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Aside from it being completely immoral, what kind of political leader in this situation makes a choice that means *the story is guaranteed to continue to run* and that her own responsibility for any consequence of that is now dramatically increased?

I take the point. I think on the British side many of the most prominent transphobes either downplay any religious influence or genuinely didn't begin from that context, but clearly the link to religious conservatives is there and growing.

Not magical at all; as I said, I think it's marginal, but a consensus does get shaped by individuals who have a platform and status, and people are influenced by the consensus amongst those who share their values and interests, etc.

Really interesting, but I'd be also interested to read more about the aspects that aren't covered here, e.g. why things were already on a bad track as early as 2018, and how specifically the Greenwich takeover came about. Maybe others have covered/will cover these things, insofar as they're known.

I mostly agree; my only caveat is that he carries enough residual weight (as a public intellectual with an association with Oxford and background in the Sciences) that his endorsement likely did make a marginal but meaningful contribution to cementing a transphobic consensus among the British elite.

I take your implicit point that this is could be a bit overdone, but one reason that era of New Atheism stays in the discourse is that Dawkins is still being a jerk on one of the major issues of our time (Transphobia), in ways that reflect the same blinkers seen in his particular version of atheism

Enjoyed reading this, very helpful for putting things in context.

It might help him if not everything was stated in a tone of 120% confidence.

Obviously, that's not to say that it's never legitimate to find parallels and connections where these are substantive and meaningful. But if doing so ends up changing the overall weight of focus from Right to Left despite the basic facts of the case being exactly opposite, something has gone wrong.

Strong echoes of Maxwell and Epstein too, especially the former’s role

I think internal regulation and practice around doctoral supervision have got infinitely better in the past couple of decades, but do wonder whether current cuts will cause a degree of reversion on this - ultimately however well-designed a system is, it needs human capacity to make it work.

It has some features of a genre e.g. being marketed to specific audiences, but is also unlike a genre in that there are no fixed expectations for its content (I'm not sure that style alone makes a genre). So I'd call it a category rather than a true genre. Others may have different views though! ☺️

Ah thank you!

I see, so it’s a somewhat narrower issue than the headline framing might suggest, I guess. I suppose it’s not unusual for a conflict to come down to who is willing to accept losses at scale.

Wasn’t there some doctrine about being able to fight two full-scale wars simultaneously? This doesn’t seem very in line with such ambitions.

Indeed, I think that’s exactly it.

As I've said before, I think there is a chunk of Labour and Labour-adjacent people who have not adapted to the reality of having a Left bloc that is no longer within their own party, and the idea that the legitimate version of the Greens is as a small single-issue party is all bound up in that.

It's all rooted in annoyance at the Greens broadening their appeal, and part of the way that gets expressed is by suggesting there's a zero sum relationship between focus on climate and focus on anything else. As you say, that logic isn't applied to the other parties in the same way.

Absolutely.

That ‘I don’t care in the slightest’ is pure playground smirking.