Reason will not be enough it seems, dear Helen. There is never a worse deaf man than the one who does not want to hear. Today the tribes only want to kill what does not belong, and it looks like being back to the 30 Years War. Worse of all is that Liberal in America means Progressive, which has spread with American cultural dominance and tainted the discourse since the start. Poor Gladstone is surely turning in his grave.
But thank you for continuing to be the voice of reason.
Isn’t there a problem with the definition of “harm”? Men who wear dresses claim that it isn’t enough to simply accept their right to dress as they please. They also claim it does them material harm if they are not treated always and everywhere as if they actually are women. This is the basis of their claim that it is their “human right” to access women’s public toilets and changing rooms, to engage in women’s sports, to be incarcerated in women’s prisons, to be allowed to body search and provide intimate health care to non-consenting women, to be given employment, awards and honours reserved for women on equity grounds... It would seem that in this and many other instances there are competing harms. How do we decide between these competing harms? Should women “win” because there are more of them than there are men who wear dresses? Or should men who wear dresses “win” because, as they argue, affronts to their paraphilia cause them more material harm than their paraphilia causes women by affronting their dignity, invading their privacy and threatening their safety, health and well-being? Who gets to be the playground monitor?
That’s the thing with liberalism. You sometimes have to reason case by case but I don’t think so here. I qualify with “material” because if only feelings are hurt, you need to deal.
I took your point about material harm, but trans activists claim that failing to accept transgender people as women causes them anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation that can lead to actual suicide. This is why people who criticise gender ideology are accused of killing transgender people. The suicide narrative is doggy, but I am sure that challenging a firmly held delusion can cause more than hurt feelings.
Yes. But the responsibility to deal with hurt feelings is the individual with them, not the rest of society. It’s very distressing to one of my relatives that I am not Christian. It keeps her up at night worrying. Still not my responsibility.
Having people take responsibility for their own feelings is the only way. Otherwise you’d have to judge what can and can’t be said in any situation by who is more likely to kill themselves if they feel distressed by the claim that a woman is an adult human female or a woman is a subjectively felt gender identity. And if you believe that intention matters, you’d also have to try to evaluate whether the speaker knew it was the trans person or the biological woman who was most psychologically vulnerable in that particular exchange & stated their own position “maliciously” or not. There would be no space for caring about truth or reason and it would incentivise people being or pretending to be psychologically traumatised whenever anybody else says something that goes against their own political views. It would be a mess.
The definition of harm is critical. If it is too loose, anything can be a damage, and the debate is not possible. If it is too strict, we would be being deliberately blind to certain harms. I understand the attempt at limitation with the concept of material harm, but what if the perceived material harm is not now to an individual, but to society in the future?. Example, the debate around marriage and its impact on birth rates and the material realities of society in the future goes beyond material harm to a particular individual.
I think you could actually decide this one, and many if not all such cases, by appeal to freedom of association. If one party does not want to associate with another, they should not be compelled to be. In this case, if women do not want to associate with men in a particular context (bathrooms), they should not have to. This and that reasoning about why it's somehow harmful to the man if he can't force himself upon the women should be, in theory, dismissed out of hand.
That said, you are touching on the basic issue that liberals are often too weak-minded to actually defend the liberal standard, and are too easily brow-beaten into giving it up by manipulative bad actors.
>"I am/believe in <belief system> but I defend your right not to."
Heres the weakness I see in liberalism. It will defend your right not to, even if what they believe wouldn't reciprocate or might even in fact force the liberal trying to extend them epistemic grace into believing what they believe or becoming subject to some violent or fatal force if they refuse - given they had the chance to do so. Is it just for the liberal to defend the right to free speech of those who would take it away from the liberal the moment they realized the power to do so?
