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If you hang around intellectuals or academics long enough, one of them will make the joke that they wish they were conservative because there is a lot more money in it.Jordan Peterson is living proof of that.

The Koch Brothers and the Heritage Foundation are eager to fund and promote the brightest minds conservatism has to offer. They intend to use the free market language of the right, there is a high demand for intellectuals who will defend conservative ideas, but there is a very low supply.

So if youre wondering how 55-year-old Canadian psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson became an overnight sensation, going from obscure academic to international bestseller lauded in the New York Times as most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now, you dont have to look much further than that old academic joke.

Jordan Peterson is famous because in the era of the resurgent alt-right, the loose collection of conservatives that align with white supremacists, there are few intellectuals willing to align themselves with the movement. The alt-right is in need of intellectuals to justify their fascist worldview, and Peterson has been ready.

Until 2016, Peterson languished in relative obscurity. He taught at Harvard and then at the University of Toronto after earning a Ph.D. from McGill. In the fall of 2016, he became embroiled in a controversy that would cost him his teaching position, but would ultimately launch him to stardom.

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In Canada, as in America, the rights of transgender people have been a hotly debated issue.

Peterson found himself a viral star after opposing a bill known as C-16, which sought to add gender identity and expression to laws regarding discrimination. Peterson began his now thriving YouTube career with a series of lectures arguing that asking people to refer to others by their preferred gender pronouns infringes on free speech. His stance on this issue led to an interview with Channel 4s Cathy Newman which also went viral (the video currently has nine million views).

Suddenly, Peterson was a star with a platform and an eager audience. His views include an Ayn Randian focus on the individual and masculinity, as well as darker viewpoints including anti-Social Justice Warrior screeds, critiques of feminism, the suggestion that political correctness is the undoing of Western culture, and even the implication that violence against women is okay if the woman deserves it.

If Peterson were to advocate these views outright, without a carefully constructed academic veneer, he would be treated like Richard Spencer or Milo Yiannopoulos. Even more likely, he would be largely barred from the public square. But Peterson cleverly follows the playbook of respectability, cloaking his views in Jungian archetypes, fatherly self-help diatribes, and labored academic language. He lends himself an aura of intellectual seriousness his ideas do not deserve. Beneath all the layers of pretense and respectability, Peterson is making an argument you can find at any bar in America. Its a hard world out there, he argues, so get whats yours.

Prior to this year, Petersons only published book was a tome titled Maps of Meaning. In this text, Peterson relied heavily on Swiss psychologist Carl Jung whose work involved interpreting life through mythic archetypes or deeply rooted characters and symbolic motifs that reappear in art, dreams, myths, and religions.

The primary project of Maps of Meaning was to prove modern culture is natural. By this, he means that the structures of society are in place because of how humans are meant to exist in terms both intellectual myth and evolutionary science. This is an incredibly niche subject, but it isnt hard to see why this would be appealing to conservative defenders of the status quo. His argument boils down to Make Western Civilization Great Again.

In January, Peterson released 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos. Several hundred pages slimmer than his earlier work, the book mixes his ideas about masculinity, individualism, and mythic destiny with a self-help style manual for living.

12 Rules breaks up his long academic and philosophical digressions into chapters with titles fitting of a book like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, like Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back and Be Precise In Your Speech. With this book, Peterson rebranded as a kind of Malcolm Gladwell of the right, boiling down varied, complicated concepts into digestible chunks that support generally accepted ideas that he can then use to bolster his misogynistic, bigoted, reactionary worldview.

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In the book and lectures, Peterson contends that a man should be a dominant figure. It is feminine aspects, Peterson argues, of society that prevent men from self-actualizing. Boys are suffering in the modern world, he cautions his audience. The only way to stop the suffering is to toughen up. He refers to his female critics as rabid harpies.

Taking into account Petersons audience and particular appeal, this approach makes sense. Whether you want to talk about the alt-right, Proud Boys, Pepes, gamers (Peterson counts PewDiePie among his fans), or the economically anxious, there is a mass of young, underemployed white men who chafe at the modern liberal answers society provides. Peterson offers them a role model, a mentor, and even a father figure to look up to and affirm their isolated and often prejudiced worldview.

