" in two distinct ways; Free Speech versus speaking freely. The first is a guarantee that the government will not use its power to punish citizens for speaking how they want. The second is actually speaking or publishing without self-censorship, exploring ideas without restraint, something which often gives rise to mistakes that may or may not be revised later, and other kinds of messy or unpopular thoughts and speech. These are both vital, vital concepts, but only the first is subject to the law. The government cannot encourage this second type, it can only bar it from existing by getting He says in one lecture "I don't believe the reason for the changes is the stated reason". In other words, the changes aren't really to help transgendered people feel more included, there's some secret ulterior motive. In an email exchange with WION seeking to know about this supposed ulterior motive, Peterson declined to elaborate, and pointed instead to a recent op-ed carried in the Washington publication The Hill. (WION will update this article should he clarify this point, and ) remove the second type, but if the first is gone, second cannot exist without the first without which the second cannot be performed. Peterson feels the government is removing his ability to say mistaken things, making him and his opponents both correct. The government The govern While homophobes and transgender trolls haunt twitter, they don't usually bother to make thoughtful lectures Is the government really going to fine people, or send them to jail, for using certain phrases? There are two separate issues to be sorted out from either side. One, what is the ideological motivation that Dr Peterson fears so badly? Is changing a pronoun a simple way to make transgendered people feel less hated by the world around them, or is it a conspiracy to control heteroseual people's free speech? OK, but whatever this is, surely people like Doctor Peterson shouldn't go to jail over their choice of pronoun...is he at risk or prison, or is this fear actually groundless and part of an attempt to make a trivial issue seem important?

Toronto professor refuses to use trans-gendered pronouns

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