For me the question of morality isnt one of "you must" or "you must not" but rather a question of how do we justify what we might claim we "ought" or "ought not" do. If there is no objective justification, then there are only subjective or intersubjective ones. If there are only subjective or intersubjective justifications, how do we justify any normative prescription with anything greater or more authoritative than individual preference? You could say this is sort of an age old question concerning opposing worldviews but this feels especially relevant to liberalism considering we are granting everyone else validity in their own systems of beliefs. So we are granting people the same rights we would want to be granted and we also have no way of telling them what they consider right or wrong, is anymore right or wrong then what we believe is. Seems like this is a lot of faith being put in humanity which is something different in theory and in practice.
>"This ‘might makes right’ model of forceful dominance and overthrow has been the predominant one throughout human history. I would rather not go back there."
Nor would I but what does what we want have to do with what is? I would argue that the playground could be seen as the globe and the countries are the children. There is no overarching democratic or otherwise global authority like there are in a governed state. The countries exist in relation to each other in a state of anarchy and in that sense how can we be sure we ever have left a world where 'might makes right' except maybe in our minds within the parameters of our country, which benefits massively from its might. Regardless of whether or not we are in that world, we can still be sure we are in a world where "might makes" and it does appear to do so regardless of how we feel about it morally and ethically.
This is where the weakness in the worldview I tried to describe above comes in. There is no mechanism in the liberal worldview that I can identify that would save it from being overwhelmed or taken over by a group with an entirely different worldview which was motivated to do so under subversive or forceful circumstances. As a matter of fact, if those occurred naturally in a liberal democracy by means of the subversive worldview simply becoming adopted by at least 50% of the public and they voted their way into power, this would actually be a function of liberal democracy itself.
Don't we already we the beginnings of the snake eating its tail in this regard?
If morality is grounded subjectively, how could we even say to anyone not already inclined to our worldview that this kind of capture, or any outcome for that matter, would be a bad or wrong outcome?
“If morality is grounded subjectively, how could we even say to anyone not already inclined to our worldview that this kind of capture, or any outcome for that matter, would be a bad or wrong outcome?”
You can claim morality to be grounded objectively but you’ll just be arguing with a load of other people who make the same claim but for a different morality.
These are all just claims. There is no way to ground a morality objectively. It always need a premise. “This god exists and its morality is objective even though we can’t measure it against anything else to see.” “This morality is objective because it’s rooted in human thriving and we can assume that all humans want to thrive, even though this is limited to humans and doesn’t apply to other species that exist so it’s hard to see how it is objective even on this planet.”
“There is no mechanism in the liberal worldview that I can identify that would save it from being overwhelmed or taken over by a group with an entirely different worldview which was motivated to do so under subversive or forceful circumstances.”
There’s no mechanism in any worldview that would save it from being so overwhelmed. That’s why all authoritarian systems of government get overwhelmed by another eventually. That’s what humans do. Liberalism is the one which seeks to prevent one faction taking power in the first place and overwhelming all of society until objections rise to an extent that another can overwhelm it. Think of what we see in Iran right now.
Do you have an alternative in mind. Some other system that would prevent any one orthodoxy from overwhelming everybody and also cause counterforces to build and seek to overwhelm it?
Not necessarily. Genuinely pitching some questions that I have had myself, as someone who doesn't necessarily subscribe to a particular worldview, to someone who has thought about this worldview specifically and claims it as their own. Maybe 'save it from' wasn't the best framing and more so what I meant was 'less prone to'.
>"Liberalism is the one which seeks to prevent one faction taking power in the first place"
Isn't it more like "seeks to prevent another faction from taking the power it has". How does liberalism through democracy prevent anything at societal scale without taking or having power itself, in the name of its worldview, first?
What's going on in Iran could be seen from a number of perspectives, including the one where a liberal democracy is trying to at least to some degree prevent the proliferation of another worldview it sees as potentially and practically dangerous or threatening by leveraging force.
>"They have never in their history all believed the same thing."
