Trigger warning: Faced with professional discipline and a requirement to take training to keep his psychology license in Canada - Jordan Peterson shares his beliefs re trans people

I finished reading it. The man is such a blowhard. It’s like he is constantly testing the amount of adjectives he can get away with putting into a single sentence at times.

And he’s just so painfully wrong no matter what justification he uses. I for one am sick and tired of people using people’s youth as an excuse to take away people’s rights. And then of course at one point he claims that God is going to smite the state for its sins. Ugh!

When he’s done with his pointless drivel, he then goes on to point out his “worldwide reputation” as if he is more qualified than the College, and ends with this gem:

I will have no part of it: the Ontario College of Psychologists be damned.

Take my license, if you can — if you dare, you pathetic censors.

Good, we’re all in agreement. He absolutely deserves to be downgraded to the low-quality political pundit he has been trying to be for years. He’s clearly much more interested in that profession than he is actually helping people. Let him forever be known as the disgraced, unethical doctor that he is. He really aught to be grateful since this will free up his time to come up with more bile and vitriol to publish for his moronic fan base.

Well at least he's getting the victimhood he so obviously desires.

I couldn't finish the article because I find his writing and speaking styles to be exhausting.

So from my admittedly limited observations, Peterson has a very narrow set of communication skills. When he's speaking at a specific and receptive group of people, it's very engaging. It's all factoids and anecdotes. Random Pseudo Intellectual BS like stuff about lobsters or misinterpreted sociology or narrow interpretations of history/theology. Over time it builds into a very flattering portrait of the audience with a simple punchline: based on this evidence, "you" are important and should be respected otherwise mankind will fall to ruin. You see it in his masculinity talks when men are the superior leaders. Or silicon valley talks where the Intellectual inventors are the superior leaders. Or business events where the intelligent investors are the superior leaders. And it leads into this cautionary tale of nebulous "chaotic forces" that seek to overthrow this natural order.

But he really goes to hell when he's communicating to a general audience or in any form of dialog. I think it's because he doesn't actually believe anything. He's a white-labeled hyperconservative talking point with some fancy diction. Does he believe in democracy and free speech? Or does he believe in strong man authoritarian rule? Does he believe that men are cognitively superior to women? Feel like he skirts around all these things and implies a lot but never takes an actual position. I remember the time he was asked if he believed the Bible was true and he went into this whole thing about it being real on a meta level and Moses is still walking the desert today.

So with this whole rant, it seems like all he can do is rattle off the talking points with what he thinks is intelligent language. "Government silencing me." "Protect the children." "God will be angry at you." "You can't take my license, I didn't want it anyway."

I don't pay this person much attention, but reading this - holy shit, he's a terrible writer.

let us note that the United Nations itself recognizes “forced sterilization” not only as a crime, but as a veritable crime against humanity, the most serious imaginable crime.
That implies, at the very least, a responsibility among medical and adjacent professionals to speak up when they note such occurrences

What the fuck is he even talking about?

We will look back in the decades to come at the absolute catastrophe of the “gender affirming” movement with the same horror we view the days of lobotomies and eugenics.

Wait, does he legitimately think Elliot Page was forced to do anything? What?

Instead of speaking, therefore, he makes tracks in the opposite direction, taking a boat to parts unknown and far away. (...)
The moral of the story? The ship of state itself founders when those commanded to speak remain silent. Then Hell itself makes itself manifest.

So according to this metaphor, the ship of state is the one that the prophet - that being himself - was using to run away from the truth, and he doesn't want that to founder? Because he wants to keep running away from the truth? Am I getting that right?

Also, I'm pretty sure the NY Post are the outfit that spammed my e-mail address mercilessly for years and illegally ignored all requests to unsubscribe (I never subscribed). No one should be giving them views.

I couldn’t finish it either. Here’s hoping most will read it the way I did- as inadvertently helping the board’s case and the public’s case against him.

I heard a man spiraling and scrabbling for publicity. It’s unfortunate. I hope his finances are set up so he can just retire very very quietly.

This article was a hard read. Not in the sense that it made me upset, but in that Jordan Peterson's approach to writing is overly academic for the setting, and he doesn't make it easy to follow what he's reading. I will blame the editors of the website for some of this as well, interspersing mostly unrelated pictures throughout the text seemingly at random. I've no doubt that if my ad-blocker were off I would be bombarded with a load of other visual clutter that helps to distract from the clumsy point being made. Either way, this felt almost incoherent, and the overuse of paragraph breaks does nothing to make the argument readable.

Once upon a time, I found Peterson's advice sensible and (to a point) helpful. When I read it, I thought 12 Rules for Life had some good points to make, even if the making of them wasn't particularly skilful. Even today, mid-transition and years on from feeling like I need the advice contained in a self-help book (especially one so specifically aimed at men), I still think about some of the 12 rules that he gives and consider them to be good foundational advice for building a good life, and have discussed them closely with a lot of different people who also found value in them.

Anyway Peterson has nothing new to say here, except that he now seems to be couching his justifications for speaking out against transition in terms of both freedom of speech, and of a "professional responsibility, in the face of an egregious and increasingly widespread medical crime." I find it ironic that he grants himself the enormous weight of this responsibility repeatedly in the article, but complains early that none of the individuals who have "brought charges" against him were ever his clients. I wonder if he thinks that the Jonah parable he cites as reasonable justification for taking his position so publicly applies to the people who disagree with him. Peterson seems ignorant (possibly wilfully) to the idea that his detractors may also feel the same degree of responsibility and fear of divine retribution that he does.

Peterson concludes with another petty whinge à la "we'll see who cancels who", and it's quite astonishing that despite how much of "an embarrassment [it is] to be associated with [the Ontario College of Psychologists]," he still seems quite angry about the prospect of getting kicked out (which is not what's happening here, he has merely been instructed to receive professional guidance counselling). Once again, Jordan Peterson reveals himself to be little more than an insecure adolescent, lashing out because he isn't getting his way and because his egregious words have consequences, swearing up and down that he doesn't need his guardians anyway. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

What's been wild to me has been to see just how far some bottom of the barrel self help advice can go with folks. Peterson has not offered anything you can't get from any of the books on the self-help shelf. It's basic, simple shit every two bit "life guru" comes up with, go open some of those books and you'll see. That means absolutely nothing about the folks who got something out of it, other than they've been exploited. For attention, for money, etc, their needs have been used and the failure is in not assigning blame to the man who did it, because "oh well this one other thing he said was good actually".

It's made doubly complicated by the precise nature of who he used. His audience is comprised of some of the least likely people to ever admit they were desperate, when they aren't so young that they're just regurgitating whatever shit happens to be around them. The men Peterson (literally) cries about are being harmed by him and the cult-of-personality-in-miniature keeps them delirious. They only become more of what they don't wish to be, and incessantly try to argue it isn't happening, clumsily and with words they don't actually know.

I'll just be straightforward about it, I loathe this man and everything about him, because he took things I also studied and warped them into their most twisted forms. It's anti-support, the opposite of support, disguised trickery. Instead of resolving, reconciling, introspecting, the audience is led into further irrationality, threatened with ostracisation if they should ever actually grow, which is cult shit. A few days in their group chats/subreddits/forums is enough to see it in action. The need for help is completely real, it's why Peterson met with success. But he is not offering help. He is offering a base, pathetic means to cope with the deteriorating world, where all you can really expect is a constant hunt for chaos agents, who conveniently change shape to be whatever ails you and never go away, because if they did you'd lose your attachment and stop donating, or buying books, or whatever.