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This is preposterous and illogical. Trans people make an effort to pass as the gender they identify as, so forcing a trans man who is on testosterone and had top surgery into the women's restroomor a trans woman who is on estrogen into the men's restroom makes no sense. Even with her harmful views about trans people,I still think throwing drinksand swearing at her is unjustified.

I dont getBennetts whole shtick. Bennett, who rose to fame as The Gun Girl, first gained traction at Kent State University, walking around with a gunwith police for backup. A recent graduate, her activisms emphasis was to protest the campusrulewhichprohibitsstudents from open-carrying. Now, Ifor one, am definitely someone for SecondAmendmentrights.However, asking police from the same district as those who historically murdered students makes no sense to me. The police force at Kent State University may be comprised of different people than in 1970, but it doesnt erase history.

Her methodology is also abrasive.

Do you guys think we should abolish the death penalty? Bennet asked while dressed as her alter-ego, Jenna, at the Womens March in January.

The woman she was interviewing responded, saying she believe[s] in the death penalty, actually, to which Bennett countered, Is that why youre pro-choice?

Now, regardless of what your views are on either abortion orthe death penalty, you can agree this framing is incredibly disrespectful. It doesnt give the interviewee the benefit of the doubt and automatically assumes she gravitates towards policies which support murder. Of course, there are other reasons for being both pro-choice and pro-death penalty, most of which dont support a consistent murder ethic. What Bennett is doing aims just to get a rise out of people, not to have a calm, level-headed discussion. If she wanted to have a level-headed discussion, she wouldnt paint her political opponent as a murderer.

Even so, despite Bennetts apparentlack of disrespect for people she disagrees with, the borderline violent behavior of students at Ohio University was uncalled for, and the police should have intervened. There is a difference between a heated debate and splashing someone with hot beverages while behaving in a manner that could be determined as a precursor to violence.

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I disagree with Kaitlin Bennet but I will protect her free speech - UConn Daily Campus

We havent had one of these for a while, but Professor Jordan Peterson articulates (I think) one of the reasons Slugger remains a live and lively community of unlike-minded folk who arent afraid to disagree with one another over almost everything.

This piece, recorded at the Oxford Union a couple of years ago, is worth watching the whole way through, but this section (where I hope the video link will start below, is the key passage that relates to the role which dispute plays in any democracy.

One key phrase is how he describes respect for the manifestation of the logos as the core value of free speech. In this important regard, Sluggers famous play the ball and not the man is merely an aid to the promulgation of such respect.

As my good friend and colleague John Kellden likes to say, in a network, the best place to store knowledge is in other people. Preferably folk who dont see the world in the same ways that you do

Theres dangers on both sides. One is the danger of pathological order and the other is the danger of pathological chaos and the problem with the questioning tendency is that it knows no limits and thats actually hard on people.

Its actually very difficult to orient yourself in life if you happen to be very high in openness very low in conscientiousness and very high in neuroticism because you question everything and youre not stable.

You might be wildly creative like thats a pretty good recipe for wild creativity but that doesnt mean that its tenable or sustainable because most creative ideas are not only wrong theyre actually deadly.

But some of them arent. Some of them are absolutely vitally important right and so part of the reason we have political discussion or discussion at all is to separate the wheat from the chaff.

So the endless proclivity of the questioning tendency of the liberal left is that every axiom is open for infinite questioning well that leaves you bereft.

But the problem on the right is if you tighten things up too much well then you have no adaptive flexibility left and you are in a sterile tyranny of stone and then the environment shifts around you and youre not prepared and then everyones done.

So the reason that free speech is so important, well I dont think about it as free speech but as respect for the manifestation of the logos thats the proper way of conceptualizing it is that it keeps the balance between those two tendencies right.

You need the questioning and you need the order. And so you think well how much of each and the answer is the recipe changes day to day? And so you think well if it changes day to day how are we going to keep up?

And the answer is by keeping up. Right where we are. But we do that by thinking and we think by talking and we think and talk by disagreeing and were better disagree conceptually because then we dont have to act out stupid ideas that will kill us.

