Thanks for the reply, Tom. I think the remaining disagreement is fairly specific. You seem to be reading liberalism as itself entailing certain liberal virtues of communication — about tone, emphasis, and rhetorical form — whereas I was using liberalism in its more canonical sense as a doctrine concerned with when coercive power (laws, sanctions, punishment) is justified and what equal legal standing requires. On that view, once speech does not cross a harm threshold or deny equal standing before the law, liberalism is largely silent about how it ought to be expressed. Other moral or political considerations may of course apply, and I’m sympathetic to many of the virtues you emphasise, but they are not entailed by liberalism as such. In short, you treat what you regard as liberal virtues as part of liberalism itself, whereas I don’t. I’ve appreciated the exchange in any case.
I mostly agreed with your previous post that stirred-up the controversy. But, in a very ironic twist, I feel you have hardened your position over the last week and as a result I only partially agree with this sequel, and I disagree with your final point. What's interesting here is to wonder whether it was the the week of being under virtual bombardment that caused you to harden your position, and if so, to wrap that observation around and feed that it back into the original question.
I disagree with your final point that Rowling is no longer a liberal, and I think you're on loose footing when essentially arguing this is because she's a "single issue" speaker now and is occasionally a bit rude. Is someone really a single-issue speaker when all anyone ever asks that person these days is about the single issue? If someone, by being braver and more resourced and informed than others, becomes a figurehead for a single issue, and the movement turns to them frequently, then how can that plausibly count against them in terms of liberalism? I agree with C. Mills that focus on single issues is not in itself incompatible with liberalism; you then say, "However, there is clear potential for the single issue to override all other concerns." It sounds like you are arguing that liberals should *refuse* to allow themselves to become figureheads for movements, lest they be judged to have become a single-issue activist and thus, be in danger of being judged illiberal due to tone. We are certainly asking a lot of liberals here: not just wisdom and intelligence, patience and tolerance, but also enough restraint so as to not care *too* much about the issue at hand and to keep busy with other stuff even when the movement calls. Even if that issue is really important and itself a matter of liberalism.
And this leads to a real worry that I have here: how are liberals to defend liberalism against activists who are themselves single-issue fanatics, if being sucked-in and allowing the issue to dominate one's output itself becomes a liberal disqualifier? It seems to me that you are creating a rule-set for liberals that illiberals don't and never will obey, and you're setting up liberalism to be unable to defend itself with sufficient vigour against the multitude of threats it now faces. Denying liberalism the tools and methods it needs to win against illiberalism will hand the future to illiberalism. For example, would you seriously argue that the liberals in America currently trying to resist the real march of autocracy should chill-out and keep their focus well spread out to avoid becoming single-issue? Or is that issue important enough that it's okay to become single-issue on it?
Haha, it would indeed be ironic if my position has hardened after social media pushback! Certainly, I can't rule out that this has happened, but I'm not convinced that there's a great difference between the posts?!? I reread the original post and feel it asserted, quite clearly, that Rowling's positions were no longer liberal ones. In the new one, I concluded that Rowling is no longer a liberal public figure, yet also stated that she's clearly not an authoritarian and, overall is a politically ambiguous figure.
This is ideologically motivated cope. JKR is being retroactively labelled as problematic because she so utterly embarrassed so many people by being totally correct when they were hiding under the bed. Academics hate being proven wrong. I’m with Linehan.
At the risk of being a bore (which is very real) I've thought a bit more about your position and I hope you don't mind me pushing a bit on the methodological side. I’m not convinced that Freeden’s semantic approach can take you as far as you want it to here. Freeden’s project is explicitly non-normative: it is designed to describe how ideological configurations shift, fragment, or become fixated, not to tell us when someone has crossed a threshold and ceased to belong to an ideological family altogether. At most, it allows us to say that Rowling’s liberalism looks narrower, more single-issue-driven, or more sharply articulated than before — which may well be true, but is also a fairly unremarkable observation, since people’s political priorities and styles change all the time.