Understanding Petersons intellectual and cultural project will also help you understand his popular YouTube videos a little better. For example, why does Peterson spend some much time talking about Disney movies? Famously, Petersonlikes to tear into Frozen for being SJW propaganda. Remembering that Peterson is setting out to affirm a more traditional view of masculinity, free of the influence of things like Marxism, postmodernism, leftists, or what many people might call social progress, his anger makes complete sense.

While Peterson has a long list of the forces of modernity he is generally opposed to, writers like Shuja Haider of Viewpoints have pointed out that he declines to engage in direct criticism of the work of the various authors he critiques. Essentially, he rails against modernity without ever really bothering to define it. If he did, he would have to admit he is speaking of things like civil rights and gender equality. This is just one example of the kind of lack of intellectual rigor that led Macleans Tabetha Southey to call Peterson, the stupid mans smart person.

Peterson is careful not to explicitly align himself with fascists. But it isnt a giant intellectual leap from Petersons words to the actions in Charlottesville. How does one toughen up if not through violence? He says he is not of the alt-right, but he has said, If men are pushed too hard to feminize, they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.

Peterson tries to duck out of taking responsibility for the political actions of his followers. One of his 12 Rules is Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. But everything is especially political when you are positioning yourself as a cultural theorist. As the world develops around us, we are impacted every day by the worlds political realities. We pay rent on that house we have to put in order.

Nathan J. Robinson is the author of perhaps the most thorough dismantling of Petersons intellectual credibility so far. As he concludes his argument, he makes exactly this point:

Peterson speaks to disaffected millennial men, validating their prejudices about feminists and serving as a surrogate father figure. Yet hes offering them terrible advice, because the individual responsibility ethic makes one feel like a failure for failing Millennials struggle in part because of a viciously competitive economy that is crushing them with debt and a lack of opportunityBut if you cant pay your student loans, or your rent, and you cant get a better job, what use is it to tell you that you should adopt a confident lobster-posture?

Here Robinson refers to an anecdote in 12 Rules in which Peterson explains that human males, like lobsters, are subject to a rigid hierarchy of dominator and dominated. While he is welcome to indulge in whatever metaphors he likes, the sad view dominates his work. He may sound smarter than your average fascist, but his wordsare little more than furious, insignificant bluster.

The only thing you can really learn from Jordan Peterson is that while being a conservative academic might be lucrative, it certainly isnt worth it.

Original post:
Jordan Peterson: What You Should Know About the Alt-Right ...

Women are underrepresented in science, tech, engineering, and math (STEM), and two years ago a study offered a counterintuitive explanation as to why. The authors pointed out that countries with more gender equality, like Finland, tended to have fewer women earning degrees in those fields.

But more women studied science and tech in countries with less gender-progressive policies, such as Algeria, reported the researchers, who called this phenomenon the gender-equality paradox in STEM education.

The 2018 finding drew widespread attention from mainstream media outlets, like the Atlantic and Ars Technica, as well as from conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute and Jordan Peterson, the controversial psychologist most famous for his YouTube videos addressing what hes called the crisis of masculinity. Peterson and others cited the study to argue that, free from societal constraints, women choose to stay away from technical fields a choice they make because of an innate lack of interest, not because of the patriarchy.

But outside researchers questioned that conclusion after they tried, and failed, to replicate the original study. Sarah Richardson, a science historian at Harvard University, told BuzzFeed News that the study authors used a very selective set of data to produce a contrived and distorted picture of the global distribution of women in STEM achievement.

In December 2019, a lengthy 1,113-word correction was added to the paper, clarifying how the researchers had arrived at their conclusions and correcting several sentences and misleading figures. In a separate article and series of blog posts on Tuesday, Richardson and her colleagues at Harvards GenderSci Lab laid out what they saw as the significant problems with the studys methodology, including the researchers calculations for determining the percentage of women STEM graduates and the metrics they used to assess gender equity in each country.

And they called into question the studys fundamental premise: that the correlation the authors apparently found between national gender equity and women in STEM means the former directly affects the latter.

When we looked under the surface, this appears to be a case of massaging ones data selecting for different countries, particular gender measures, particular women-in-STEM measures to produce the narrative that you want to see, Richardson said.

