This is one of the most engaging podcasts I've heard in quite a while. Conversation includes author Caitlin Flanagan and First Amendment Attorney Greg Lukianoff (From FIRE - The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). The topics are varied but repeatedly come back to free speech. Flanagan claims that far too many college students don't understand the importance or free speech and the First Amendment.
I saw this Rogan interview with Krystal and Saagar. I've watched a lot of Joe Rogan for the past two years. He leans far left on most issues he discusses, but that's not good enough for most people and news media on the political left, who seek to purification, not nuanced discussion. Many of them have no idea what to do with people like Rogan, who hold heterodox opinions. They reject the idea of human complexity and they are increasibly thinking in cartoons. That is the subject of Krystal Ball's 7-minute commentary. It was spot on. I've seen this rejection of the "impure" on FB over and over. IMO, this is ruining the political left and sending many voters over to the political right, which is morally bankrupt.
My advice to people on the political left: Quit demonizing people who are not aligned with your views. Quit writing off everyone who voted differently than you. Engage openly and respectfully with your family, neighbors and friends who think differently than you. I'm an atheist, but Jesus had it right when he gave the Sermon on the Mount: "Love your enemies." I give thanks today that we don't all think alike. And I give thanks for the wisdom of John Stuart Mill. And I give thanks for the courage and soaring inspirational thoughts of Martin Luther King: Hate cannot drive out hate and we should judge each other only by the content of our character. Let's start judging each other more wisely starting today.
It looks like it is now safe to publicly say these critically important things at the WP, 18 months after Abigail Shrier sounded the alarm but was completely and intentionally ignored by WP/NYT/NPR. Here is an excerpt from a brand new article by Laura Edwards-Leeper and Erica Anderson: "The mental health establishment is failing trans kids Gender-exploratory therapy is a key step. Why aren’t therapists providing it?":
"The number of adolescents requesting medical care is skyrocketing: Now 1.8 percent of people under 18 identify as transgender, double the figure from five years earlier, according to the Trevor Project. A flood of referrals to mental health providers and gender medical clinics, combined with a political climate that sees the treatment of each individual patient as a litmus test of social tolerance, is spurring many providers into sloppy, dangerous care. Often from a place of genuine concern, they are hastily dispensing medicine or recommending medical doctors prescribe it — without following the strict guidelines that govern this treatment. . . .
When working in gender clinics, we’ve also both received letters from therapists who had “assessed” patients they were referring to us. An astonishing number of these were nothing but a paragraph that stated the youth identified as trans, had dysphoria and wanted hormones, so that course was recommended. There are nearly 200,000 members of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association. Add to that the clinical social workers, marriage counselors and family therapists. The overwhelming majority of those well-intentioned professionals receive limited or no training in the assessment of gender-diverse youth. (We receive requests frequently from people eager for more comprehensive, nuanced trainings, which we both deliver.) In simple terms, the demand for competent care has outstripped the supply of competent providers."
How many teenagers have been permanently damaged as a result of getting ideology instead of meaningful counseling? How many have been permanently disfigured or made sterile as a result of surgery and hormone treatment in those 18 months since Abigail Shrier tried to warn us but was shut down in a concerted effort by left-leaning media, social media platforms and even a prominent attorney for the ACLU?
Glenn Greenwald comments on the words of Ahmaud Arbery's father, comparing these words to the efforts of the racecraft being peddled by the establishment elite:
Here, Scott Barry Kaufman tells us why we need to have conversations with people who think differently than us:
Here is a long list of many of the things we have in common, a list compiled by Donald Brown in a book called Human Universals. I commented on this long list in a previous post.
And here is a good recipe for having those conversations, the HxA Way of Heterodox Academy.