Maybe not entirely or in a complete global sense but prior to the Enlightenment, it does seem that an objective morality was an overarching belief shared by almost everyone and regardless of how we may feel about such things today, this sort of collective moral ontology served at least one if not a few particularly potent social functions. Additionally, we did not commonly or naturally form into any pluralistic or multi-cultural societies as we do today in liberal democracy where we could very well be sharing a nation with others who might which to subvert said system/worldview if/when given the opportunity to do so.
Ultimately, I'm not trying to advocate for anything in particular as much as I am trying to understand better and maybe stress test liberalism out of largely respecting it as a worldview and many of the seemingly positive societal changes it has contributed to facilitating. Out of not wanting to see it subverted or fail to produce superior longevity in terms of productive societies compared to other historical worldview/governing system combinations.
I appreciate your time and consideration in entertaining my poking and prodding
“I would argue that the playground could be seen as the globe and the countries are the children”
You could argue that but we don’t have a world order in which everybody gets to vote for what it looks like so each liberal democracy has to do that for itself only.
“how do we justify what we might claim we "ought" or "ought not" do. If there is no objective justification, then there are only subjective or intersubjective ones.”
Yes, that’s reality. Humans are messy. They have never in their history all believed the same thing. We can either war over that and let whichever orthodoxy gets powerful enough to enforce their beliefs to do so until another knocks them aside or we can try to find a way to co-exist.
“It will defend your right not to, even if what they believe wouldn't reciprocate or might even in fact force the liberal trying to extend them epistemic grace into believing what they believe or becoming subject to some violent or fatal force if they refuse - given they had the chance to do so. Is it just for the liberal to defend the right to free speech of those who would take it away from the liberal the moment they realized the power to do so?”
No, we do not tolerate coercion. That’s the line. You may believe in God, you may not force me to pretend to do.
It’s not as though there is another option. If we tried to ban, say, Christianity and Islam, because they have so often got coercive due to their belief in Heaven and Hell and directive to convert, people would still be religious believers and would object violently. We can’t actually suppress beliefs we don’t like for any significant time. We can only cut out the option to hold them openly and force people to fight for them.
Here again we see how qualified and nuanced is your leftism, and thus why classical liberals are favorably disposed toward you…
• Your depiction of the schoolyard anarchy descending into a brutal Lord of the Flies scenario indicates you have an unromantic view of human nature, such that there is something wrong with us, it is not externals, civilization of whatever sort that warps us, we are already warped and need a certain amount of governance
• You’re also unhappy with too much governance, wanting to resist any trend toward a Marxist dictatorship. The Leftists that classical liberals object to so strenuously are just fine with Marxist dictatorships and many of them are working toward precisely that end
"We have never achieved this cultural cohesion. It didn’t exist even in times when everybody was the same religion, had the same nationality, came from the same cultural/racial/ethnic background and lived under the same, sole government. Never. Humans don’t do this. As E.O. Wilson said of Marxism, “Good ideology. Wrong species.”" I fully agree with this statement, but the Wilson quote is equally applicable to those who pretend that positive beliefs should be kept in the private space and that the public space should be empty of moral judgements. Moral is basically a human invention to play socially.
What is your view on essentially eradicating certain ideas via overwhelming social sanctions, i.e. fascism/Nazism/white supremacy? The primary weakness of liberals, in my view, seems to be that they are not nearly willing enough to do this when presented with things like communism or leftist identitarianism. I would probably find liberalism appealing if it came along with a society where 99.99% of the population fully shunned anyone that even slightly hinted at supporting communism, transgenderism, etc., as is done with certain "right-wing" ideas.
That’s precisely how I think we should do it & have done it. The “Everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi” meme is a meme because Nazi is the epitome of evil. I’ll disapprove people who support totalitarian regimes of any kind, but transgenderism includes people just being trans so not that. You’ll probably need to impress this more on the right-wing liberals as they are most likely to oppose communism specifically. I think they do, though. The classical liberals and libertarians?