To reach the stronger conclusion that she has moved away from liberalism as such seems to require an additional criterion of exclusion, and it’s not clear to me where that comes from. Neither Freeden nor the main strands of liberal theory (Mill, Kant, Rawls) supply a rule according to which intensity of focus, rhetorical abrasiveness, or failure to exhibit certain communicative virtues is sufficient to disqualify someone from liberalism. Those may be grounds for criticising tone, judgement, or political strategy — all legitimate concerns — but they are not, in themselves, departures from liberal principle.
You are, of course, perfectly entitled to adopt whatever stipulative definition of liberalism you think is most useful for the purposes of your argument. But once one does that, the burden of justification can’t be avoided. A stipulation still needs reasons if it is to persuade anyone who doesn’t already share one’s intuitions. And it seems to me that all the obvious routes to such a justification are closed. The criterion you rely on can’t be grounded in Freeden’s sociology of political ideas, which is explicitly descriptive, because, in short, he has nothing to say about the features of Rowling's speech that you object to. And you have also been clear that you are not appealing to the familiar normative frameworks of Mill, Kant, or Rawls. That leaves the exclusion unsupported by either a principled justification or any identifiable source of authority. My concern, then, is not that a line is being drawn, but that the grounds for drawing it still remain unclear.
The parallel I see here is with media bias. A newspaper or programme can report accurately and opine within constraints of law. But that does not make it unbiased. And if we prize impartiality it matters. I'm with you on prizing liberalism's broad respect for complexity, whereas JK Rowling appears to prefer essentialising. It is not the detailed content of her pronouncements that is illiberal. It is their focus.
But no version of liberalism requires citizens be impartial. Nobody expects GC advocates or TRAs to be impartial. They are entitled to give the best account of their case that they can. Requiring the state to be impartial about metaphysical positions - is whether Jesus is the son of God - is a recognizable liberal position but requiring citizens to be so is not. You can dislike the focus of Rowling for all sorts of reasons - aesthetic, pragmatic, cognitive or whatever - but this has nothing to do with liberalism.
I see a distinction similar to what's technically legal but not really in the spirit of the law.
Extreme focus on one side of a contentious social justice issue seems to me (and possibly Thomas) to violate the spirit of liberalism because liberalism is grounded in pluralism, epistemic humility, and respect for individual moral judgment. My sense of liberalism is that it respects values conflict. Single-issue moral absolutism elevates one value above all others, suppresses legitimate disagreement, and demands moral alignment. It seems kind of extreme to do that.
It's not that Rowling's views don't jibe with mine because I'm with her in the epistemic sense. But I still think Thomas makes a valid point about her doubling down.
Liberalism is grounded in pluralism, but it is the state, as a coercive authority, that is required to respect pluralism. Citizens are not required to be impartial, balanced, or to entertain all opinions. All that liberalism requires of citizens is that they do not advocate the suppression of others’ rights or peaceful activities (subject to the usual harm condition).
I could be wrong, but as far as I know Rowling has not advocated that trans people should lack rights, be prevented from living as they please, or be barred from campaigning for what they want. If she had done any of that, the charge of illiberality would be well founded. But a citizen’s decision to focus their limited time and energy intensely on a single issue they care about does not violate liberalism, either in letter or in spirit.
If it did, we would have to say that people who focused obsessively on apartheid, prison reform, poverty, or climate change were illiberal. That is plainly a category error. One can dislike Rowling’s focus for aesthetic, pragmatic, or strategic reasons, but that has nothing to do with liberalism. It is perfectly possible for a liberal to be a fanatic—someone who treats individual rights, toleration, pluralism, and the rule of law as non-negotiable.
Brilliant analysis on how single-issue focus can erode liberal principles from within. The Freeden semantic approach is spot on here becasue it captures how movements like XR or anti-trans activism organize facts in ways that eventually override pluralist considerations. I've seen this play out in local politics where figureheads start reasonable but dunno how to pump the brakes once momentum builds. The line between passionate advocacy and Manichean crusading gets real blurry real fast.