In the end, we do not think that there is a gender-equality paradox.

But one of the studys authors, Gijsbert Stoet of the University of Essex, stands behind the correlation they found and argued that it remains even when using Richardsons preferred calculations. The problem with the critique, he said by email, is that they cannot explain the phenomenon we reported.

When the study came out in February 2018 in the journal Psychological Science, it provided fodder for the likes of YouTube channel Independent Man. Its not that women dont have the aptitude to take STEM subjects in the more egalitarian societies, explained one clip. They just choose not to.

This clip, which has been viewed more than 89,000 times, lives alongside videos like Debunking the Black Lives Matter Narrative and Toxic Femininity.

In an interview at the time, Peterson mentioned a great paper showing that as societies become more egalitarian, the enrollment gap between men and women in STEM fields increases. He added, And what do the feminists say about that? Pseudoscience.

And a member of the American Enterprise Institute cited it to argue that underrepresentation of women in STEM may actually be the result of the great advances in female empowerment, progress, and advancement that have taken place in recent decades, and not the result of systematic gender discrimination.

In the paper, a pair of psychologists Stoet and David Geary of the University of Missouri found that across most countries, girls are as good as boys, and often better, at math and science. But in countries with greater gender equality like Norway and Finland, women make up less than 25% of college graduates in STEM fields. In and of itself, this gender gap isnt news. But the researchers theorized that because these countries tend to be richer, women have the financial freedom to pursue their natural interests which drives them more toward the humanities.

In contrast, in countries with historically less gender equality, such as Algeria and Turkey, women make up much higher percentages of STEM degree-holders, according to their analysis. Because economic opportunities tend to be fewer there, those conditions may make relatively high-paying STEM occupations more attractive to women, Stoet and Geary wrote.

But Richardson thought a lot of these numbers seemed off. So she and a team tried to recreate the analysis with the publicly available data it was based on, including college graduation data from UNESCO.

The researchers had reported, for instance, that the percentage of women among STEM graduates in Algeria was 40.7%. But Richardson found that in 2015, UNESCO reported a total of 89,887 STEM graduates in Algeria, and 48,135 of them or 53.6% were women.

So where did 40.7% come from?

Eventually, Richardsons team would learn that Stoet and Geary had added different sets of numbers: the percentage of STEM graduates among women (in Algerias case, 26.66%) and the percentage of STEM graduates among men (38.89%). That added up to a total of 65.55%. Then they divided the percent of women STEM graduates by the total, producing a rate of 40.7%.

What they had done is create their own ratio of those two, which has never been validated or used in STEM research, Richardson said.

That metric was not explained in the paper. In the recently issued correction, the authors went into detail on the math theyd come up with.

After Richardson and her colleagues recalculated each countrys figures, they found that overall, the study underestimated the number of women STEM graduates worldwide by about 8%.

That wasnt the only problem. Even after Richardsons team learned about the study authors method of calculating the ratio, they still couldnt replicate all of their results. Richardson also took issue with the metric used to assess each countrys level of gender equity and the fact that the study did not examine trends over a long period of time.

Richardsons team found that there are large variations in the gender gaps between STEM graduates among countries, no matter how they are measured. These variations do not conform to simple patterns, Richardson and graduate student Joseph Bruch wrote in a blog post, adding that gender inequalities are not easily represented along a single dimension and with a single measure, as Stoet and Geary attempt to do.

Maria Charles, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies gender and STEM education and was not involved with Richardsons analysis, told BuzzFeed News by email, There is no evidence that gender stereotypes and unconscious gender biases are less pronounced in advanced industrial societies even in societies where women are well represented in universities, labor markets, and polities.

In a letter responding to Richardsons allegations, Stoet and Geary said they had chosen their metric to reflect a womans likelihood of completing a STEM degree compared to a mans. They also said that despite the specific approach to calculations theyd taken, the overall correlation that they had found between nations gender-equity levels and the number of women in STEM remained the same.

Richardson said she first emailed Stoet with questions about the source of his numbers in December 2018. He replied and then stopped writing back, she said, at which point she contacted the editors at Psychological Science.