The abstract territory of conceptual dispute is the substitute for war and death. It can be a brutal substitute because conceptual disagreement can be very intense but compared to war and death its hardly intense at all.

You keep the landscape open for serious dispute including dispute thats offensive, obviously, because if youre ever going to talk about anything thats difficult (and why talk otherwise) then youre going to talk about things that are offensive to people.

And youre going to do it badly, youre going to stumble around when youre formulating your thoughts and thats horrible, it makes people anxious, it alienates them but its better than pain and death. And thats the alternative.

This is why eclectic mixers like Sluggermatter. As Fast Company notedpeople are much more likely to share something that accords with something they already think. They also prefer stories that come from someone within their peer group.

Photo by Pixabay is licensed under CC0

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty

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Friday Thread: A reminder that robust political dispute is [much] better than war - Slugger O'Toole

With our collapsing democracies and imploding biosphere, its no wonder that people despair. The Austrian psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl presciently described such sentiments in his book Mans Search for Meaning (1946). He wrote of something that so many patients complain [about] today, namely, the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. A nihilistic wisdom emerges when staring down the apocalypse. Theres something predictable in our current pandemics, from addiction to belief in pseudoscientific theories, for in Frankls analysis, An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour. When scientists worry that humanity might have just one generation left, we can agree that ours is an abnormal situation. Which is why Mans Search for Meaning is the work to return to in these humid days of the Anthropocene.

Already a successful psychotherapist before he was sent to Auschwitz and then Dachau, Frankl was part of whats known as the third wave of Viennese psychoanalysis. Reacting against both Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, Frankl rejected the firsts theories concerning the will to pleasure and the latters will to power. By contrast, Frankl writes that: Mans search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a secondary rationalisation of instinctual drives.

Frankl argued that literature, art, religion and all the other cultural phenomena that place meaning at their core are things-unto-themselves, and furthermore are the very basis for how we find purpose. In private practice, Frankl developed a methodology he called logotherapy from logos, Greek for reason describing it as defined by the fact that this striving to find a meaning in ones life is the primary motivational force in man. He believed that there was much that humanity can live without, but if were devoid of a sense of purpose and meaning then we ensure our eventual demise.

In Vienna, he was Dr Viktor Frankl, head of the neurology department of the Rothschild Hospital. In Auschwitz, he was number 119,104. The concentration camp was the null point of meaning, a type of absolute zero for purpose in life. Already having developed his theories about logotherapy, Frankl smuggled a manuscript he was working on into the camp, only to lose it, later forced to recreate it from memory. While in the camps, he informally worked as a physician, finding that acting as analyst to his fellow prisoners gave him purpose, even as he ostensibly assisted others. In those discussions, he came to conclusions that became foundational for humanistic psychology.

One was that the prisoner who had lost faith in the future his future was doomed. Frankl recounts how even in the camps, where suicide was endemic, the prisoners who seemed to have the best chance of survival were not necessarily the strongest or physically healthiest, but those somehow capable of directing their thoughts towards a sense of meaning. A few prisoners were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom, and in the imagining of such a space there was the potential for survival.

Frankl imagined intricate conversations with his wife Tilly (who, he later discovered, had been murdered at another camp), or of lecturing a future crowd about the psychology of the camps which was precisely his work for the rest of his life. Mans Search for Meaning with its conviction that: Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions became a postwar bestseller. Translated into more than two dozen languages, selling more than 12 millions copies, and frequently chosen by book clubs and college psychology, philosophy and religion courses, Mans Search for Meaning has its place in the cultural zeitgeist, with whole university and hospital departments geared around both humanistic psychology and logotherapy. Even though Frankl was a physician, his form of psychoanalysis often seemed to have more in common with a form of secularised rabbinic Judaism than with science.

Mans Search for Meaning is structured in two parts. The first constitutes Frankls Holocaust testimony, bearing similarity to writings by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. In the second part, he elaborates on logotherapy, arguing that the meaning of life is found in experiencing something such as goodness, truth and beauty by experiencing nature and culture or by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness by loving him, not simply in spite of apocalyptic situations, but because of them.