I can understand your point about excessive focus on a single issue like law enforcement. If one’s overriding concern is reducing crime, it can cause the loss of due process and excessive punishment. But that’s not at all like JKR and the trans debate. Instead, there’s general agreement—as reflected in polls and expressly stated by JKR—that transgender people should not be discriminated against in housing, work, and the like. Instead the debate—and JKR—focus on 1) treatment of minors who are not yet full citizens and 2) areas of clashing rights, such as fairness vs inclusion in sports. And, importantly, her focus is a reaction to others. I mean, it’s not like JKR just woke up one day and decided to tweet about the sex binary. I’m sure she wishes it had never been necessary to do so.
“Graham Linehan’s dismissal of the piece was succinct (‘Oh do f*ck off’). I would play the world’s smallest violin, but even my mother laughed at this remark.”
I mean, you did baselessly call him racist in your previous article. He has the right to dismiss your article. Not very liberal of you, then.
And speaking of liberal, it’s not very liberal to double down on a position that’s clearly not very good in the first place and which a lot of people (besides those clapping like seals to everything you say) don’t agree with. In the end, you’re just a “woke” progressive posing as a liberal who can’t handle people who think differently than you. I expect an ad hominem from you any time for calling you out.
OP has surely dismissed your comment out of hand for being too mean or something, but you're obviously right. If JKR had taken the other side of the trans issue with the same tone, fervor, level of focus, or whatever then there is a 0% chance OP would be attempting to call her out.
Imagine that some people start to claim that evolutionary theory is offensive, not because it conflicts with what’s in the Old Testament (say) but because it runs counter to the self-image of those who are repulsed by the idea that they’re “descended from monkeys” (sic) or that they share anything in common with folk whose skins are a different colour. Imagine that these people are so successful in promoting this “identitarian” view that even though the majority of the population continue to think that the origin our species is part of the natural history of our planet, they nevertheless have come to regard it as “illiberal” to insist in public that this has any bearing on what we think human beings “are” in the broadest sense. Indeed, so disposed do they become to respecting the identity-claims of the “nonanimalists” that they begin to agree with their conviction that teaching evolutionary theory in schools is reactionary, representing little more than an expression of fear or hatred directed towards them—a rancid denial of their “lived” reality. Every year the nonanimalist share a conference with the flat-earthers (whose lived experience is that they see a flat horizon; they don’t feel the earth’s rotation) and the alien-abductees (their lived experience is that they’ve… been abducted by aliens!) to celebrate the fact that not only is evolutionary theory no longer taught in schools but travel by sea has been radically restricted to avoid ships falling off the edge of the world and you can now have anal-probe reinsertion on the NHS.
This is a lot of words to let people know you’re dismayed Rowling, that uppity woman, won’t shut up about the subjugation of women and children to a pseudoscience manufactured by males with sexual fetishes.
There is a context from which all of this is irrelevant, which is biology, or perhaps game theory.
Sex mimicry is a tried and true behavior, driven by evolutionary forces - evolving the behavior is balanced with evolving recognition in a classic “Red Queen” dynamic.
The behavior is used to avoid male aggression, and to elicit empathy via deception in order to gain access to female enclaves for sexual gratification.
The use of aggressive extortive empathy to support the position introduces another classic behavior, parasitism, where the mimic burdens social systems without reciprocity. The game usually expands on this slightly, by ensuring that rejection is punished with harsh social consequences, morphing into predatory parasitism - the Cuckoo.
For Rowling, with boundless financial and social capital, the relative cost is minimal to foster rejection the behavior - puny punitive measures are vastly asymmetric. She signals correctly that institutions recklessly export the cost of the mimic burden on women, prisoners, and the like.
