Diagnosing Woke Ideologists

Josh Slouch lost a job he loved. In his current essay, he indicates that a Woke Mob came after him. He writes:

What was my sin? Had I hung a noose from the rearview mirror of my Prius? Did I assault a trans person? Did I don blackface and drop the n-bomb? No. It was more sinister than that. They discovered that I, a gay man, host a conservative podcast.

If you're wondering how a progressive gay liberal became a libertarian conservative, the story of that political transformation will be told on my Substack soon.

I'll be on the lookout for that forthcoming article. In the meantime, Josh has contemplated the types of people who joined the Woke Mob that cost him his job. Here's how he diagnoses them:
I believe part of the answer to this complicated question lies in the normalization of a type of psychology that drives domestic abuse known as Cluster B personality disorders. These include narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and anti-social personality disorder. The symptoms of these disorders are diverse and overlapping, and people with them engage in conflict, deception, abuse and mistreatment of others (almost always while claiming they themselves are victims).

These are more than “difficult people.” They are impossible, and often dangerous, people. A quick glossary of the Cluster B disorders. There is a lot of overlap in symptoms among them:

Narcissistic Personality Disorder—self-centered, vain, may be a braggart or may be the type that acts like a very special put-upon victim. The world revolves around them, and others are objects to be used, not people to love or respect.

Borderline Personality Disorder—extreme emotional instability, laughing one minute, crying or screaming the next. Borderlines fear abandonment but engineer conflicts with everyone around them until they fulfill their own fear of being rejected. Think “I hate you/don't leave me.”

Histrionic Personality Disorder—Big emotions about everything all the time. Life events are over-dramatized. Minor disagreements become relationship-shattering cataclysms. Histrionics are often sexually seductive and go beyond flirtation in acting out for attention.

Anti-social Personality Disorder—also known as “sociopathy” or “psychopathy.” An absence of conscience or empathy. Antisocials lead a parasitic life draining money and time from others. Many are criminals. Others stay within the law but torment their families and colleagues to get what they want.

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Stanford University Attempts to Dismantle Harmful Language

Stanford University has launched an initiative to protect us from harmful language. This language is so incredibly harmful that after the link to the website started getting passed around, Stanford shut down public access. Now only Stanford students will get to know the language that purportedly harms all of us.

Heather Heying had been poking around at the Stanford website that was designed to protect her (and me and you and everyone else) from certain terrible words and phrases, but before she could finish reviewing the website, Stanford closed off public access. Here's some of the information that Heather can report at her website, Natural Selections:

Finally, I grabbed a single screenshot of one of the recommendations on the site before access was restricted4. Here it is:

[More . . . ]

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Trophies for Every Student = Trophies for No Student

Meanwhile, at a school that has been ranked as the top high school in the country . . .

For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology [in Virgina] have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. This episode has emerged amid the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in. It’s a race to the bottom. . . .

[Director of student services, Brandon Kosatka] admitted that the decision to withhold the information from parents and inform the students in a low-key way was intentional. “We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” he told her, claiming that he and the principal didn’t want to “hurt” the feelings of students who didn’t get the award.

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Camille Paglia Discusses Transgender Issues

I've followed Camille Paglia for many year, always finding her opinions deeply explored, courageous and clearly stated. An excerpt from CPYU:

Although I describe myself as transgender (I was donning flamboyant male costumes from early childhood on), I am highly skeptical about the current transgender wave, which I think has been produced by far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows. Furthermore, I condemn the escalating prescription of puberty blockers (whose long-term effects are unknown) for children. I regard this practice as a criminal violation of human rights.

It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women’s studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.

The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one’s birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.

In a democracy, everyone, no matter how nonconformist or eccentric, should be free from harassment and abuse. But at the same time, no one deserves special rights, protections, or privileges on the basis of their eccentricity. The categories “trans-man” and “trans-woman” are highly accurate and deserving of respect. But like Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys, I reject state-sponsored coercion to call someone a “woman” or a “man” simply on the basis of his or her subjective feeling about it. We may well take the path of good will and defer to courtesy on such occasions, but it is our choice alone.

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Prevalence of Gender Ideology and the Placebo Effect

Is the nearly vertical upward spike in reported cases of gender transition due, in part, to the placebo effect? Leor Sapir Reports at City Journal,  "The Placebo Is the Point: A new paper highlights the fundamental bias in the world of “gender-affirming” research."

A paper published last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior makes an important point about the environment in which “gender-affirming” drugs and surgeries are offered to minors. Positive outcomes from hormonal interventions, argues psychiatrist Alison Clayton, the article’s author, may be attributable to placebo effects generated by clinical encounters and the social context in which they take place, rather than to the underlying psychotropic effects of the drugs themselves.

Clayton’s basic intuition makes sense. If you take a teenager in emotional distress and tell her that drug X will solve her problems, while treatment Y will make them worse, and then bring her to a clinical setting where medical professionals repeat that message, it should come as no surprise that the teenager experiences emotional relief when you give her X, or distress when you give her Y—regardless of the psychotropic effects of X. The patient may regard the giving of X symbolically as adults listening to her and empathizing with her inner turmoil. “The ‘Hawthorne effect,’” writes Clayton, “describes the phenomenon where clinical trial patients’ improvements may occur because they are being observed and given special attention. A patient who is part of a study, receiving special attention, and with motivated clinicians, who are invested in the benefits of the treatment under study, is likely to have higher expectations of therapeutic benefits.”

It is indeed the case that promoters of “gender-affirming care” have created what Clayton calls “a perfect storm for the placebo effect.” In the left-of-center media, puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones and (less frequently) surgeries are hailed as “medically necessary” and suicide-preventing measures for teens in distress, supposedly over having been wrongly “assigned” their sex at birth. Skeptics of these interventions are denounced as cruel deniers of life-saving medicine to youth at high risk of suicide. Meantime, alternatives to drugs and surgeries (e.g., psychotherapy) are denigrated as harmful “conversion therapy,” setting the stage for a nocebo (harmful) effect on those who receive psychotherapy but not drugs.

From the viewpoint of those who have become intensely interested in treating dysphoria medically (rather than the "watch and see" method), many have uttered the phrase "Munchausen syndrome by proxy," which is "a mental illness and a form of child abuse. The caretaker of a child, most often a mother, either makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms to make it look like the child is sick."

 Biologist Colin Wright has been observing various parent groups. His observations give credence to that concern.

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