#liberal values

[secularsasquatch]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

John Anderson: When we talk about the liberal global order that's prevailed since the 1940s, it's prevailed because America has been strong enough to make sure it prevails.

Konstantin Kisin: Absolutely, and believed in its values, even if you don't like them, right? They believe in freedom of speech. Europeans believe in restricting people's speech so that no one's offended. That's at a governmental level, right? At the moment, that's who you're choosing between. If you're choosing between America, the American administration believes in free speech and is prepared to accept sometimes very unpleasant costs that come with free speech, right? The Europeans want the opposite, right? That's the choice, right? And so this is a question of values.

Anderson: Well, that's right, but there's an even bigger choice that I'm alluding to, and that is that if America loses its global dominance, what will the new order, global order look like?

Kisin: Well, that's what I'm saying, right? Our values are better than the values that would be in place of those values if we were not the strongest civilization. So being strong has to be one of our values. So this sort of makes sense, doesn't it?

And so, you know, this idea that we should walk around and sort of keep ourselves small and, you know, we have this weird thing. I know it's a British thing. Maybe this is a sign that I haven't fully integrated, but we have a debate in this country every time the Prime Minister of the country goes to some global summit on a big plane, and everyone's like, oh, no, he's spending government money. I'm like, no. What, you're saying Xi Jinping arrives on a megabus? This is a game. There's a game being played here, and people will treat you depending on how powerful they perceive you to be, and human beings are very shallow. And if you've got a big plane with the name of your country on it, people tend to respect that, especially people who are not Western and don't have this moronic ideology where the stronger you are or appear to be, the worse you are as a human being. They don't have that. Xi Jinping doesn't think like that, nor does Vladimir Putin, nor do most people in the world. I think you'd back me up on this, John.

Anderson: You're right. You're absolutely right.

Kisin: Having dealt with people in different governments around the world.

Anderson: Yeah, yep, that's right. You know, we don't want braggarts, but on the other hand, we don't want our leaders to look like they're not respected or respectable.

Kisin: No. On an international stage, I think of them kind of like our champion in a battle, right? Do you want somebody who is strong and capable in that role, or do you want someone who's not, as the Americans had at the last election? I think it was as basic a choice as that, frankly,

==

Being strong is good, actually.

[progressivejudaism]

American Values Religious Voices Email Forms

Do you need hope right now?

My professor / rabbi-superhero, Rabbi Dr. Andrea Weiss is launching the second round of American Values Religious Voices letters. 

Over the first 100 days of the Biden/Harris administration, she has coordinated 100 short letters written by progressive religious scholars of nearly every faith tradition from around the United States to send the administration a letter grounded in our shared values and religious texts.

Each of the letters is only a little over a paragraph in length.

You can sign up to receive them at the link above.  Please reblog this message, and share the link with interested friends.

People described the last round of letters as inspirational, and the only thing that got them through really difficult days of the Trump administration.  It’s worth subscribing.

[mzimnik]

#NewRule: Liberal States' Rights | #RealTime with Bill Maher (HBO). The most brilliant #NewRules ever. OMG!!!

[secularsasquatch]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Hitler Bad. Islamism Complicated.

The cowardice and confusion of our progressive elites endanger us all.

By: Frederick Alexander

Published: Dec 21, 2025

If a fundamentalist Christian or a radical Hindu massacred a group of innocent civilians, would the first instinct of politicians be to protect churches or temples? Of course not. The ideology would be named and condemned. Apologists for religiously inspired terror would be sidelined and treated as morally adjacent.

So why, when the violence is inspired by political Islam, is the reflex always to protect mosques, draft laws on “Islamophobia”, and resurrect the looming threat of the “far right”?

It’s because Western liberalism has been captured and deformed by a progressive ideology that treats plain speaking about political Islam as the cardinal sin. To judge is to imply hierarchy; to imply hierarchy is to admit that liberal values might be superior – something now utterly taboo and status-destroying among those with institutional and cultural power. This doctrine is so internalised among the progressive class that it functions like a substitute religion. Naturally, it’s ruthlessly exploited by our enemies.

In theory, liberalism is perfectly capable of moral discrimination. It emerged from the Enlightenment precisely to allow members of society to assess competing beliefs, criticise some, adopt others and, through arguments and persuasion, reject those beliefs that seek to undermine these same rights. It assumes that ideas matter, that some are better than others, and that individuals have the right – indeed the duty – to defend the conditions that make liberty possible.

Progressivism has gradually and almost imperceptibly rewritten that agreement. In its current form, it treats all cultures as morally equivalent, while moral judgement is almost exclusively reserved for the West. The result is a ruling class that no longer understands what liberal principles are for and has lost the language to say that certain belief systems are not merely inferior but incompatible with a liberal society.