She also seems to recognize that you cannot defeat extortive empathy with:
•Better arguments
•Better intentions
•Better messaging
She is also clear:
Legitimate psychiatry doesn’t use an irreversible chemical / psychiatric treatment that creates an “identity.”
In all my reading, there are no accepted treatments that combine:
* chemical irreversibilityYou cannot defeat extortive empathy with:
•Better arguments
•Better intentions
•Better messaging
* operant or social reinforcement
* identity instantiation as a treatment goal
None!
That combination is unique.
Psychiatric treatments today aim to:
* reduc symptoms,
* restore functioning,
* preserve developmental flexibility,
* and remain reversible or adjustable.
Modern psychiatry deliberately moved away from irreversible, identity-shaping treatments after recognizing the harm caused by lobotomy, chemical castration, and aversive conditioning.
It’s the “Hotel California” of therapy.
Some aggressive people might claim it is “Brainwashing”, a conspiracy-minded term for identity imposition.
This week, trans activists hacked freespeechunion.org, since 2014 have exploited NCHI police procedures to intimidate, and from the invention of social media onwards have deployed mass tactics to silence those they disagree with including coordinated harassment campaigns, mass reporting content to prompt platform suspensions, astroturfing to create a false sense of consensus, dogpiling, and smear campaigns to damage reputations.
While it is possible to have a quiet coffee house conversation about James O'Brien's How They Broke Britain, how is one possible when activists have escalated the interchange to include death threats? Thomas Prosser noted Anna Politkovskaya, but it goes back to Socrates and then Jesus both silenced, and in recent years Charlies Hebdo and Kirk. Are there not times when the liberal tone is legitimately more robust?
Thanks for the reply, Tom. I think the remaining disagreement is fairly specific. You seem to be reading liberalism as itself entailing certain liberal virtues of communication — about tone, emphasis, and rhetorical form — whereas I was using liberalism in its more canonical sense as a doctrine concerned with when coercive power (laws, sanctions, punishment) is justified and what equal legal standing requires. On that view, once speech does not cross a harm threshold or deny equal standing before the law, liberalism is largely silent about how it ought to be expressed. Other moral or political considerations may of course apply, and I’m sympathetic to many of the virtues you emphasise, but they are not entailed by liberalism as such. In short, you treat what you regard as liberal virtues as part of liberalism itself, whereas I don’t. I’ve appreciated the exchange in any case.
Thanks Colin, appreciated the exchange too. Yes, over here, Freeden > Kant & Rawls!
May I just say it's nice to see two people having an argument who know what they're actually arguing about!
Thanks James - very kind of you!
I mostly agreed with your previous post that stirred-up the controversy. But, in a very ironic twist, I feel you have hardened your position over the last week and as a result I only partially agree with this sequel, and I disagree with your final point. What's interesting here is to wonder whether it was the the week of being under virtual bombardment that caused you to harden your position, and if so, to wrap that observation around and feed that it back into the original question.
I disagree with your final point that Rowling is no longer a liberal, and I think you're on loose footing when essentially arguing this is because she's a "single issue" speaker now and is occasionally a bit rude. Is someone really a single-issue speaker when all anyone ever asks that person these days is about the single issue? If someone, by being braver and more resourced and informed than others, becomes a figurehead for a single issue, and the movement turns to them frequently, then how can that plausibly count against them in terms of liberalism? I agree with C. Mills that focus on single issues is not in itself incompatible with liberalism; you then say, "However, there is clear potential for the single issue to override all other concerns." It sounds like you are arguing that liberals should *refuse* to allow themselves to become figureheads for movements, lest they be judged to have become a single-issue activist and thus, be in danger of being judged illiberal due to tone. We are certainly asking a lot of liberals here: not just wisdom and intelligence, patience and tolerance, but also enough restraint so as to not care *too* much about the issue at hand and to keep busy with other stuff even when the movement calls. Even if that issue is really important and itself a matter of liberalism.
