Hot water

Comments

4 responses to “Hot water”

1. 

   Papito

   Jul 13, 2026 4:54 AM

   Amnesty International wants people who believe that sex exists to either shut up or be put in jail. How did Amnesty International do a full 180 and become an organization that is against free speech and in favor of political incarceration?
2. 

   Francis Boyle

   Jul 13, 2026 7:43 AM

   Papito, your rhetorical question demands a better answer than I can give, but I suspect it happened about the time that they (and much of the left) became the party of institutional revolution. Holding the reins of power (however discreetly) but insisting on seeing yourself as one of the oppressed (in some mystical way that only the top Catholic theologians could understand) must do strange things to your head.
3. 

   Ophelia Benson

   Jul 13, 2026 7:46 AM

   Same way that bloggers who used to be fans of reason and realism went all in on magic gender, I guess.
4. 

   The Whimster Gap

   Jul 14, 2026 1:29 AM

   Here’s my go-to just-so story.

   Executive summary: The Right is very good at culture wars.

   Let’s go back to the mid-noughties. In the US, a group of oddball Christians have, for a while, been pushing creationism in one form or another. But this is also the early days of blogging, online activism, and – ugh! – Web 2.0. This allows for pushback from a young and thriving community of sceptics. (And because the internet speaks American, this US phenomenon becomes an Anglosphere phenomenon, and then a global one.) The oddball Christians tend to lean right politically; the sceptical crew tends to lean left. This is not entirely surprising, since scepticism tends to be well, sceptical of the status quo, and therefore more reformist.

   Now, there’s all kinds of things we can unpack here about whether one becomes a sceptic because one is left-leaning or vice versa, and likewise with the right-leaning/ creationist side. For the sake of our story, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the debate took on a left-wing/ right-wing tone. And, of course, this had something to do with the fact that the creationist lobby had a hold over the Bush Jr White House, and so became associated with the whole neocon, Iraq invasion, that-sort-of-thing agenda.

   And the right lost. For a period in 2007-8, the whole world banking system went a bit unusual for reasons largely attributable to the kinds of policy that neocons had been pushing. Iraq had become a disaster. Bush went; Obama came. Creationism got the spanking it deserves; nobody talks about even intelligent design any more.

   But here’s the genius move of the right – the American right in particular. They noticed that the debate about creationism had stopped being about the origin of life; it had become a partisan thing. Biology was relegated to being a small part of that wider stand-off between a (largely) left/ liberal bloc and a (largely) right/ conservative bloc. The trap into which the former bloc fell was to defend views not because of their truth, but because of their consonance with a set of other views. Sure, they might have been true, but it was their political tone that mattered more.

   And so all the right had to to was to bide its time and find a new cause with which it could drive its opponents mad. Remember: truth no longer mattered as much as being on the acceptable side of any given argument. The left could be discredited by its being forced to embrace lunacy and to call that embrace virtue.

   Here, then, is my hypothesis.

   Some clever policy wonk stumbled across a slightly obscure academic, whom I’ll call Budith Jutler, pushing a slightly cranky view about sex and gender; and the clever wonk jumped on it. “Look what these lunatic lefties are saying!”

   And because debates were now partisan before they were anything else, the left was unwilling – and actually unable – to take that point seriously. It wasn’t even able to mount a properly sceptical response. It couldn’t say, for example, that Jutler raised a decent point in respect of φ but overdid things in respect of ψ, because that would be accepting that the right-leaning critic might have had a point; and when the game is partisan, you can’t do that. All that was left was to mount a full-throated defence of Jutler and Jutlerism, and to condemn anyone not on board with that defence as a backslider, because not to do that would be to cede ground to The Enemy.

   (The right seeks converts; the left seeks traitors. There’s truth in this.)

   This, I think, is how at least some progressive groups went mad: once debates become partisan, all you need to do is to find someone loosely in the vague political area of your opponents whose position on a topic is sufficiently bizarre, and then engineer a situation in which defending that position becomes a rallying-cry; and then to tweak that situation a bit more in such a way that it’s not a matter of defending the position for Millian reasons of free inquiry, but of defending it because of who’s attacking it; and then to tweak it further still so that defending it against the Baddies is now a test of being a Goodie.

   And I think that the right is very good at this game, and the left isn’t. Rather, the left keeps on falling into the trap of binding itself to positions that in its heart of hearts it knows it doesn’t need to give the time of day, because not to do so would be backsliding.

   Most people on the left don’t actually have any strong attachment to the crap they’re spouting. Some do, for sure. But most have just got into the rut of instinctive defensiveness against political opponents who are – we can admit – generally not nice people. Add to that an Arthur Miller-esque fear of being denounced as a witch by one’s notional allies – allies who are just as lukewarm beneath the surface, but who’d never admit it because they thing they’ll be denounced too – and we end up where we are.

   Scepticism ends up being anti-sceptical for fear of being wrong in the face of the enemy.