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.
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.)
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.
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.