And this leads to a real worry that I have here: how are liberals to defend liberalism against activists who are themselves single-issue fanatics, if being sucked-in and allowing the issue to dominate one's output itself becomes a liberal disqualifier? It seems to me that you are creating a rule-set for liberals that illiberals don't and never will obey, and you're setting up liberalism to be unable to defend itself with sufficient vigour against the multitude of threats it now faces. Denying liberalism the tools and methods it needs to win against illiberalism will hand the future to illiberalism. For example, would you seriously argue that the liberals in America currently trying to resist the real march of autocracy should chill-out and keep their focus well spread out to avoid becoming single-issue? Or is that issue important enough that it's okay to become single-issue on it?
Haha, it would indeed be ironic if my position has hardened after social media pushback! Certainly, I can't rule out that this has happened, but I'm not convinced that there's a great difference between the posts?!? I reread the original post and feel it asserted, quite clearly, that Rowling's positions were no longer liberal ones. In the new one, I concluded that Rowling is no longer a liberal public figure, yet also stated that she's clearly not an authoritarian and, overall is a politically ambiguous figure.
This is ideologically motivated cope. JKR is being retroactively labelled as problematic because she so utterly embarrassed so many people by being totally correct when they were hiding under the bed. Academics hate being proven wrong. I’m with Linehan.
At the risk of being a bore (which is very real) I've thought a bit more about your position and I hope you don't mind me pushing a bit on the methodological side. I’m not convinced that Freeden’s semantic approach can take you as far as you want it to here. Freeden’s project is explicitly non-normative: it is designed to describe how ideological configurations shift, fragment, or become fixated, not to tell us when someone has crossed a threshold and ceased to belong to an ideological family altogether. At most, it allows us to say that Rowling’s liberalism looks narrower, more single-issue-driven, or more sharply articulated than before — which may well be true, but is also a fairly unremarkable observation, since people’s political priorities and styles change all the time.
To reach the stronger conclusion that she has moved away from liberalism as such seems to require an additional criterion of exclusion, and it’s not clear to me where that comes from. Neither Freeden nor the main strands of liberal theory (Mill, Kant, Rawls) supply a rule according to which intensity of focus, rhetorical abrasiveness, or failure to exhibit certain communicative virtues is sufficient to disqualify someone from liberalism. Those may be grounds for criticising tone, judgement, or political strategy — all legitimate concerns — but they are not, in themselves, departures from liberal principle.
You are, of course, perfectly entitled to adopt whatever stipulative definition of liberalism you think is most useful for the purposes of your argument. But once one does that, the burden of justification can’t be avoided. A stipulation still needs reasons if it is to persuade anyone who doesn’t already share one’s intuitions. And it seems to me that all the obvious routes to such a justification are closed. The criterion you rely on can’t be grounded in Freeden’s sociology of political ideas, which is explicitly descriptive, because, in short, he has nothing to say about the features of Rowling's speech that you object to. And you have also been clear that you are not appealing to the familiar normative frameworks of Mill, Kant, or Rawls. That leaves the exclusion unsupported by either a principled justification or any identifiable source of authority. My concern, then, is not that a line is being drawn, but that the grounds for drawing it still remain unclear.
Thanks Colin - I'll think about this further!
The parallel I see here is with media bias. A newspaper or programme can report accurately and opine within constraints of law. But that does not make it unbiased. And if we prize impartiality it matters. I'm with you on prizing liberalism's broad respect for complexity, whereas JK Rowling appears to prefer essentialising. It is not the detailed content of her pronouncements that is illiberal. It is their focus.
But no version of liberalism requires citizens be impartial. Nobody expects GC advocates or TRAs to be impartial. They are entitled to give the best account of their case that they can. Requiring the state to be impartial about metaphysical positions - is whether Jesus is the son of God - is a recognizable liberal position but requiring citizens to be so is not. You can dislike the focus of Rowling for all sorts of reasons - aesthetic, pragmatic, cognitive or whatever - but this has nothing to do with liberalism.
