The solution is that society shouldn’t make people dependent on any single means of income for survival, not that no one gets rejected/disbarred from any occupation ever. Ultimately any negativity towards a person lies along a spectrum, and it’s important not to lose sight of the degree of harm involved.
The revoking of professional licenses is not (and should not be) intended as punishment of the individual in question, but rather limiting the damage to society of their recklessness.
That can sometimes be a slippery slope of its own, but I will argue that it’s a somewhat different slope (the “for the greater good” slope) from the “totalitarian government hates nonconformity” slope. Sometimes they intersect though.
Banning lead from gasoline (and paint, plumbing etc) is also governmentally-punished wrongthink, if you’ve built your whole identity and livelihood around being a salesman for leaded gasoline.
Or. Could a certified driving instructor lose their license for telling their clients to drive aggressively, regardless of safety concerns? They might just become a brave martyr challenging the safety-obsessed culture that coddles our drivers.
Hence the “salesman” part. The government is technically depriving you of your livelihood because your employer is out of business, or has moved to non-leaded gasoline, but you insist on only selling leaded gasoline, because you sincerely believe it is superior. Now you are out of a job. (Or rather: now there’s talk going around that you might be out of a job.)
People supporting any form of “Re-education camps” or course do not end up on the right side of history.
If you are in support of the forced “re education” of an individual, under threat of revoking their livelihood, no matter your ideological leanings, I would encourage you to think on this.
Back to the matter at hand: There’s a difference between (potentially) losing your professional license for beliefs and practices related to your professional practice, and being put in a re-education camp. The former isn’t always right either (and can sometimes be weaponzied for political reasons), but they’re not the same thing.
(Speaking as someone from an authoritarian/totalitarian country that puts people in re-education camps, and sometimes weaponizes professional licensing for political reasons. JP’s case looks more like an unfortunate coincidence than that.)
It’s curious that you chose JP, as opposed to the much better example of Hamline University (or that stupid halloween costume thing from a couple of years back; etc, etc). Instead, we choose to entertain JP’s ever-escalating persecution complex.
It’s “persecution” only when someone I like loses or suffers, it’s “consequences” when it’s someone I dislike/in the outgroup (never mind the actual circumstances of their behavior in context). Or maybe the alternative is that no one on any side ever gets any consequences for doing anything. Lawyers never get disbarred, drivers never lose licenses, and everything is exactly the same shade of grey. /s
There’s an extended discussion to be had about the merits and drawbacks of professional licensing as state-enforced gatekeeping, but equating this with political persecution doesn’t seem useful.
Has it not occurred to you that professionals could lose their licenses for reasons that at are not solely political? Like professional malpractice, or advocating for quackery? (There’s a line to be drawn there, too, about what constitutes reasonable standards, but you seem to be suggesting that there be no standards at all.)
> Has it not occurred to you that professionals could lose their licenses for reasons that at are not solely political? Like professional malpractice, or advocating for quackery?
For malpractice such as leaving a scalpel inside of someone or amputating the wrong appendage, sure. But there's no Constitutional right to do either of those things. As for "advocating for quackery", the government forbidding someone for practicing medicine over that absolutely flies in the face of the First Amendment.
Which might be a tricky distinction sometimes, especially in psychology, because
(1) some beliefs and speech aren’t exactly object-level, but aren’t quite political either;
(2) previously non-political, purely object-level issues (eg. treatment approaches for trans people) sometimes become seen as politicized (make no mistake, JP very much played a part in making it so), or conversely lose its previous political connotation.
If the government passes a law saying "you can only be a psychologist if you have a license from the College of Psychologists", and the College of Psychologists will only let you have a license if you go to a re-education camp, why should we look upon that any differently than if the government passes a law saying "you can only be a psychologist if you go to a re-education camp" directly? If you choose to delegate your authority for something to others, shouldn't you be responsible for what they do with it?
* Second hand biased reporting makes it unclear what the official statement from the the College of Psychologists of Ontario actually is and whether they can pull his licence if he ignores them.
* The Government does not auto-kneejerk magically back the College and Peterson has a right of appeal, he's already publicaly grandstanding on the issue and claiming to have preemptively filed application for judicial review with the Ontario Divisional Court.
Going by past performative peak Peterson this is likely a mountain of outrage in response to a molehill of criticism .. and far removed from the spectacle of beiong dragged away and beheaded w/out appeal.
A long time ago, some Jewish coworkers told me about Saudi Arabia as very extreme (a lot of frank discussions about Israel’s issues, Palestinians, and the middle east).
Naive as I was, I didn’t believe them at the time but time has proven them right.
Well this was because you were completely ignorant of Saudi Arabia and the peninsula in general then. No one has ever mistook the Saudis for non-extremists and they’re liberal compared to the population they govern.
