By The Canadian Press

  • @[email protected]
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    610 months ago

    It’s sad. I used to follow this guy a bit. The stuff he said made sense to me and seemed pretty decent. Personal responsibility, upholding important values, your role in society. He said good stuff all about self improvement as a way to attaining a good and happy life.

    I don’t know if he just drank his own cool-aid for too long or what, but seeing this makes you realize that you can make anything that should be common sense goodness into some terrible things.

    • Pxtl
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      710 months ago

      Uh, he literally became famous by spreading panicky fear about the bill C-16, the law that extended minority human rights protections to trans people. Nobody had heard of him before that and his most notable book was “maps of meaning” which is basically rambling.

      • ShaunaTheDead
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        110 months ago

        I think he actually started his climb towards the spotlight by causing people to call for his expulsion as a professor at the University of Toronto for refusing to call a transgender student by their name and refusing to use their preferred pronouns. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the protest against him simply made him reach a wider audience with his hate speech.

        • @[email protected]
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          110 months ago

          Whichever way he came into the spotlight, those weren’t the things I saw of his interviews and lectures. While it was obvious he was at least a bit sexist, his talks about personal responsibility and bringing back the better parts of traditional values weren’t so bad.

          I mean, stopping a divorce by making people make their marriage work by actually working on it? Not a crazy idea, yet not exactly something that is often said in the last few decades.

    • @[email protected]
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      710 months ago

      I think he’s addicted to the attention. The dumbest part of all is that he doesn’t need to bully or shit on other people to get attention – but that’s what reliably keeps him in the spotlight, so that’s what he does.

      The whole ‘personal responsibility’ angle is a way to shit on poor people, addicts, immigrants, etc. The sad part being that he was a addict, and had the money to get treated privately, got treatment, and instead of it humbling him and leading him to realize that anyone can fall down the hole into substance abuse, he uses it to look down on people who need help and don’t have the money or assets to pay for that help out of pocket.

      I have no idea why he cares about how the LGBTQ+ segment of society lives. What other people do with their junk is anyone else’s business, least of all him. It seems like him and his followers are afraid of being attracted to a person that don’t have the ‘correct’ genitals.

      • @[email protected]
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        110 months ago

        It really is sad that the way to get the most attention is through hate and resentment, not through care and joy.

        I personally believe that personal responsibility is how to get yourself out of a hole and live a good life. The difference is that I would never say “you gotta pull yourself up by your shoelaces” but instead “you gotta teach a man to fish.”

        You can’t save others. Not in any long term sense. But you can give others the means to save themselves. You don’t get someone out of addiction by just throwing money at them, but have them go through therapy, get them to figure out what’s wrong with them and what can be done to fix it, all the while supporting them emotionally so they don’t feel all alone while they struggle. Only then can they overcome their addiction (or poverty or isolation or whatever) and grow as a person and become responsible for themself.

        Self responsibility is the result and how you keep what you’ve gained, not the means to cure life’s ails. Self responsibility is nothing but turning your nose when people are in a hole, because what they need isn’t to be lectured, but a hand reaching into that hole. It’s only when they have a grip on the lip of that hole that they can better themselves through personal responsibility. Not when they’re so deep that can’t even reach that ledge.

        I know I’m a hypocrite for saying this stuff without actually doing anything to help anybody, but it’s far worse to just say shit and expect others to magically fix themselves, as all it does is make them feel worse for being unable to fix themselves when they shouldn’t be expected to. You don’t look down on a 5yo just because he can’t read.