This conception of liberalism allows for social eradication of any sufficiently unpopular idea or behavior. This does not mean that anyone will be disallowed by force from "just being trans." But if they choose to "just be trans," they will face total social isolation and ridicule. People who advocate for pedophilia usually suffer this fate today, as an example of this shunning model being properly applied to curtail evil. In my opinion, the same treatment should extend to transgender ideology/behavior, and eventually it will again, as it did in the past.
I think I can support this notion of liberalism. We just need more people who call themselves liberals to get on board.
I think you are responding to the wrong essay. This is an essay about the simple principle of non-coercion in liberalism.
Or you have a single-minded interest in trans issues and think everyone else does too and have a responsibility to stop talking about my area of interest (liberalism) and instead talk about yours (trans issues)
I have no such responsibility.
Try someone writing an essay about your area of interest instead?
The only part of your comment that relates to my essay is already answered in my essay.
Have a look at Mill’s one simple principle against forcing people to do things and see if you can see if you apply it to your hypothetical and work out of it means it would force you to do something or protect you from any such force.
I will leave it here because I suspect you don’t want to talk about my essay at all, but your own interest. I don’t want to talk about your interest.
You seem to want to prevent these men from entertaining their own delusion. To compel them to see themselves as men when they see themselves as women.
Liberalism says: It is your right to believe that it is a delusion and to tell them so, and to refuse to treat them as women, so long as you do not follow them around and harass them. It is not your right to demand that they by law be prevented from doing with their bodies whatever they wish, or to harass them, or to call for their internment.
Liberalism says, to the men in wigs: it is your right to dress as you wish, alter your body as you wish, and believe yourselves to be what you think you are. It is not your right to demand that everybody else believe likewise, it is not your right to demand that who disagrees with you is silenced or punished, nor it is your right to harass them or demand by law access to women's spaces that are exclusive of biological males.
It is neither liberal nor illiberal to affirm mental illness. Scientific opinion changes about what constitutes mental illness and what is the best treatment for it. If you allow, homosexuality was labelled as a personality disorder until 1976 in the APA and the 90's in the WHO.
And that gender affirmation treatments are the best treatment for gender dysphoria has been the medical consensus long before trans activists came on the stage. Nobody demanded that doctors and the medical establishment affirm their "lies", the majority of doctors and the medical establishment reached the conclusion that sex-reassignment treatments are the right ones for individuals suffering from gender dysphoria. The activists have increasingly pushed for radical intervention on children that identify as transgender, and this is a problem inasmuch it has poor science to support it, but it has become unquestionable in the culture wars.
Incidentally, you may be aware that most of the people who identify as transexual are today biological females. There is certainly a problem in their growing number, but they are not likely to be "autoandrophile". Autogynephilia has been theorised as an explanation for only a specific presentation of transexuality in males, which concerns older males who envision themselves as women and are attracted to women (the ones that usually make the headlines.) Blanchard's hypotheses have value but need more studies, as he himself declares. And Blanchard never proposed any different treatment for transsexuals than the ones that are in place.
Liberalism demands that we accommodate every conceivable identity group by changing our laws and our social norms. What was once relegated to the margins must now become mainstreamed with no moral or social disapprobation.
Previously, people who wanted to live certain ways knew there were trade-offs. If my child's 3rd grade teacher decides to transition mid-year, I must accept it and any parental demands that the teacher be replaced is hateful bigotry and discrimination. Look at the Wisconsin school dean who did porn and said it was his first amendment right and refused to resign. I can hear the liberals saying his side gig has nothing to do with his job performance and it's wrong to fire him based on our (out dated) morals and social norms.
Reason will not be enough it seems, dear Helen. There is never a worse deaf man than the one who does not want to hear. Today the tribes only want to kill what does not belong, and it looks like being back to the 30 Years War. Worse of all is that Liberal in America means Progressive, which has spread with American cultural dominance and tainted the discourse since the start. Poor Gladstone is surely turning in his grave.