Asked whether the paper should have been retracted instead of corrected, the editors, Tim Pleskac and Steve Lindsay, said by email: In our view, retraction is appropriate when the reported results have been convincingly shown to be fundamentally in error. In our view, the Stoet and Geary article, post-Corrigendum, was not fundamentally in error.

Richardson said that the messiness underlying the findings reinforces that there is no one factor that determines whether women pursue or succeed in science and technology.

Cultural patterns around womens achievement in and preferences for STEM are incredibly complex and incredibly diverse across the globe, she said.

Read more from the original source:
A Controversial Study Claimed To Explain Why Women Dont Go Into Science And Tech. It Just Got A 1,113-Word Correction. - BuzzFeed News

In the wake of news that Jordan Peterson spent eight days in an induced coma in Russia to overcome a physical dependency on a benzodiazepine drug, questions have been raised about the nature of this commonly prescribed drug, its symptoms and the best way to treat withdrawal. In a video and transcript provided to the National Post, the psychologists daughter, Mikhaila, said that her father was initially prescribed a low dose of a benzodiazepine a few years ago for anxiety, but he only developed a physical dependence on the drug after his dose was increased last April following his wifes terminal cancer diagnosis. She said Jordan was misdiagnosed at several hospitals in North America and nearly died several times before his family made the decision to fly him to Russia for emergency treatment. Mikhailas account has raised questions about the difference between physical dependence and psychological addiction, side effects associated with benzodiazepines, and potential treatments. Heres everything you need to know about the drugs.

What are benzodiazepines?

Benzodiazepines are prescribed for anxiety or as sleeping aids. They include diazepam, lorazepam, alprazolam and clonazepam. They are commonly referred to as benzos or tranquillizers, and well-known brand names include Valium, Ativan and Xanax.

Are they dangerous?

While benzodiazepines can effectively treat anxiety and insomnia, it is not recommended that they are taken long-term as a physical dependency can develop in just two weeks. Once they become physically dependent upon them, anytime that you try and stop them, youre going to have a rebound of the prior symptoms, said David Crockford, a psychiatry professor at the University of Calgary. When you try and taper them or stop them, people will notice a worsening of their prior anxiety that will come on. While the recommendation is that theyre used only in the short term, a lot of people end up on them for longer because of their effectiveness.

Is there a difference between drug addiction and physical dependency?

While colloquially the terms are often used interchangeably, there is a difference, though its not a clear line. The National Institute on Drug Abuse defines addiction as compulsive drug use despite harmful consequences. This includes failure to meet work and social obligations and risky behaviour to seek out more drugs. Physical dependence is when your body adapts to a drug, develops tolerance and experiences physical and mental withdrawal symptoms when trying to come of the drug. Physical dependence can develop even when someone is taking a drug exactly as prescribed, which is the situation Mikhaila described.

What is a paradoxical reaction?

Mikhaila said her father experienced a rare but not unheard of paradoxical reaction, meaning the benzos did the opposite of what theyre supposed to do. A 2004 review published in the journal Pharmacotherapy found that paradoxical reactions to benzodiazepines prescribed for sleep problems occur in less than one per cent of patients. Mikhaila did not specify what kind of paradoxical reaction her father experienced, but if she was referring to increased anxiety, the effect may actually have been caused by growing tolerance to the drugs, Crockford said. As you develop physical tolerance, you require either a higher dose to get the same effect of what you saw before, or essentially people just start getting a breakthrough of all their anxiety symptoms, he said. Thats essentially what tolerance means.

What is akathisia?

Mikhaila said her fathers worst symptom was akathisia an incredible, irresistible restlessness, and an inability to sit still. Crockford said this movement disorder is commonly a side effect of antipsychotic drugs and he didnt know of any benzodiazepine cases. Its also hard to differentiate from anxiety, so its possible Jordans symptoms were a result of growing tolerance to the drug.

What are common symptoms of benzodiazepine withdrawal?

Symptoms include disturbed sleep, agitation, hallucinations, psychotic behaviour, altered mental status and seizures. (Mikhaila said her father is taking anti-seizure medication.)

What are common treatments for a physical dependency?