Islamism isn’t morally complicated, any more than fascism is. What’s complicated is the West’s refusal to judge it.

This strange development – to see Western culture as uniquely guilty, and therefore uniquely undeserving of defence – is one of the great moral errors of our time.

It’s an intellectual failure as much as a moral one. Western liberal societies are increasingly governed by people with only the most basic understanding of the civilisation they have been entrusted to protect. Beyond the crudest moral shorthand – Hitler bad, tolerance good – their grasp of history, philosophy and our cultural inheritance is alarmingly shallow.

How many senior civil servants in the UK could explain what the Magna Carta actually constrained? Who among our governing class has heard of John Stuart Mill or could say what the Enlightenment was about? Could any articulate how Christianity shaped Western ideas of rights, duty, and human dignity? These are not pub-quiz questions. They are foundational to the order our leaders are meant to protect.

Instead we are served by a managerial class reading from a competence worksheet put together by McKinsey. They mistake box-ticking for wisdom and DEI protocols for moral precepts. Intellectually incurious and historically illiterate, our leaders imagine that what matters above all else is process, media training and fluency in the language of risk management. These are technocrats presiding over institutions whose moral and cultural logic would baffle them if they bothered to look into it.

It’s this combination of ignorance and hubris – ignorance of what liberal civilisation is, hubris about their right to redesign it – that makes the progressive ruling class so censorious, brittle and profoundly unlikeable.

For decades now, Western institutions have treated certain belief systems as exempt from serious scrutiny, provided they arrive under the banner of cultural sensitivity. Political correctness turns ideological critique into a moral transgression and disagreement into bigotry. Once that move is accepted – through decades of institutional messaging from universities, NGOs, and diversity consultancies – the public conversation becomes fraught with anxiety and policed by busybodies who derive enormous satisfaction from others’ breach of etiquette.

Language above all is where these distortions play out, and there’s no better example than with the charge of “Islamophobia”. The word functions like a magic incantation. Emotionally charged and strategically deployed, it collapses distinctions between people and ideas, specifically between Muslims as people and Islam as a system of beliefs. To be accused of “Islamophobia” is to be excommunicated from the cultural establishment and made a pariah from polite company. The substance of the argument is irrelevant.

Crucially, the term “Islamophobia” doesn’t exist to protect Muslims from violence or discrimination (a legitimate concern), but to insulate a set of ideas from scrutiny. And because progressive elites have made non-judgement a moral absolute, the tactic works, promising moral purity, high status and – as we are all now very tired of seeing – the opportunity to signal virtue.

Many of our current cultural problems stem from this same pathology. Identity narcissism, cancel culture, a far-right backlash and, above all, the persistent threat of Islamism – all of them are enabled by progressive ideology and its attendant moral confusion.

Breaking the spell doesn’t require hostility to Muslims. It means recovering moral clarity and being willing to say that liberal societies are worth defending, that some values are non-negotiable, and that not all belief systems are compatible with freedom of speech, equality before the law, or the right to leave one’s religion without fear.

Until our elites are willing to understand and defend these foundational liberal principles – rather than their progressive distortions – the enemies of civilisation, and the useful idiots who enable them, will remain an existential threat to our way of life.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal Just Declared Classical Liberalism Incoherent

When a foundational political philosophy is dismissed while activist EDI is treated as neutral, the system is no longer protecting rights.

By: Lisa Bildy

Published: May 12, 2026

Does anyone understand what “classical liberalism” is anymore? The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal certainly doesn’t. Last month, it tossed out a complaint filed by a former political science professor against Simon Fraser University. He argued that he was passed over for a tenure-track position because his classical liberal beliefs did not align with the university’s demand for ideological conformity to equity, diversity & inclusion (EDI). His case didn’t even get past the gatekeeping stage. Four years after his complaint was filed, the tribunal ruled, without a hearing, that his beliefs were not grounded in a cohesive and recognized political philosophy and that there was no reasonable prospect of success.

This is the philosophy that shaped the modern West. But it’s apparently not one that the tribunal, or SFU, recognizes.

According to the decision, issued on April 15 but released publicly on May 7, Dr. Joshua Gordon’s early research focused on the sort of class-based concerns for social justice that used to preoccupy the political left: affordable housing for the working poor, the role of labour unions in building a robust welfare state, and so on. But that’s not what passes for acceptable research in today’s academic environment: ‘activist EDI’ requires the use of critical‑theory frameworks that sort people into identity groups and demand adjusted outcomes based on group hierarchy rather than individual merit or economic class. In a pluralistic society like Canada’s, this sort of thinking is corrosive.

