Truth To Power wrote:And FYI, no one has a right to live free from discrimination, only institutional discrimination. Private individuals discriminate all the time on the basis of looks, charm, etc., and their liberty to do so is essential to their exercise of freedom. Similarly, people have every right as private individuals to discriminate on the basis of "prohibited" factors like race, religion, and sex. Personally, when I was looking for a spouse, I discriminated against men; some people would discriminate against adherents of other religions, or members of certain races, and they most certainly have every right to do so.
Yes, “discrimination” can mean many different things.
Thiss does not contradict my claims about JP.
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JP, testifying before the Senate:
I think the first thing I’d like to bring up is that it’s not obvious, when considering a matter of this sort, what level of analysis is appropriate. If you’re reading any given document, you can look at the words or phrases or sentences or the complete document, or you can look at the broader context within which it is likely to be interpreted.
When I first encountered Bill C-16 and its surrounding policies, it seemed to me that the appropriate level of analysis was to look at the context of interpretation surrounding the bill, which is what I did when I scoured the Ontario Human Rights Commission web pages and examined its policies. I did that because at that point, the Department of Justice had clearly indicated on their website, in a link that was later taken down, that Bill C-16 would be interpreted within the policy precedents already established by the Ontario Human Rights Commission. So when I looked on the website, I thought there were broader issues at stake here, and I tried to outline some of those broader issues.
You may or may not know that I made some videos criticizing Bill C-16 and a number of the policies surrounding it. I think the most egregious elements of the policies are that it requires compelled speech. The Ontario Human Rights Commission explicitly states that refusing to refer to a person by their self-identified name and proper personal pronoun, which are the pronouns I was objecting to, can be interpreted as harassment. That’s explicitly defined in the relevant policies. I think that’s appalling, first of all, because there hasn’t been a piece of legislation that requires Canadians to utter a particular form of address that has particular ideological implications before, and I think it’s a line we shouldn’t cross.
The definition of identity that’s enshrined in the surrounding policies is ill-defined, poorly thought through and also incorrect. It’s incorrect in that identity is not and will never be something that people define subjectively because your identity is something you actually have to act out in the world as a set of procedural tools, which most people learn — and I’m being technical about this — between the ages of two and four. It’s a fundamental human reality. It’s well recognized by the relevant, say, developmental psychological authorities. The idea that identity is something you define purely subjectively is an idea without status as far as I’m concerned.
I also think it’s unbelievably dangerous for us to move towards representing a social constructionist view of identity in our legal system. The social constructionist view insists that human identity is nothing but a consequence of socialization, and there’s an inordinate amount of scientific evidence suggesting that that happens to not be the case. So the reason that this is being instantiated into law is because the people who are promoting that sort of perspective, or at least in part because the people promoting that sort of perspective, know perfectly well they’ve lost the battle completely on scientific grounds.
It’s implicit in the policies of the Ontario Human Rights Commission that sexual identity, biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual proclivity all vary independently, and that’s simply not the case. It’s not the case scientifically. It’s not the case factually, and it’s certainly not something that should be increasingly taught to people in high schools, elementary schools and junior high schools, which it is. It is being taught. I included this cartoon character that I find particularly reprehensible, aimed obviously as it is at children somewhere around the age of seven, that contains within it the implicit claims, as a consequence of its graphic mode of expression, that these elements of identity are, first, canonical and, second, independent. Neither of those happen to be the case.
I think that the inclusion of gender expression in the bill is something extraordinarily peculiar, given that gender expression is not a group and that, according to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, it deals with things as mundane as behaviour and outward appearance, such as dress, hair, makeup, body language and voice, which now, as far as I can tell, open people to charges of hate crime under Bill C-16 if they dare to criticize the manner of someone’s dress, which seems to me to be an entirely voluntary issue.
I think that the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s attitude towards vicarious liability is designed specifically to be punitive in that it makes employers responsible for harassment or discrimination, including the failure to use preferred pronouns.
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Unthinking Majority wrote:Right he doesn't say that on the response on his website. I earlier quoted the interview where he said exactly as I claim. You refused to watch the interview, which your free choice but has no relevance on the fact that he said it.
I do not think you quoted the video.
You copied and pasted the link, and then told me to watch it. If you wish to quote his exact words now, I would gladly address them.
Unthinking Majority wrote:If incels take research evidence from social science and use it for violence that's a 'them" problem, it's not on the science or the academic.
That's like a prof saying a fact like "whites are projected to be a minority in the US by 2050" and blaming the prof because some rightwing nut uses that fact as an excuse to kill non-white people.
Except that JP specifically brought up this exact review to support his claim and the review itself does not support his claim.
This is more like having a prof argue that white people will be a minority in the future and that this includes white Hispanics and white passing mixed race people, and then using the study to which you are probably referring in your example, when the study specifically states that whites are only a minority if we also exclude white Hispanics and white passing mixed race people.
Then we have an academic either deliberately or unintelligently making a misleading claim that happens to serve the ideological purposes for which he is paid. Note that this is something you specifically argued against in this thread when you argued that social science academics do this.
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