Free speech is being assassinated while the world of academia remains silent

Free speech is the very foundation of our civilization. It's the only mechanism we have which prevents us from violence to sort out our differences. So I'd say it's kind of sacred.

Here is the story: some Canadian professor makes fuss about his objection to legislation which will oblige him to address his students the way they want him to. The official narrative is this: let's move on, he is just being homophobic, bitter and frustrated, or just unkind to vulnerable people.

So what's the big deal?

Please watch the following video to find out. I cannot articulate it any better than Peterson did it himself. All I can say is that what he said about the role of truth in our existence, is probably the most important message I've heard in my entire life.

The truth is a process, it's a process of successive approximation. (...) The truth is a spiritual food. You live on information, you are a cognitive apparatus. (...) If you are fed on diet of deceit, you'll become pathological and the world will kick back at you extraordinarily hard. The first thing it will do is deprive you of any sense of meaning. (...) A life that is characterized by nothing but deceit, has no positive meaning in it but plenty of suffering.

(The interview starts at 6:30)

The silence

For me the most dreadful aspect of all this is the fact that the very guardian of our civilization, the world of academia, remains silent (almost equally silent as Steem, for that matter). Or even outright hostile - they try their best to discredit him and shut him up.

One of the very few people from academia who publicly backed Peterson is Janice Fiamengo and she did is in a spectacular way - she offers a broader context and citations from Canadian Supreme Court, like this one:

The benefits of the suppression of hate speech and its harmful effects outweigh the detrimental effect of restricting expression which, by its nature, does little to promote the values underlying freedom of expression.

Statements like this should send shivers down the spine of any reasonable human being aware of the events of the 20th centry.

The side effects

It seems the affair around bill C-16 has caused some interesting encounters, which probably would not have happened otherwise. Below is an extremely insightful conversation between Gad Saad and Jordan Peterson.

Jordan Peterson:

You can stumble around and speak badly, but if it's genuine, if it's a genuine attempt to articulate the truth, it has unstoppable power.

As one of the YouTube commenters put it nicely: SJWs picked the wrong man to piss off.