In setting out the parties’ positions, tribunal member Devyn Cousineau noted that Dr. Gordon “describes himself as a ‘classical liberal’, who supports ‘mild EDI’, meaning ‘a liberal commitment to eliminating overt forms of discrimination and systemic barriers.’” That was the sole mention of classical liberalism in the entire decision. She could not properly characterize Gordon’s opposition to ‘activist EDI’ as classical liberalism – a coherent political tradition with centuries of scholarship – because she appeared to have no conception of it.

Perhaps that’s not surprising. Universities have spent decades marinating students in identity-based theories, and those graduates now populate the institutions that shape public meaning: media, law, education, and the public service. Meanwhile, Marxist educator Paulo Freire’s revolutionary “praxis,” drawn from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has seeped into K–12 education, mobilizing students to view and transform society through the lens of oppression. Classical liberalism, seen by the critical theorists as an ‘oppressor ideology,’ is no longer on the syllabus.

Classical liberalism emerged during the Enlightenment as a political philosophy centred on individual rights, freedom of conscience and expression, equality before the law, and limits on state power. Drawing on earlier traditions of rational inquiry and constitutionalism, it dismantled hereditary privilege and group‑based legal hierarchies by insisting that each person possesses inherent dignity and must be treated as a rights‑bearing individual. It is the only political philosophy that treats the right to free speech as inviolable. These principles became foundational to modern Western institutions and offered a way to restrain our tribal impulses by grounding political order in universal legal equality rather than in the claims of groups or castes.

But group rights are all the rage today, and along with them an intolerance for any expression to the contrary. Despite Dr. Gordon’s strong teaching evaluations, his “responses with respect to EDI” were deemed insufficient by the activist Faculty Group – five faculty members who opposed his appointment and held enough votes to sink it. Their concern? Gordon’s statement indicated that he treated people equally, without regard to race, gender, or sexual orientation. That is no longer acceptable. Under activist EDI, one must not treat people equally; one must treat them unequally, according to a shifting hierarchy of “marginalized” identities.

This hierarchy is unstable and often incoherent. Gay men who do not identify as “queer,” or non-white individuals who hold conservative or classical liberal views, can find themselves reclassified as “oppressors.” The logic is political, not principled.

Critical theory rejects the core assumptions of the classical liberal legal order: equality before the law, individual rights, and Enlightenment rationalism. Within this framework, disagreement is treated as harm, and dissenters are viewed not as interlocutors but as obstacles to justice. The result is an ideology that cannot tolerate dissent and that must correct, exclude or sanction those who reject its premises.

Gordon’s affidavit described his worldview as prioritizing equality over equity, colour-blindness, individualism over group rights, and open inquiry over ideological policing. That political worldview has a name – classical liberalism. But according to Cousineau, it lacks “the necessary cohesion and cogency” to qualify as a protected political belief under s. 13 of the Code.

Interestingly, she concluded that the activist EDI orthodoxy embraced by the Faculty Group is not a cohesive political belief either. When an ideology becomes so pervasive that it is simply “the water everyone swims in,” its political nature can become invisible to those enforcing it. When everything is political, nothing is.

I have argued in the National Post that human rights tribunals across Canada have outlived their usefulness. This case is yet another example of institutions that no longer defend rights but instead enforce ideological conformity. How many more examples do we need?

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

A Defense of Disagreeability

Liberalism is Not Relativism

By: Helen Pluckrose

Published: May 9, 2026

I am not sure why someone’s religion matters as long as someone’s personal beliefs are not imposed on others.

This comment was made to me by one of my readers who has always expressed her commitment to liberalism very strongly. She is a staunch defender of individual liberty. She does, however, tend to disapprove of me criticising other people’s deeply held beliefs. She is not alone on this. At least once a month, I am asked why, if I am such a strong defender of freedom of belief, I cannot just leave other people’s beliefs alone. I think this misses a core feature of liberalism.

Liberalism is, at root, the commitment to letting people believe, speak and live as they see fit provided this does no material harm to anybody else nor denies them the same freedoms. It is a commitment to individual liberty which requires allowing other people to be wrong.

This can lead some people to believe that a commitment to liberalism is a commitment to moral or epistemological relativism - everybody having their own factual truths and ethical principles which must all be respected as equally valid. This is false. One can be a relativist and uphold the central liberal principle of leaving other people alone unless they are harming anyone or imposing their values on them, but relativism is not part of the liberal philosophical tradition.