But thank you for continuing to be the voice of reason.
Isn’t there a problem with the definition of “harm”? Men who wear dresses claim that it isn’t enough to simply accept their right to dress as they please. They also claim it does them material harm if they are not treated always and everywhere as if they actually are women. This is the basis of their claim that it is their “human right” to access women’s public toilets and changing rooms, to engage in women’s sports, to be incarcerated in women’s prisons, to be allowed to body search and provide intimate health care to non-consenting women, to be given employment, awards and honours reserved for women on equity grounds... It would seem that in this and many other instances there are competing harms. How do we decide between these competing harms? Should women “win” because there are more of them than there are men who wear dresses? Or should men who wear dresses “win” because, as they argue, affronts to their paraphilia cause them more material harm than their paraphilia causes women by affronting their dignity, invading their privacy and threatening their safety, health and well-being? Who gets to be the playground monitor?
That’s the thing with liberalism. You sometimes have to reason case by case but I don’t think so here. I qualify with “material” because if only feelings are hurt, you need to deal.
I took your point about material harm, but trans activists claim that failing to accept transgender people as women causes them anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation that can lead to actual suicide. This is why people who criticise gender ideology are accused of killing transgender people. The suicide narrative is doggy, but I am sure that challenging a firmly held delusion can cause more than hurt feelings.
Yes. But the responsibility to deal with hurt feelings is the individual with them, not the rest of society. It’s very distressing to one of my relatives that I am not Christian. It keeps her up at night worrying. Still not my responsibility.
Not convinced, but thanks for giving me lots to think about today and as usual.
Having people take responsibility for their own feelings is the only way. Otherwise you’d have to judge what can and can’t be said in any situation by who is more likely to kill themselves if they feel distressed by the claim that a woman is an adult human female or a woman is a subjectively felt gender identity. And if you believe that intention matters, you’d also have to try to evaluate whether the speaker knew it was the trans person or the biological woman who was most psychologically vulnerable in that particular exchange & stated their own position “maliciously” or not. There would be no space for caring about truth or reason and it would incentivise people being or pretending to be psychologically traumatised whenever anybody else says something that goes against their own political views. It would be a mess.
The definition of harm is critical. If it is too loose, anything can be a damage, and the debate is not possible. If it is too strict, we would be being deliberately blind to certain harms. I understand the attempt at limitation with the concept of material harm, but what if the perceived material harm is not now to an individual, but to society in the future?. Example, the debate around marriage and its impact on birth rates and the material realities of society in the future goes beyond material harm to a particular individual.
I think you could actually decide this one, and many if not all such cases, by appeal to freedom of association. If one party does not want to associate with another, they should not be compelled to be. In this case, if women do not want to associate with men in a particular context (bathrooms), they should not have to. This and that reasoning about why it's somehow harmful to the man if he can't force himself upon the women should be, in theory, dismissed out of hand.
That said, you are touching on the basic issue that liberals are often too weak-minded to actually defend the liberal standard, and are too easily brow-beaten into giving it up by manipulative bad actors.
>"I am/believe in <belief system> but I defend your right not to."
Heres the weakness I see in liberalism. It will defend your right not to, even if what they believe wouldn't reciprocate or might even in fact force the liberal trying to extend them epistemic grace into believing what they believe or becoming subject to some violent or fatal force if they refuse - given they had the chance to do so. Is it just for the liberal to defend the right to free speech of those who would take it away from the liberal the moment they realized the power to do so?