The book has been maligned as superficial pop-existentialism; a vestige of middle-brow culture offering platitudinous New Age panaceas. Such a reading isnt entirely unfair. And seven decades later, one might blanche at the sexist language, or the hokey suggestion that a Statue of Responsibility be constructed on the US West Coast. However, a fuller consideration of Frankls concept of tragic optimism should give more attention to the former rather than the latter before the therapist is impugned as overly rosy. When he writes Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake, its hard to accuse him of being a Pollyanna.

Some critics accuse Frankl of victim-blaming. The American scholar Lawrence Langer in 1982 even wrote that Mans Search for Meaning is almost sinister. According to him, Frankl reduced survival to an issue of a positivity; Langer argues that the book does a profound disservice to the millions who perished. A critique such as this has some merit to it, and yet Frankls actual implications are different. His book evidences no moralising against those whod lost a sense of meaning. Frankls study doesnt advocate logotherapy as an ethical but as a strategic response to tragedy.

When identifying meaninglessness, it would be a mistake to find it within the individual who suffers. Frankls fellow prisoners werent responsible for the concentration camps, just as somebody born into a cycle of poverty isnt at fault, nor is any one of us (unless you happen to be an oil executive) the cause of our collapsing ecosystem. Nothing in logotherapy implies acceptance of the status quo, for the struggle to alter political, material, social, cultural and economic conditions is paramount. What logotherapy offers is something different, a way to envision meaning, despite things not being in your control. In his preface to the books 2006 edition, Rabbi Harold Kushner glosses Frankls argument by saying that: Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.

Far from being obsessed with the meaning of life, logotherapy demands that patients orient themselves to the idea of individual meaning, to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life daily and hourly, as Frankl writes. Logotherapy asking patients to clear an imaginative space to orient themselves towards some higher meaning provides a response to intolerable situations.

Frankl writes that he grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. It is easy to be cynical about such a claim, proving Frankls point. In our small, petty, limited, cruel era, it seems hard to come across much collective human affection, and yet our pettiness, limitations and cruelty are in their own way a response to the looming apocalypse. Every age has its own collective neurosis, Frankl writes, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it. If were exhausted, fatigued, anxious, enraged, despairing and confused at the collapse of our individual fortunes, our social networks, our communities, our industries, our democracy, our very planet, its no wonder weve developed a certain collective neurosis. Yet humanistic psychology has not been in vogue for decades; in its place, we have fashionable sociobiology and misapplied neuroscience in the form of the Panglossian Steven Pinker and the Svengali platitudes of Jordan Peterson.

In one of the books most remarkable passages, Frankl recounts how, when his work group was allowed a meagre few hours of rest, a fellow prisoner interrupted them and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see a wonderful sunset. With a prose style that tends towards the clinical, albeit with a distinct sense of the sacred, Frankl here gives himself over to the transcendent:

Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colours, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky.

From this vision, here in a place whose very definition was the nullification of meaning, another prisoner remarked: How beautiful the world could be! Such is the promise of logotherapy not to ensure that there will be more sunsets, for that is our individual and societal responsibility. What logotherapy offers, rather, is the promise to be in awe at a sunset, even if it does happen to be our last one; to find wonder, meaning, beauty and grace even in the apocalypse, even in hell. The rest is up to us.

Ed Simon

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

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What Viktor Frankls logotherapy can offer in the Anthropocene - AlterNet

(Chris Baamonde)

Not only ought Gabriel Andrade resist implying there are parallels to be found by Peterson and Hitler, but he also should keep in mind how many lives have been positively changed thanks to his ideas.

In a recent Merion Westarticle, Dr. Gabriel Andrade asserts that Jordan Peterson needs to think harder about the detrimental effects of his Nietzschean/Randian-inspired philosophy and must try harder to disavow some of the tendentious readings that people make of his words. Andrade depicts Ayn Rand as a substandard philosopher and Peterson as an inferior version of Randmore aptly a self help motivational coach, whose ideas resonate with young males and also some of the worst individuals in society, such as members of the alt-right.