I see a distinction similar to what's technically legal but not really in the spirit of the law.
Extreme focus on one side of a contentious social justice issue seems to me (and possibly Thomas) to violate the spirit of liberalism because liberalism is grounded in pluralism, epistemic humility, and respect for individual moral judgment. My sense of liberalism is that it respects values conflict. Single-issue moral absolutism elevates one value above all others, suppresses legitimate disagreement, and demands moral alignment. It seems kind of extreme to do that.
It's not that Rowling's views don't jibe with mine because I'm with her in the epistemic sense. But I still think Thomas makes a valid point about her doubling down.
Liberalism is grounded in pluralism, but it is the state, as a coercive authority, that is required to respect pluralism. Citizens are not required to be impartial, balanced, or to entertain all opinions. All that liberalism requires of citizens is that they do not advocate the suppression of others’ rights or peaceful activities (subject to the usual harm condition).
I could be wrong, but as far as I know Rowling has not advocated that trans people should lack rights, be prevented from living as they please, or be barred from campaigning for what they want. If she had done any of that, the charge of illiberality would be well founded. But a citizen’s decision to focus their limited time and energy intensely on a single issue they care about does not violate liberalism, either in letter or in spirit.
If it did, we would have to say that people who focused obsessively on apartheid, prison reform, poverty, or climate change were illiberal. That is plainly a category error. One can dislike Rowling’s focus for aesthetic, pragmatic, or strategic reasons, but that has nothing to do with liberalism. It is perfectly possible for a liberal to be a fanatic—someone who treats individual rights, toleration, pluralism, and the rule of law as non-negotiable.
I’m persuaded by that reasoning. Nice one, thanks.
Brilliant analysis on how single-issue focus can erode liberal principles from within. The Freeden semantic approach is spot on here becasue it captures how movements like XR or anti-trans activism organize facts in ways that eventually override pluralist considerations. I've seen this play out in local politics where figureheads start reasonable but dunno how to pump the brakes once momentum builds. The line between passionate advocacy and Manichean crusading gets real blurry real fast.
Thanks! Yes, I was involved in the 2016 Remain campaign and was very disillusioned with the evolution of that movement.
I can understand your point about excessive focus on a single issue like law enforcement. If one’s overriding concern is reducing crime, it can cause the loss of due process and excessive punishment. But that’s not at all like JKR and the trans debate. Instead, there’s general agreement—as reflected in polls and expressly stated by JKR—that transgender people should not be discriminated against in housing, work, and the like. Instead the debate—and JKR—focus on 1) treatment of minors who are not yet full citizens and 2) areas of clashing rights, such as fairness vs inclusion in sports. And, importantly, her focus is a reaction to others. I mean, it’s not like JKR just woke up one day and decided to tweet about the sex binary. I’m sure she wishes it had never been necessary to do so.
“Graham Linehan’s dismissal of the piece was succinct (‘Oh do f*ck off’). I would play the world’s smallest violin, but even my mother laughed at this remark.”
I mean, you did baselessly call him racist in your previous article. He has the right to dismiss your article. Not very liberal of you, then.
And speaking of liberal, it’s not very liberal to double down on a position that’s clearly not very good in the first place and which a lot of people (besides those clapping like seals to everything you say) don’t agree with. In the end, you’re just a “woke” progressive posing as a liberal who can’t handle people who think differently than you. I expect an ad hominem from you any time for calling you out.
Still harping on this? Illiberalism is not when people don’t agree with you.
You guys will continue on this path and just continue losing.
OP has surely dismissed your comment out of hand for being too mean or something, but you're obviously right. If JKR had taken the other side of the trans issue with the same tone, fervor, level of focus, or whatever then there is a 0% chance OP would be attempting to call her out.