For me the question of morality isnt one of "you must" or "you must not" but rather a question of how do we justify what we might claim we "ought" or "ought not" do. If there is no objective justification, then there are only subjective or intersubjective ones. If there are only subjective or intersubjective justifications, how do we justify any normative prescription with anything greater or more authoritative than individual preference? You could say this is sort of an age old question concerning opposing worldviews but this feels especially relevant to liberalism considering we are granting everyone else validity in their own systems of beliefs. So we are granting people the same rights we would want to be granted and we also have no way of telling them what they consider right or wrong, is anymore right or wrong then what we believe is. Seems like this is a lot of faith being put in humanity which is something different in theory and in practice.
>"This ‘might makes right’ model of forceful dominance and overthrow has been the predominant one throughout human history. I would rather not go back there."
Nor would I but what does what we want have to do with what is? I would argue that the playground could be seen as the globe and the countries are the children. There is no overarching democratic or otherwise global authority like there are in a governed state. The countries exist in relation to each other in a state of anarchy and in that sense how can we be sure we ever have left a world where 'might makes right' except maybe in our minds within the parameters of our country, which benefits massively from its might. Regardless of whether or not we are in that world, we can still be sure we are in a world where "might makes" and it does appear to do so regardless of how we feel about it morally and ethically.
This is where the weakness in the worldview I tried to describe above comes in. There is no mechanism in the liberal worldview that I can identify that would save it from being overwhelmed or taken over by a group with an entirely different worldview which was motivated to do so under subversive or forceful circumstances. As a matter of fact, if those occurred naturally in a liberal democracy by means of the subversive worldview simply becoming adopted by at least 50% of the public and they voted their way into power, this would actually be a function of liberal democracy itself.
Don't we already we the beginnings of the snake eating its tail in this regard?
If morality is grounded subjectively, how could we even say to anyone not already inclined to our worldview that this kind of capture, or any outcome for that matter, would be a bad or wrong outcome?
“If morality is grounded subjectively, how could we even say to anyone not already inclined to our worldview that this kind of capture, or any outcome for that matter, would be a bad or wrong outcome?”
You can claim morality to be grounded objectively but you’ll just be arguing with a load of other people who make the same claim but for a different morality.
These are all just claims. There is no way to ground a morality objectively. It always need a premise. “This god exists and its morality is objective even though we can’t measure it against anything else to see.” “This morality is objective because it’s rooted in human thriving and we can assume that all humans want to thrive, even though this is limited to humans and doesn’t apply to other species that exist so it’s hard to see how it is objective even on this planet.”
“There is no mechanism in the liberal worldview that I can identify that would save it from being overwhelmed or taken over by a group with an entirely different worldview which was motivated to do so under subversive or forceful circumstances.”
There’s no mechanism in any worldview that would save it from being so overwhelmed. That’s why all authoritarian systems of government get overwhelmed by another eventually. That’s what humans do. Liberalism is the one which seeks to prevent one faction taking power in the first place and overwhelming all of society until objections rise to an extent that another can overwhelm it. Think of what we see in Iran right now.
Do you have an alternative in mind. Some other system that would prevent any one orthodoxy from overwhelming everybody and also cause counterforces to build and seek to overwhelm it?
Not necessarily. Genuinely pitching some questions that I have had myself, as someone who doesn't necessarily subscribe to a particular worldview, to someone who has thought about this worldview specifically and claims it as their own. Maybe 'save it from' wasn't the best framing and more so what I meant was 'less prone to'.
>"Liberalism is the one which seeks to prevent one faction taking power in the first place"
Isn't it more like "seeks to prevent another faction from taking the power it has". How does liberalism through democracy prevent anything at societal scale without taking or having power itself, in the name of its worldview, first?
What's going on in Iran could be seen from a number of perspectives, including the one where a liberal democracy is trying to at least to some degree prevent the proliferation of another worldview it sees as potentially and practically dangerous or threatening by leveraging force.
>"They have never in their history all believed the same thing."
Maybe not entirely or in a complete global sense but prior to the Enlightenment, it does seem that an objective morality was an overarching belief shared by almost everyone and regardless of how we may feel about such things today, this sort of collective moral ontology served at least one if not a few particularly potent social functions. Additionally, we did not commonly or naturally form into any pluralistic or multi-cultural societies as we do today in liberal democracy where we could very well be sharing a nation with others who might which to subvert said system/worldview if/when given the opportunity to do so.