Although Andrade wonders what all the hand-wringing surrounding [Peterson] is all about and may prefer the Cliffnotes version of his ideas, many fans view the Canadian psychologist as a modern-day hero. This is something Andrade seems to recognize when he contends that Peterson has seized the mantle as the new right-wing intellectual guru. In doing so, Peterson, according to Andrade, is filling the rights thirty year intellectual vacuum that has been in place since the death of Ayn Rand.

Unlike some of his peers, Andrade is very careful in how he structures his arguments. Although he never directly compares Peterson to Adolf Hitler, his assertions are fraught with innuendo as he leaps from one unsubstantiated claim to another. He points out that Nietzsche was not guilty of the way his philosophy was abused by the Nazis but that he gives credence to the thesis that his ideas did sow the seeds of totalitarianism. Andrade is also concerned that underneath all the talk about responsibility, order, and anti-political correctness, there may be something more sinister going on with Peterson, presumably given the fact that some members of the alt-right and Men Going Their Own Way are counted among Petersons supporters.

Most unfair of all, however, is when Andrade suggests Peterson might be encouraging thinking along the lines of: If you worry so much about being a Superman, then ultimately it is not so hard to conclude that weaklings must simply disappear from the face of the Earth. As such, Andrade engages in the very tactic some commentators, including Conrad Hamilton, have accused Peterson of: suggesting various implications about a writers work, while allowing enough distance to disavow said implications if they are explicitly suggested by readers.

Attempting to invalidate anothers position on the basis of direct or indirect insinuations that there is a comparison to be found with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party makes for an exercise in one of the least excusable of the logical fallacies: Reductio ad Hitlerum. Rachel Maddow, for instance, was one of the mainstream journalists to most notably turn Nazi comparisons into a political strategy. In her effort to equate Donald Trumps 2016 presidential campaign with the advent of a well organized national fascist party in America, she asserted that fascism was not just a word or a way to insult one with whom you disagree with. Maddow continued, it is a specific thinga specific form of far-right politics that involves a sort of narcissistic cult of superman action around the party.

In contrast, Princeton Professor Gianni Riotta warned in a January, 2016 Atlantic piece that though xenophobic rhetoric, demagoguery, and populist appeals certainly borrow from the fascist playbook, there is no fascism without a rational plan to obliterate democracy via a military coup. Riotta said that the fascists who marched on Rome in 1922 were relentlessly, violently focused on a clear goal: to kill democracy and install a dictatorship, which was clearly not a part of the Trump presidential campaign.

Moreover, the frivolous use of the word fascism, not only belittles past tragedies but also obscured future dangers. Since Maddows prime time codification of the newest iteration of Reductio ad Hitlerum in 2015, it has become a favorite tactic of many on the left. Politicians such asAlexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Beto ORourke, and Tom Steyers willy-nilly Hitler references are a terrible insult to the actual victims of Nazi genocide, yet they have recently been joined by entertainerssuch as Linda Ronstadt. They have done it to Trump, and now they do it to Peterson, the latter of whom evendevoted many of his own lectures to explaining how the evil of Hitler was truly unparalleled.

Not only ought Gabriel Andrade resist implying there are parallels to be found by Peterson and Hitler, but he also should keep in mind how many lives have been positively changed thanks to his ideas. For Andrade, who argues that Peterson, still has time to avoid going down the path of Ayn Rand and that his unchecked views may be promoting a world that few sensible people would want, I would counter that Andrade still has ample time toavoid going down the path of individuals whose negative fixations on Peterson have resulted in substandard scholarship.

Maybe, instead of belaboring a perceived failure of Peterson to disavow certain subsets of his readers, Andrade should disavow the absurd comparisons of thinkers one disagrees with (or disagrees in part with) to Hitler. So, Andrade writes that, many, many contemporary intellectuals who have far more interesting things to say than Peterson. Yet, after reading Andrades tired indulgence of a lazy logical fallacy,I am afraid that I can now say the same about Gabriel Andrade.