Generally, the recommended approach is a gradual detoxification from the benzodiazepines, done on an outpatient basis, Crockford said. The Ashton Manual, a well-known tapering technique, recommends reducing the dose by five to 10 per cent every two to four weeks, which means it could take as long as a year to come off the drug. Every time theres a taper, there will be more experience of anxiety and withdrawal symptoms from it, Crockford said.

What about a medically induced coma?

Mikhaila said her father was flown to Russia and placed in a medically induced coma because doctors there have the guts to medically detox someone from benzodiazepines. Crockford said a medically induced coma has been tested for rapid detox from opioids, but it had much higher mortality rates so the Canadian Society of Addiction Medicine recommended against it. He is not aware of any cases of it being used for rapid detoxification from benzodiazepines. Likely, it would have the same potential risk, he said. Most people would not recommend a detox through a general anesthetic.

Link:
Why was Jordan Peterson placed in a medically induced coma? What we know about benzodiazepines and treatment - National Post

In a 2018 CBC interview, Wendy Mesley asked Jordan Peterson, then at the zenith of his celebrity, what he thought lay ahead for him. Peterson responded with his typical gloomy realism: I dont know whats next, really. The overwhelming likelihood, as far as Im concerned, and its been this way since September of 2016, is that this will go terribly wrong. Its too much, eh? Its been too much for a long time. Im surfing a hundred-foot wave and generally what happens if you do that is you drown.

Peterson surely meant the words metaphorically, suggesting that the publics interest in him would wane as rapidly as it had escalated. But in retrospect, the words too much and drown acquire an ominous prescience.

In a recent YouTube video, Petersons daughter, Mikhaila, summarized her familys past year of absolute hell. In dealing with anxiety, Jordan Peterson developed an physical dependence to a benzodiazepine (commonly known as benzos, this category of drugs includes Ativan, Serax, Klonopin, Xanax and Valium, amongst others), which led to numerous unbearable side effects, notably akathisia, an irresistible restlessness thats so maddening, it led to suicidal ideation.

It is unfortunate that it often takes the publicity surrounding a famous persons tragedy to jump-start a national discussion, but if ever there was a moment to shine a light on the scandal of decades of overprescription of benzos, this is it.

Janet Currie, a PhD candidate in the University of British Columbias School of Nursing, is a Canadian researcher and educator with long-time concerns over the safety and use of psychiatric drugs. She has no ties to any pharmaceutical companies, so her research is entirely independent. Before consulting her personally, I read Curries paper for the British Columbia Centre of Excellence for Womens Health, titled Manufacturing Addiction: The over-prescription of benzodiapezines and sleeping pills to women in Canada, which contains many sobering facts and statistics. Although published in 2003, Currie said the paper requires no material updates.

The first benzos were called tranquillizers and were marketed in the 1960s as a safe and effective alternative to barbiturates. But after only one year of availability, the first report in the medical literature describing their addictive nature was published, according to Curries report.

There is an elephant in the mental-health room that seems curiously invisible.

Currie notes that it is estimated that up to 15 per cent of adults may be using benzos; of them, up to 65 per cent are women. The majority of people who take these drugs at recommended dosages will become dependent on them, and of them, most will experience difficulties withdrawing from the drugs. Canadian and international studies indicate that 20 to 50 per cent of all women over 60 may be prescribed benzos or sleeping pills and that long-term use increases with age. A strong link has been established between falls in elderly women and drugs, of which 90 per cent are benzodiapezines, according to the report. In 2000, one in three status Aboriginal women over 40 in Western Canada were prescribed benzodiazepines.

I put a number of questions to Currie in an email exchange. Was Petersons story an outlier? Not really, she said, there are many stories like it. Most people do not know that benzos should be prescribed for a maximum of a few weeks. What Peterson experienced was a prescribing cascade, in which the withdrawal symptoms are not associated with the benzos, so more drugs are prescribed with even more deleterious effects.

Petersons desperation trip to Russia is understandable, Currie told me, because there is a serious lack of physicians (in Canada) who are willing to do tapers and no accessible community-based resources where people can get help. Tapering, the process of slowly weaning a person off a drug, can take months or years. By the way, Currie added, benzos are also sold on the street and widely used by heroin addicts and alcoholics.