The men pontificate. Meanwhile in the real world
https://x.com/i/status/2001325521259663805
Imagine that some people start to claim that evolutionary theory is offensive, not because it conflicts with what’s in the Old Testament (say) but because it runs counter to the self-image of those who are repulsed by the idea that they’re “descended from monkeys” (sic) or that they share anything in common with folk whose skins are a different colour. Imagine that these people are so successful in promoting this “identitarian” view that even though the majority of the population continue to think that the origin our species is part of the natural history of our planet, they nevertheless have come to regard it as “illiberal” to insist in public that this has any bearing on what we think human beings “are” in the broadest sense. Indeed, so disposed do they become to respecting the identity-claims of the “nonanimalists” that they begin to agree with their conviction that teaching evolutionary theory in schools is reactionary, representing little more than an expression of fear or hatred directed towards them—a rancid denial of their “lived” reality. Every year the nonanimalist share a conference with the flat-earthers (whose lived experience is that they see a flat horizon; they don’t feel the earth’s rotation) and the alien-abductees (their lived experience is that they’ve… been abducted by aliens!) to celebrate the fact that not only is evolutionary theory no longer taught in schools but travel by sea has been radically restricted to avoid ships falling off the edge of the world and you can now have anal-probe reinsertion on the NHS.
This is a lot of words to let people know you’re dismayed Rowling, that uppity woman, won’t shut up about the subjugation of women and children to a pseudoscience manufactured by males with sexual fetishes.
There is a context from which all of this is irrelevant, which is biology, or perhaps game theory.
Sex mimicry is a tried and true behavior, driven by evolutionary forces - evolving the behavior is balanced with evolving recognition in a classic “Red Queen” dynamic.
The behavior is used to avoid male aggression, and to elicit empathy via deception in order to gain access to female enclaves for sexual gratification.
The use of aggressive extortive empathy to support the position introduces another classic behavior, parasitism, where the mimic burdens social systems without reciprocity. The game usually expands on this slightly, by ensuring that rejection is punished with harsh social consequences, morphing into predatory parasitism - the Cuckoo.
For Rowling, with boundless financial and social capital, the relative cost is minimal to foster rejection the behavior - puny punitive measures are vastly asymmetric. She signals correctly that institutions recklessly export the cost of the mimic burden on women, prisoners, and the like.
She also seems to recognize that you cannot defeat extortive empathy with:
•Better arguments
•Better intentions
•Better messaging
She is also clear:
Legitimate psychiatry doesn’t use an irreversible chemical / psychiatric treatment that creates an “identity.”
In all my reading, there are no accepted treatments that combine:
* chemical irreversibilityYou cannot defeat extortive empathy with:
•Better arguments
•Better intentions
•Better messaging
* operant or social reinforcement
* identity instantiation as a treatment goal
None!
That combination is unique.
Psychiatric treatments today aim to:
* reduc symptoms,
* restore functioning,
* preserve developmental flexibility,
* and remain reversible or adjustable.
Modern psychiatry deliberately moved away from irreversible, identity-shaping treatments after recognizing the harm caused by lobotomy, chemical castration, and aversive conditioning.
It’s the “Hotel California” of therapy.
Some aggressive people might claim it is “Brainwashing”, a conspiracy-minded term for identity imposition.
That’s all.
If you don’t want here we’ll take her.
Is there only one liberal tone?
This week, trans activists hacked freespeechunion.org, since 2014 have exploited NCHI police procedures to intimidate, and from the invention of social media onwards have deployed mass tactics to silence those they disagree with including coordinated harassment campaigns, mass reporting content to prompt platform suspensions, astroturfing to create a false sense of consensus, dogpiling, and smear campaigns to damage reputations.
While it is possible to have a quiet coffee house conversation about James O'Brien's How They Broke Britain, how is one possible when activists have escalated the interchange to include death threats? Thomas Prosser noted Anna Politkovskaya, but it goes back to Socrates and then Jesus both silenced, and in recent years Charlies Hebdo and Kirk. Are there not times when the liberal tone is legitimately more robust?
Your confusion is noted.