AFAICT, MBS himself is not a religious extremist, just a power-hungry tyrant who doesn't tolerate dissent. There's a difference. The dynamic has long been that the royals running the place are much more liberal than the Wahhabis who enforce the religion, and have slowly been trying to liberalize things. It's another great example of why democracy isn't some kind of silver bullet that will magically make populations accept socially liberal values. If Saudi Arabia lost its monarchy and became democratic, it'd be even worse than it is now.
>Worse for you, but better for its citizens, which is the whole point of Democracy.
Of course, I meant "worse" from a Western liberal point-of-view, which I would think should be obvious here.
My whole point there is that Western liberals seem to usually think that if people in oppressive regimes only had democratic governments, then they'd magically turn into countries like Norway. So they try installing democratic governments in places like Afghanistan and then are shocked when these countries don't turn into clones of liberal Western democracies.
> Sure, they just created Algebra, cameras, algorithms and many foundation of our modern world. What a coincidence for a society that hates modernity!
Algebra is what, 3,000 years old? That's your idea of modernity? Really?
> So you stayed in a region you unfathomably hate for 20 years for a job you could've done anywhere? And you didn't even pick rich countries either, starting to sound like someone who's just making stuff up.
You're putting words in my mouth. I enjoy teaching refugees and trying to convert them to atheism, I love the geographic and landscape here, and I love my queer/gay/liberal/artistic friends and family here. I just dislike the religion and the religious. I feel the exact same way about christianity, judaism and hinduism.
It's great being here. All my friends here are either expats or liberal beyaz turkular who work in entertainment, and feel the same way about Islam and religion as I do.
Oh, just caught this. If I said 20, it's a typo. I moved here at the end of '11. I spent my previous 10 years in Europe. I moved to Turkiye because I love the music here. Microtonal theory is fascinating, and as a percussionist, turkish and arabic drumming are second only to Indian. Hopefully we will move to Rajasthan in a few years after my wife and boyfriend retire.
(And to answer a common objection, yes, the same rules apply regardless of religion.)
It's a pity because you obviously also have valuable contributions to make - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34404614. But the damage caused by bombs is greater than the benefit offered by flowers, so we don't really have a choice.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
But consider that I’m representative of the average American of a certain age and older; whose interests begin and end with oil and our involvement because of it.
I think this is somewhat understandable given the “Our allies, the Saudis” rhetoric common in the Reagan/Bush era. American politicians pronounced them friends and the “tough on crimes” ones were more than a little positive about their policies - read something like a Tom Clancy novel from the time and it’s pretty hard to miss.
It's a bit more complicated than that. MBS throwing the book at dissenters have very little to do with Palestine or Israel, and very much to do with MBS's increasing personal paranoia and lack of tolerance for even the mildest form of dissent. There are people getting jailed for completely non-political dissent like daring to advocate for female drivers before the government itself made a policy U-turn on that.
Saudi society itself is far from homogeneous. The largely Western-educated royalty is (was?) in a marriage of convenience with the Wahhabi Sunni extremists who lead the religious establishment, there's a growing middle class that's not particularly extreme in any way, oppressed native groups like the Shia, a huge population of completely powerless and frequently abused foreign workers keeping the kingdom running, etc etc.
His level of violence is the only distinction between MBS, Tayipp, and the rest of the islamic ethnostates. Otherwise everything else is true in every muslim nation from Indonesia to Albania.
The last person you should ask about anything Arab related is anybody connected to the Israeli occupation.
Its like asking a russian army general about Ukraine.
> the use of social media and other communications has been criminalised inside the kingdom since the beginning of Prince Mohammed’s reign.
I don't understand the harping on about "social media" here? It's not using social media that's illegal in Saudi Arabia, it's public dissent, and that's been the case since day one. Previously people were jailed or executed for spraying graffiti on overhead bridges, but the authorities were too clueless to care/understand about posting on the Internet. Now the dinosaurs have been replaced by MBS, who does care about the online world, so they've started applying the same old punishments to people posting the same sentiments online.
When it was spraying graffiti, at least that's actually bad and universally recognized as a crime, so it was just a really disproportionate punishment for it. Posting on social media isn't supposed to be a crime at all.
The crime is not the post. The crime is the statement contained in the post. Who told you that online statements were not crimes? They are exactly as much a crime as a statement in a newspaper or on tv.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadThe revoking of professional licenses is not (and should not be) intended as punishment of the individual in question, but rather limiting the damage to society of their recklessness.
That can sometimes be a slippery slope of its own, but I will argue that it’s a somewhat different slope (the “for the greater good” slope) from the “totalitarian government hates nonconformity” slope. Sometimes they intersect though.
Or. Could a certified driving instructor lose their license for telling their clients to drive aggressively, regardless of safety concerns? They might just become a brave martyr challenging the safety-obsessed culture that coddles our drivers.
If you are in support of the forced “re education” of an individual, under threat of revoking their livelihood, no matter your ideological leanings, I would encourage you to think on this.