There is something Andrade can do to regain the credibility that he has lost in his latest article. It is to give Peterson the respect he deserves as a scholar and refrain from writing articles that reflect the very unhealthy conspiratorial thinking that Andradeclaims to oppose. Otherwise, Andrade risks continuing the collectivist drift of his thinking and accepting his destiny as a contributing author toEveryone I Dont Like Is Hitler: a Childrens Guide to Online Political Discussion.

But Andrade is correct about one thing; Peterson is someone truly resonating with people, and in turn, he is making some people very upset. All things considered, it is not Petersonthe person himselfthat causes many of his detractors to feel such revulsion and anger but, rather, the ideas he promotes, ideas that are a repudiation of the identity politics of the left.

It is not so much the messenger as it is the message. Peterson offers an alternative means of understanding the world for so many, thus diminishing the power of many on the left as a result. I believe that there is a faction within the left that supports a type of authoritarian progressivism as nefarious in all aspects as the kind that Peterson is accused of supporting. The left might not own the means of production, but it greatly controls much of the discourse in cultural institutions, the academic world, and the mass media. Anyone interfering with that process would be attacked similarly.

Free speech is just one of the ideas that Peterson and his detractors disagree on. It is an ironic twist of fate that Peterson is now the preeminent spokesperson for todays Free Speech Movement, which had its origins within the counterculture of the Left. Mario Savio was in many ways the Jordan Peterson of his era. He is considered to have been the voice of the Free Speech Movement, and, at one time, he wasunder investigation by the FBI.

In an address given at Sproul Hall, University of California in 1964, Savio asserted that:

Despite the protestations of those such as Andrade, for many (in the United States and around the world), the idea of the heroic protagonist is intrinsic to our identity. For those of us who strive to uphold the principles of individualism, Peterson is a genuine hero, a paragon of virtue, and a man of great moral courage. We are indebted to Peterson for drawing his line in the sandand doing what needed to be done in his effort to stop the machine. Little wonder that all his detractors have in response are the pettiest of cheap shots.

Tony D. Senatore graduated from Columbia University in 2017, at the age of 55. He is a well-known bassist and musician and can be reached attds2123@columbia.edu.

The artwork for this piece was contributed byChris Baamonde, who can be reached at chrisbaamonde@optonline.net.

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The Travesty of Comparing Jordan Peterson to Hitler - Merion West

Im not a disciple of Dr. Petersons. But he has inspired and helped to heal me with his words, and I admire him most for the example that hes set with his own life: the courage to stand up, with shoulders back and face the darkness.

Fred Hammon, a sixty-five-year-old bass player and mechanical engineer living in Los Angeles, was the subject of Tony D. Senatores November, 2019Merion Westarticle The Best Argument For Jordan Peterson: My Friend, Fred.

Hammon discovered Jordan Peterson by chance on the Internet one day, while caring for his wife who is suffering fromFrontotemporal dementia. Upon seeing Petersons lecture where he describeshow his father-in-law lovingly cared for his wife during an illness, Hammon was particularly struck by Petersons advice to,stand up straight and fully face the darkness, and what you discover is at the darkest part is the brightest light. Hammon describes this as a transformative moment for him, which led him to re-center his own approach to taking care of his wife and dealing with his own sadness at witnessing the state of his wifes health.

Hammon, who self-identifies as a centrist liberal and was influenced by the counterculture movement of the 1960s, does not consider himself a disciple of Petersons. Rather, he simply finds some of his Petersons lessons and advice to be intensely helpful in his own life. In light of the discussions generated by Senatores article about Hammon, as well as Jordan Petersons own recent health issues, Hammon joinsMerion West to provide more background on his relationship to Jordan Petersons work.

Mr. Hammon, you were the subject of a widely-read Merion West article in November about how Jordan Peterson personally helped you so much. Can you briefly explain how Jordan Petersons work has been so impactful in your life?

