JP has no qualm with laws limiting speech. He only made a stink of this law because he believed it compelled speech, which it does not.
I'd agree with his objection if the law was compelling speech. The government should never do that. You have to understand the difference between preventing speech and compelling speech. Your first paragraph makes it seem like you still do not understand that important distinction, because if you did, you would never compare fire in a crowded theater with forcing you to call someone a girl. The law does not force him to call someone a girl. The law prevents him from calling someone a girl (or boy or whatever) if they have asked him to stop doing so. This would be an unreasonable law if it applied to everyone, everywhere, but the law he is taking issue with only applies to people in positions of power. There is a lot of power invested in making sure people like you continue to fight for them against your own best interests and the interests of all subordinates.
But having just watched the first video igor_kavinski linked immediately above Peterson does not make that claim. What is said, to my ears at least is that he has studied totalitarian governments for forty years and knows how totalitarianism starts and that the Canadian bill, while on the subject of gender, at a deeper level was coming dangerously close to crossing over in that of how totalitarians deal with free speech. And all the while he was trying to tell those obviously traumatized kids that the capacity to debate issues and try to arrive of consensus over what speech could legitimately be legislated against many of them in their self righteous indignation were trying to silence him. They were looking to lay the blame for their suffering on somebody else and thereby get even. They had been made to feel worthless and victims of sexual bigotry and lay the blame at someone else's feet. As I have said so many times the need to target others with rage and contempt comes from having experienced the other side of it.
When I point out that Peterson is not saying what people hear because they have a need to find a target for their suffering to dump on as they were dumped on, I become the new target. I have known that would be the case for years and years and years. No surprise here, but when I don't take the insults personally or react in kind, and I have made it perfectly clear that I can as I hope you have seen, the hostility amps up.
Peterson is talking to the three monkeys, they don't see, they won't hear, and they have nothing of value to say. They just throw self justified victim mentality tantrums.
The right is self-righteously convinced they know what the good is and have no need of liberals so the liberals start screaming to be heard. That fails so they attempt to silence the right out of the self righteous certainty that doing so is the good. Meanwhile, here and there are people who can both argue and listen.
Your homework assignment (just kidding) is to ask yourself in Peterson said that the law compels speech or gets dangerously close to it. If the latter than what needs doing is examining his claim. My first thought on that matter is that I do not have forty years of studying totalitarianism and how it gets started. That is a habit I acquired from becoming aware that everything I held sacred was a lie and discovering to my utter shock that none of it was needed, that there's is something I call the joy of being but has many other names, I think.
But what I do feel is a curiosity as to why Peterson says what he does from that 40 years of analysis by first of all hearing more about his opinions. I don't need to shit on him for ideological error having, in my opinion, none or fewer myself, to defend. My victim mentality is of a different kind. I have observed a truth in psychology and Eastern systems of wisdom, that we have created a delusional reality based on a psychological mechanism, the ego, there to deny from consciousness, the life crippling feelings of worthlessness that would incapacitate us were we to let them in. The problem is that while that was true once and saved allowed us to live, it in now a kind of living death. If you were to dare to let your guard down you would open yourself again to hatred of others who deny that freedom can exist and see it as a deadly threat. We do not want to know we are the living dead. Sorry, but that's how I see it. The man most responsible for showing me all of this said, Come on in, the water's fine. Maybe I dipped a toe. It's not for me to really know.
Facebook
Twitter