Liberalism, emerging from the Enlightenment, is rooted in a tradition that values evidence, reason and robust debate. To see this clearly, it helps to separate two core commitments within liberal philosophy:

1) The right to believe, speak and live as one sees fit provided it harms nobody else nor denies them the same freedom.

2) The idea that beliefs matter, that some ideas are better than others and that we can determine which these are through a marketplace of ideas in which bad ideas can be beaten by better ones.

These are not at all incompatible. They are, in fact, mutually reinforcing. This is, arguably, set out most clearly by John Stuart Mill in Chapter Two of On Liberty. Mill first argues that any attempts to control the expression of ideas is an assault on individual liberty:

I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

He then explains why this matters for truth:

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Liberalism protects the expression of even widely rejected ideas not only as a matter of liberty, but because without this protection, truth and falsity are decided by whichever orthodoxy is dominant at the time. Individuals are denied the opportunity to evaluate ideas for themselves, tested against their strongest opposition.

If an idea is wrong, allowing it to be expressed and challenged publicly is the best way to demonstrate that it is wrong. If it is suppressed, all that is established is that those in power dislike it. This can increase its appeal, particularly when those in power are unpopular or distrusted by large swathes of the population. Driven underground, the ideas are insulated from criticism and grow more extreme in unchallenged communities. This is a breeding ground for bad ideas.

If an idea widely held to be wrong is actually correct, enabling people to argue for it publicly and address criticisms of it publicly is the best way for it to be shown to be correct. Allowing people to be wrong is a precondition for discovering what is true.

For this reason, we should be wary of any authority or movement that seeks to shield its ideas from criticism. Either it lacks confidence that its ideas can withstand scrutiny, or it lacks respect for individuals’ capacity to judge for themselves.

These are foundational principles of the liberal philosophical tradition and moral or epistemological relativism play no part in them. If beliefs did not matter and truth were relative, we would lose a primary liberal reason to defend free speech or open debate. Liberalism works because it combines individual liberty with a commitment to truth-seeking.

The claim that liberalism entails relativism is often made by authoritarians who cannot understand how one might believe some ideas are bad without seeking to ban them. If we cannot persuade them of the intrinsic value of liberty, we may at least persuade them that suppressing ideas is unlikely to eliminate them and likely to strengthen them.

More interesting, however, is the opposite mistake. Some anti-authoritarians, deeply committed to individual liberty, conclude that liberalism requires refraining from criticising others’ beliefs altogether. They believe that liberalism should embrace relativism and that not doing so is intolerant and thus illiberal. They feel that, unless somebody is imposing their views on other people, it is presumptuous, interfering or even authoritarian to tell someone we think their belief is false. This is claimed to be at odds with the ‘live and let live’ ethos of liberalism and is often criticised in a tone of “Can’t we all just get along?”

Where drives this stance? In some cases, it reflects a genuinely relativist position: the belief that objective truth either does not exist or cannot be known. This is a Counter-Enlightenment stance held by a tiny subset of liberals, interestingly most commonly found among libertarians. (Those who want to see what a libertarian postmodernist looks like might be interested in my friendly conversation with Thaddeus Russell).

More commonly, in my observation, disapproval of criticising others’ sincerely held beliefs comes from an epistemologically woolly humanitarian stance underlain by what Moral Foundations Theory identifies as the ‘care/harm’ foundation. This moral driver is more pronounced in progressives and works by considering, first and foremost, what makes people feel included, cared about and protected from hurt. While this can manifest in authoritarian ways, such as the censoriousness of the Critical Social Justice movement, it can also exist in the non-authoritarian way of simply believing that it is unkind or intrusive to criticise other people’s beliefs and kind and considerate to respect them.

Jonathan Rauch offers a useful taxonomy of principles for discerning what is true which is relevant here:

• The Fundamentalist Principle: Those who know the truth should decide who is right. • The Simple Egalitarian Principle: All sincere persons’ beliefs have equal claims to respect. • The Radical Egalitarian Principle: Like the simple egalitarian principle, but the beliefs of persons in historically oppressed classes or groups get special consideration. • The Humanitarian Principle: Any of the above, but with the condition that the first priority be to cause no hurt. • The Liberal Principle: Checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right.

The Simple Egalitarian Principle combined with the Humanitarian Principle is, I believe, what best explains most incidences of anti-authoritarians expressing disapproval of liberals (or anyone) criticising the sincerely held beliefs of other people. The Simple Egalitarian Principle constitutes the epistemological base but the moral driver for taking that stance is the Humanitarian Principle to cause no hurt. In Rauch’s view, the humanitarian principle can work in tandem with any of the other principles except the liberal one to establish truth via public criticism. Truth-seeking is inevitably painful. It is also, however, important.