Ultimately, I'm not trying to advocate for anything in particular as much as I am trying to understand better and maybe stress test liberalism out of largely respecting it as a worldview and many of the seemingly positive societal changes it has contributed to facilitating. Out of not wanting to see it subverted or fail to produce superior longevity in terms of productive societies compared to other historical worldview/governing system combinations.
I appreciate your time and consideration in entertaining my poking and prodding
“I would argue that the playground could be seen as the globe and the countries are the children”
You could argue that but we don’t have a world order in which everybody gets to vote for what it looks like so each liberal democracy has to do that for itself only.
“Nor would I but what does what we want have to do with what is?”
When talking about systems of governance, they are what ‘is’ while ‘what we want’ is what we elect them to uphold and protect.
“how do we justify what we might claim we "ought" or "ought not" do. If there is no objective justification, then there are only subjective or intersubjective ones.”
Yes, that’s reality. Humans are messy. They have never in their history all believed the same thing. We can either war over that and let whichever orthodoxy gets powerful enough to enforce their beliefs to do so until another knocks them aside or we can try to find a way to co-exist.
“It will defend your right not to, even if what they believe wouldn't reciprocate or might even in fact force the liberal trying to extend them epistemic grace into believing what they believe or becoming subject to some violent or fatal force if they refuse - given they had the chance to do so. Is it just for the liberal to defend the right to free speech of those who would take it away from the liberal the moment they realized the power to do so?”
No, we do not tolerate coercion. That’s the line. You may believe in God, you may not force me to pretend to do.
It’s not as though there is another option. If we tried to ban, say, Christianity and Islam, because they have so often got coercive due to their belief in Heaven and Hell and directive to convert, people would still be religious believers and would object violently. We can’t actually suppress beliefs we don’t like for any significant time. We can only cut out the option to hold them openly and force people to fight for them.
Here again we see how qualified and nuanced is your leftism, and thus why classical liberals are favorably disposed toward you…
• Your depiction of the schoolyard anarchy descending into a brutal Lord of the Flies scenario indicates you have an unromantic view of human nature, such that there is something wrong with us, it is not externals, civilization of whatever sort that warps us, we are already warped and need a certain amount of governance
• You’re also unhappy with too much governance, wanting to resist any trend toward a Marxist dictatorship. The Leftists that classical liberals object to so strenuously are just fine with Marxist dictatorships and many of them are working toward precisely that end
"We have never achieved this cultural cohesion. It didn’t exist even in times when everybody was the same religion, had the same nationality, came from the same cultural/racial/ethnic background and lived under the same, sole government. Never. Humans don’t do this. As E.O. Wilson said of Marxism, “Good ideology. Wrong species.”" I fully agree with this statement, but the Wilson quote is equally applicable to those who pretend that positive beliefs should be kept in the private space and that the public space should be empty of moral judgements. Moral is basically a human invention to play socially.
What is your view on essentially eradicating certain ideas via overwhelming social sanctions, i.e. fascism/Nazism/white supremacy? The primary weakness of liberals, in my view, seems to be that they are not nearly willing enough to do this when presented with things like communism or leftist identitarianism. I would probably find liberalism appealing if it came along with a society where 99.99% of the population fully shunned anyone that even slightly hinted at supporting communism, transgenderism, etc., as is done with certain "right-wing" ideas.
That’s precisely how I think we should do it & have done it. The “Everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi” meme is a meme because Nazi is the epitome of evil. I’ll disapprove people who support totalitarian regimes of any kind, but transgenderism includes people just being trans so not that. You’ll probably need to impress this more on the right-wing liberals as they are most likely to oppose communism specifically. I think they do, though. The classical liberals and libertarians?
