He definitely has rather too much faith in his own status as a life guru. That’s probably because such a large number of people (especially in North America) hold such bizarre views on everything that he represents a bit of sanity and normality, and he can explain very lucidly why mainstream views are a bunch of hogwash and should be discarded. That wins him some smart points, IMO.
His academic lectures are a lot less impressive. He rambles a lot. Stream-of-consciousness stuff that doesn’t have a whole lot of direction or point to it.
He’s clearly a clever chap, to the extent that anyone can be, and I’m sure there are some pearls in his utterances. It’s just so difficult to dive for them.
I think he’s an important cultural figure who probably caught the zeitgeist at just the right time. It doesn’t look like it worked out for him, other than financially, because no way are his addiction problems just about his wife’s illness.
Yeah, he had a comfortable life as a university professor, previously. He seemed to me to be under more and more stress as time went along, he was really going all out with speaking engagements and interviews, and he clearly took it really seriously.
Don’t underestimate drug addiction
When young I assumed only criminals and seriously messed up individuals but have seen how easoly it can creep up on someone unwittingly. Alcohol and prescription drugs are freely available and just as damaging. Alcohol in particular with society’s attachment to it. It’s all too easy for addiction to creep up on someone going through crisis.
It’s puzzling that a practicing psychologist wouldn’t be cautious of the dangers. I think he placed too much faith in doctors, who I get the impression often don’t really know what they’re doing when it comes to medication. But I can imagine how going through what he was at the time, the relief the benzos would have provided him could quickly and unwittingly have turned into a dependence
For me it’s the other way around: he’s somewhat interesting when he talks about more subjective things like archetypes n’stuff, but when he tries to apply his ideas to the real world, he gets stuck.
It’s based on existing human rights jurisprudence and is written to add one term to existing law: gender identity. The rest – the ban on hate speech, the ban on discrimination, how high the bar is set for a finding of wrongdoing – was already there.
Why homogenize? Isn’t there already too much of that going on?
I’m not sure I saw that debate or that rally, but the general idea of JP is a Nazi off with his head, that has nothing to do with me or probably the vast majority of people who disagree with him.
Who, me? I come from a planet where male and female don’t mean quite what you think they mean (it’s complicated), and here on your planet I find that transgender humans are just like cisgender humans, except that their lives have certain complications that don’t exist in the lives of cisgender humans, among which are a heightened risk of discrimination and violence. So to me, a law giving them the same kind of protection from discrimination and violence that other minority groups have makes sense. Why not? Because hypothetically a Marxist judge could order you to utter a pronoun that doesn’t exist? Not good enough for me.
Sorry, I somehow skipped over this post of yours yesterday. Moving posts in five, four, three…
ETA: Abort! Abort! Sorry, there are way too many. The recent discussion is mostly a continuation of a discussion from early 2020, and it’s about JP’s signature issue, the pronoun thang, whereas the other thread is almost entirely about conversion therapy.
If another mod wants to attempt a full split, no objection, but that would be a lot of work.
Well, that’s sort of what I meant. Have a look at his lectures where he’s rambling on about Disney characters and whatnot. He rarely seems to draw any connections between his very abstract ideas and what happens in real life (his ‘archtypes’ theory, though, is one that does work pretty well).
My sister has a PhD in psychology. She’s one of the most un-self-aware (is that a word?) people I’ve ever met.
I think, when a crisis hits, one does tend to grasp at straws regardless of what one knows, intellectually, about the uselessness of straws. I’ve known two men about JPs age whose wives died of cancer. In the aftermath, they both quite literally lost their will to live. JP, by his own account, is highly family-oriented, so the prospect of losing his wife must have taken away everything he ever believed in. With wife and family being the crux of his own life, his whole world would have collapsed; his own philosophy contains little else in the way of an alternative life-meaning (other than “life is suffering”, which isn’t very comforting). It’s not exactly surprising he sought some means of support in pharmacology.
A lot of criminals etc who end up injecting heroin often have similarly disastrous events in their backgrounds (not always). The only difference is that they started off at rock-bottom rather than in middle-class suburbia, so their descent looks less dramatic.