I'll be honest, I sat on the fence for a long time w/ Peterson but I saw him doing some Kekistan song and dance on Twitter and immediately lost all interest.
Freedom and Safety are conflicting values in a lot of circumstances. It requires judgment, pragmatism, and humility to decide which value ought to win when they conflict and it's easy to get wrong.
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My own politics come down heavily in favor of Freedom, but then I have a biased perspective of having lived in an environment where my Safety was never really at issue but my Freedom was. The main force threatening my Freedom has been bad laws and bad government.
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Do I find it reasonable that people who have not had my blessings and have lived with less safety than I have would favor legislating for safety? Yes I find that reasonable. Do I find it reasonable to consider offensive speech as a legitimate threat to safety? Almost never.
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I disagree with Peterson on a lot of stuff but I strongly agree with him on considering it an unreasonable infringement on freedom to start declaring various mundane speech acts criminal because they might hurt someone's feelings.
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Note that this is VERY different than, for example, legislation regulating FORMAL (i.e. not mundane) speech acts, such as the language used in government documentation that has legal weight to it.
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I could say a lot more and maybe one day I'll blog about it or something but for now that's where I'll leave it. Last thing to note is just that smear campaigns work by draining nuance out of the discussion and they succeeded here. I'm trying to bring some nuance back.
End of conversation
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