This conception of liberalism allows for social eradication of any sufficiently unpopular idea or behavior. This does not mean that anyone will be disallowed by force from "just being trans." But if they choose to "just be trans," they will face total social isolation and ridicule. People who advocate for pedophilia usually suffer this fate today, as an example of this shunning model being properly applied to curtail evil. In my opinion, the same treatment should extend to transgender ideology/behavior, and eventually it will again, as it did in the past.
I think I can support this notion of liberalism. We just need more people who call themselves liberals to get on board.
I think you are responding to the wrong essay. This is an essay about the simple principle of non-coercion in liberalism.
Or you have a single-minded interest in trans issues and think everyone else does too and have a responsibility to stop talking about my area of interest (liberalism) and instead talk about yours (trans issues)
I have no such responsibility.
Try someone writing an essay about your area of interest instead?
The only part of your comment that relates to my essay is already answered in my essay.
Have a look at Mill’s one simple principle against forcing people to do things and see if you can see if you apply it to your hypothetical and work out of it means it would force you to do something or protect you from any such force.
I will leave it here because I suspect you don’t want to talk about my essay at all, but your own interest. I don’t want to talk about your interest.
lucid commentary
Does what include that?
Read the piece and you will see if the one simple principle is “Tell lies to men who think they are women” or “affirm mental illness.”
When you see what it is, it will answer your question about whether it is liberal to coerce you to say things you don’t believe to be true
You seem to want to prevent these men from entertaining their own delusion. To compel them to see themselves as men when they see themselves as women.
Liberalism says: It is your right to believe that it is a delusion and to tell them so, and to refuse to treat them as women, so long as you do not follow them around and harass them. It is not your right to demand that they by law be prevented from doing with their bodies whatever they wish, or to harass them, or to call for their internment.
Liberalism says, to the men in wigs: it is your right to dress as you wish, alter your body as you wish, and believe yourselves to be what you think you are. It is not your right to demand that everybody else believe likewise, it is not your right to demand that who disagrees with you is silenced or punished, nor it is your right to harass them or demand by law access to women's spaces that are exclusive of biological males.
It is neither liberal nor illiberal to affirm mental illness. Scientific opinion changes about what constitutes mental illness and what is the best treatment for it. If you allow, homosexuality was labelled as a personality disorder until 1976 in the APA and the 90's in the WHO.
And that gender affirmation treatments are the best treatment for gender dysphoria has been the medical consensus long before trans activists came on the stage. Nobody demanded that doctors and the medical establishment affirm their "lies", the majority of doctors and the medical establishment reached the conclusion that sex-reassignment treatments are the right ones for individuals suffering from gender dysphoria. The activists have increasingly pushed for radical intervention on children that identify as transgender, and this is a problem inasmuch it has poor science to support it, but it has become unquestionable in the culture wars.
Incidentally, you may be aware that most of the people who identify as transexual are today biological females. There is certainly a problem in their growing number, but they are not likely to be "autoandrophile". Autogynephilia has been theorised as an explanation for only a specific presentation of transexuality in males, which concerns older males who envision themselves as women and are attracted to women (the ones that usually make the headlines.) Blanchard's hypotheses have value but need more studies, as he himself declares. And Blanchard never proposed any different treatment for transsexuals than the ones that are in place.
Liberalism demands that we accommodate every conceivable identity group by changing our laws and our social norms. What was once relegated to the margins must now become mainstreamed with no moral or social disapprobation.
Previously, people who wanted to live certain ways knew there were trade-offs. If my child's 3rd grade teacher decides to transition mid-year, I must accept it and any parental demands that the teacher be replaced is hateful bigotry and discrimination. Look at the Wisconsin school dean who did porn and said it was his first amendment right and refused to resign. I can hear the liberals saying his side gig has nothing to do with his job performance and it's wrong to fire him based on our (out dated) morals and social norms.