From when I first was exposed to Jordan Peterson, I liked him. Sometimes, of course, its hard to know when someone is mirroring your own thoughts but just saying it betteror is actually providing you with new information in a way that resonates and inspires. As far as helping me, Im going through the most difficult chapter of my life so far. My wife is suffering from and ultimately dying from the advanced stages of Frontotemporal dementia (FTD).

I had been living in fear and hopelessness, as well as from guilt for not being able to save her. I had pretty much shut down in many aspects of my life and started drinking a lot in order to avoid the day-to-day terror. If you read the article in November, you already know the story about me hearing Jordan talk about standing up and facing that horror head on with courage and seeing a brightness beyond. I believe him when he says that what it is that I need to find is to be found precisely there. It has helped to pull me out of my despair. Im functioning much better and looking for value, as opposed to throwing in the towel and dying along with wife.

I realized that I can be of no real use to her if I continued to circle that drain. I now think more about how I can help her on her journey and find sweetness and value along the way. It still isnt easy, but Ive managed to crawl a good way out of depths of that hole that I was living in, and hearing Jordan Petersons advice was very important for doing that.

In a sense, Tony Senatore, the author of that article, asserted that so many criticisms written about Jordan Peterson are academic or theoretical; however, the fact of the matter is that Petersons work is practically helping many peopleand that latter point ought to take precedence. Is this a view you share?

If you mean that the proof is in the pudding so to speakI suppose. People listen to Jordan Peterson, and they find him inspirational in positive ways. Im not an academic; Im not in a position to judge Jordan Peterson along those lines, and neither, for that matter, are most of his critics. Beyond that, if you take the time to review his lectures and debates, he answers a lot of the questions posed by his critics, if people would listen. He spends a lot of his time answering tough questions. I wish he werent so ill at present. I enjoying hearing him debate his detractors.

From a football blogger citing Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll as problematic because of having invited Jordan Peterson to talk to his team, to efforts to draw a connection between Peterson and Nazis, to the vitriol Peterson received when his recent health problems came to light, what is driving this anger towards Peterson?

This is asking me to understand the mind of some people on the Left who get angry and highly emotional towards anyone who holds an opinion just to the right of theirs. When he gets slammed by university humanities professors like the one who was gloating over his illness, my first reaction is: The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Its as if they fear that they cant defend themselves against his arguments using reasoned language, so, instead, they express hatred and vitriol towards him.

As we have learned recently, Jordan Peterson has, unfortunately, been undergoing a number of health issues in the past few months. Is there anything you would say to other people wholike youhave found Petersons work so impactful and are trying to deal with learning about his health issues?

Jordan Peterson is human, and, therefore, he is both vulnerable and fallible. He has neverin my recollectionever claimed to be anything other than that. He often sounds like he thinks that hes right all the time and comes off with arrogance, but then he admits to changing his mind mid-lecture sometimes after hearing his own thoughts said out loud. It happens in debates too, in real time, when he is presented with a better argument. Ive seen it.

The man is intellectually honest, in my opinion, which doesnt mean that hes right. Hes been open about his depression and health issues. How can he not be seen as anything other than courageous or, at the very least, admirable given, what hes been doing with his life: both helping people who need help, as well as courageously being open about his own health issues?

In addition to the points you already mentioned, are there any other lessons from Jordan Peterson that you think have the potential to be particularly helpful to other peopleand not just young peoplebut perhaps people of all ages?

Im not a disciple of Dr. Petersons. But he has inspired and helped to heal me with his words, and I admire him most for the example that hes set with his own life: the courage to stand up, with shoulders back and face the darkness. The first time I ever noticed him, he was doing precisely that. Hes not perfect, and I would warn anybody against those kinds of perceptions. Its his own life. That doesnt take away from his good examples and advice.

Im a pretty good bass player now, and I might even inspire some younger bass players locally; but, there will become a point when Im not as good. Having said that, I wish Jordan the best on his recovery, and I expect more lectures and writings from him. No pressure.

Editors note: If you would like to share an account of how Jordan Peterson has helped you, please get in touch with us at submit@merionwest.com

Articles authored or co-authored by Staff.

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Jordan Peterson: the One Who Helped Me When I Most Needed It - Merion West