Have there been lawsuits, I asked, and if so, what were the results? Currie responded that its difficult to go up against a big drug company, though some have tried. She cited the case of Joan Gadsby, a municipal official in B.C., who, following her young sons death from brain cancer, was prescribed benzos that led to addiction and multiple harrowing side effects. She sued her doctor, but lost the case and all her retirement savings. After interviewing thousands of stakeholders, however, Gadsby became an expert on the subject. Currie recommends her book, Addiction by Prescription.

The most significant attempt at legal redress was a years-long U.K. class-action lawsuit that was undertaken through Britains Legal Aid Funding Plan and involved 14,000 patients and 1,800 lawyers. It failed because legal aid couldnt handle the costs.

Canadians talk a lot about the need to address mental health issues openly and non-judgmentally. Thats good. But here is an elephant in the mental-health room that seems curiously invisible. Perhaps when Jordan Peterson is fully recovered and godspeed to him he will help to lead that discussion.

kaybarb@gmail.comTwitter.com/BarbaraRKay

More information on benzos and other psychiatric drugs can be found at psychmedaware.org.

Original post:
Barbara Kay: Jordan Peterson and the deadly overprescription of benzos - National Post

Kick em when theyre down, is a nasty way to live and it says more about the one doing the kicking than the kicked.

Consider reaction to the travails of controversial figures Rush Limbaugh and Jordan Peterson.

American talk show host Rush Limbaugh has always been a lightning rod. Controversy is his game. Perhaps you are familiar with him and hate everything he stands for.

No doubt you can find many examples of when Rush went over the line. I can, and I am a fan. Go ahead and argue his positions and criticize his mistakes.

But immediately upon his announcement that he has advanced lung cancer, supposedly reasonable and caring people cheered the disease.

Emmy nominated writer Arash Amel tweeted, F Limbaugh. Hope he dies. Enough of this we go high s.

He is right; he didnt go high. Amel went as low as he thinks Rush is.

Justin Lecea, a candidate for the Democratic nomination to run for Congress wrote, I will hold a party to celebrate when Rush Limbaugh begins exploring the past tense. God speed to hell you hypocritical f.

It is absolutely fair to argue strenuously against anything any commentator says, even to hate their ideas. Wishing for cancer to win displays darkness in the soul, doesnt it?

Travis Sarandos, who teaches English at Milwaukee High School of the Arts, tweeted that he hopes Rush Limbaugh dies a painful death from cancer.

Meanwhile clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson author of the international bestseller 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos announced dependence on an anti-anxiety drug he had been prescribed after his wifes cancer diagnosis.

While we increasingly worry about the prescribing of addicting drugs, that caring view was not one some felt for Peterson.

Professor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa Amir Attaran tweeted, Jordan Peterson, oracle to gullible young men, preacher of macho toughness, and hectoring bully to snowflakes, is addicted to strong drugs and his brain is riddled with neurological damage. #KARMA.

See? Peterson deserved it. This from a man employed to teach.

Writing in Psychology Today, Dr. Johnathan N. Stea said, But irrespective of your views on Peterson, it is a gross disservice to everyone to perpetuate harmful myths about people who seek mental health and addiction-related treatment. The fact that the hostility directed towards Peterson has manifested as this type of stigma is a clear indictment against our cultural milieu.

Nora Loreto who describes herself as Canadas least obnoxious writer, wrote, I hope for years of hell in perpetua for Jordan Peterson.

(I am not sure perpetua is a word. Perpetua was an early Christian martyr.)

Dont get me wrong. A quick search on Google is likely to find examples of people on the right visiting the same sort of hatred on left-leaning figures when they were down. This isnt a one-sided argument; it is just the current one.

Twitter is a cesspool minute by minute, but when hatred toward a suffering person spews from educators, politicians and the media, we are in a bad place.

We only truly believe in free speech if we defend that of those with whom we most disagree.

We truly have compassion when we have sympathy for a fellow human beings suffering, even when that person is one whose views we find abhorrent.

See the article here:
AGAR: The awful responses to Rush Limbaugh and Jordan Peterson - Toronto Sun