Back to the matter at hand: There’s a difference between (potentially) losing your professional license for beliefs and practices related to your professional practice, and being put in a re-education camp. The former isn’t always right either (and can sometimes be weaponzied for political reasons), but they’re not the same thing.
(Speaking as someone from an authoritarian/totalitarian country that puts people in re-education camps, and sometimes weaponizes professional licensing for political reasons. JP’s case looks more like an unfortunate coincidence than that.)
It’s “persecution” only when someone I like loses or suffers, it’s “consequences” when it’s someone I dislike/in the outgroup (never mind the actual circumstances of their behavior in context). Or maybe the alternative is that no one on any side ever gets any consequences for doing anything. Lawyers never get disbarred, drivers never lose licenses, and everything is exactly the same shade of grey. /s
Has it not occurred to you that professionals could lose their licenses for reasons that at are not solely political? Like professional malpractice, or advocating for quackery? (There’s a line to be drawn there, too, about what constitutes reasonable standards, but you seem to be suggesting that there be no standards at all.)
For malpractice such as leaving a scalpel inside of someone or amputating the wrong appendage, sure. But there's no Constitutional right to do either of those things. As for "advocating for quackery", the government forbidding someone for practicing medicine over that absolutely flies in the face of the First Amendment.
Which might be a tricky distinction sometimes, especially in psychology, because (1) some beliefs and speech aren’t exactly object-level, but aren’t quite political either; (2) previously non-political, purely object-level issues (eg. treatment approaches for trans people) sometimes become seen as politicized (make no mistake, JP very much played a part in making it so), or conversely lose its previous political connotation.
This doesn't seem obvious to me at all.
Many (most?) professions have things you need to do that are outside of considerations of any country's constitution.
Not remotely the same as the government-proper arresting him and threatening him with death.
* Second hand biased reporting makes it unclear what the official statement from the the College of Psychologists of Ontario actually is and whether they can pull his licence if he ignores them.
* The Government does not auto-kneejerk magically back the College and Peterson has a right of appeal, he's already publicaly grandstanding on the issue and claiming to have preemptively filed application for judicial review with the Ontario Divisional Court.
Going by past performative peak Peterson this is likely a mountain of outrage in response to a molehill of criticism .. and far removed from the spectacle of beiong dragged away and beheaded w/out appeal.
Naive as I was, I didn’t believe them at the time but time has proven them right.
Worse for you, but better for its citizens, which is the whole point of Democracy.
Its not democracy only when the west likes it.
And the average person there isn't as extreme as you think.
Of course, I meant "worse" from a Western liberal point-of-view, which I would think should be obvious here.
My whole point there is that Western liberals seem to usually think that if people in oppressive regimes only had democratic governments, then they'd magically turn into countries like Norway. So they try installing democratic governments in places like Afghanistan and then are shocked when these countries don't turn into clones of liberal Western democracies.
Algebra is what, 3,000 years old? That's your idea of modernity? Really?
> So you stayed in a region you unfathomably hate for 20 years for a job you could've done anywhere? And you didn't even pick rich countries either, starting to sound like someone who's just making stuff up.
You're putting words in my mouth. I enjoy teaching refugees and trying to convert them to atheism, I love the geographic and landscape here, and I love my queer/gay/liberal/artistic friends and family here. I just dislike the religion and the religious. I feel the exact same way about christianity, judaism and hinduism.
It's great being here. All my friends here are either expats or liberal beyaz turkular who work in entertainment, and feel the same way about Islam and religion as I do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Edit out swipes." (<-- "starting to sound like someone who's just making stuff up" definitely counts as a swipe)
(And to answer a common objection, yes, the same rules apply regardless of religion.)
It's a pity because you obviously also have valuable contributions to make - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34404614. But the damage caused by bombs is greater than the benefit offered by flowers, so we don't really have a choice.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
But consider that I’m representative of the average American of a certain age and older; whose interests begin and end with oil and our involvement because of it.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35090601/saudi-activist-p...
Saudi society itself is far from homogeneous. The largely Western-educated royalty is (was?) in a marriage of convenience with the Wahhabi Sunni extremists who lead the religious establishment, there's a growing middle class that's not particularly extreme in any way, oppressed native groups like the Shia, a huge population of completely powerless and frequently abused foreign workers keeping the kingdom running, etc etc.
The US tended to downplay the issues in SA-we need them—so unless someone digs into the history and region it was a bit of a don’t ask and don’t tell.
MBS behavior has made even someone as politically naive as me see what SA really is (and isn’t).
I don't understand the harping on about "social media" here? It's not using social media that's illegal in Saudi Arabia, it's public dissent, and that's been the case since day one. Previously people were jailed or executed for spraying graffiti on overhead bridges, but the authorities were too clueless to care/understand about posting on the Internet. Now the dinosaurs have been replaced by MBS, who does care about the online world, so they've started applying the same old punishments to people posting the same sentiments online.
Is it? Public dissent is bad?
What do you expect people to do? Vote?