Why is the truth important? Consider the statement which inspired me to write this piece. “I am not sure why someone’s religion matters as long as someone’s personal beliefs are not imposed on others.” I would suggest this relies upon inherently atheistic assumptions. Religions make claims not only about how we should live in this life and treat other people but also about how to achieve eternal salvation and avoid eternal torment. That does seem like a rather important thing not to be wrong about! If you understand that someone might carefully research a pension plan to ensure that their final years are comfortable, you should understand why they’d pay at least as much attention to their eternity. People who don’t think it matters whether the claims of any religion are true or not tend not to believe that any religions are true.

Religious believers frequently think other people’s religious beliefs matter. For example, a Christian might answer my reader’s question with, “Because Christ is the way to salvation.” It would not be reasonable to expect someone who believes there is one path to salvation and cares about their fellow humans to accept that it does not matter if they take it or not. We just require them not to badger them about it and to leave them alone if asked to do so. Likewise some atheists believe not only that the claims of religion are false and that this matters but that many religious beliefs are harmful and that the world would be a better place if people stopped believing they know what the divine creator of it wanted. (I am one of these.)

Both of these sets of people are likely to object to the claim that it should not matter what other people believe provided they do not impose it on anybody else and respond that caring about this is part of caring about other people. They would likely raise the issue of harm that can result from holding false beliefs. This applies much more broadly than religion and has recently most prominently been argued in relation to the concept of gender identity, antisemitic conspiracy theories and science-denialism in the realm of health.

It can be convincingly argued that people believing things that aren’t true is harmful to society which functions better and more ethically when more people’s beliefs correspond with reality. False beliefs frequently result in misguided actions that harm the actor and potentially others too. Unchallenged false beliefs can be taken at face value by others who are then wronged by having been misled. Also, people holding false beliefs in a non-authoritarian, harmless way still contribute to normalising those beliefs and making them more popular, increasing the number of people who will act on them in authoritarian and harmful ways.

Because the central tenet of liberalism is that only the prevention of harm to others justifies coercion, it has been essential to maintain a very high bar for what constitutes harm and keep it to that which is both material and direct. It cannot include the expression of subversive and/or false beliefs even when the vast majority of people would agree that their spread is being/would be detrimental to society and human wellbeing. As discussed above, this not only denies individual liberty but is unlikely to effectively reduce the popularity of the ideas. Also, occasionally, the purveyors of ideas considered subversive are right. The way to effectively demonstrate that this is not the case and defeat the bad ideas is to facilitate a culture which is positive towards robust and vigorous public criticism of all by all.

However, I would suggest that we don’t even need the justification of preventing potential harm or the pragmatic argument that knowing what is true enables effective action to defend criticising the deeply held beliefs of others. It is legitimate to care about truth for its own sake. It is legitimate to care about how we determine what is true, put energies into discovering what is true, remain committed to testing what we believe to be true and to make sound, reasoned and evidenced arguments for what we believe to be true and address criticisms and counterviews. It is legitimate to enjoy this. For many, the pursuit of truth is not merely instrumental but is a value in itself, and often a source of intellectual pleasure. Arguing, testing ideas, refining beliefs are not experienced as aggression, but as highly enjoyable and, yes, respectful engagement.

I have argued before against the belief that it is respectful and considerate to validate everybody else’s beliefs and feelings and refrain from pointing out when you think they are wrong or unwarranted. This, to me, feels very much like humouring people and to be condescending and disrespectful. I would much prefer people to assume me to be someone who cares about what is true and, if I am wrong about something, to be given the opportunity to stop being wrong.

It is, nevertheless, clearly true that many people do not enjoy engaging in arguments about their own beliefs or anybody else’s. They may be less interested in addressing questions of truth, more conflict-averse, or simply occupied with other priorities. Far from experiencing argument as enjoyable, they may experience it as intrusive or hostile. They would prefer to go through their lives not questioning anybody else’s deeply held beliefs or defending their own. This is a perfectly valid preference. It seems likely that both dispositions are part of human variation and consequently that nobody is likely to be convinced that they should enjoy engaging in vigorous debate if, in fact, they do not or that they should not enjoy this if, in fact, they do.

It is probably highly beneficial that we always have some people who want to argue stridently about matters of truth and ethics and more people who wish to do no such thing. If everybody was a dedicated arguer, daily life could become quite exhausting. If nobody was, we’d never advance any ideas or uncover any errors. How do we manage this? The simple solution would seem to be for those who want to discuss and debate ideas to do with each other and leave everybody who does not wish to do this alone. Alternatively, those of us who who wish to make arguments can do so in writing and publish essays which other people can comment on or respond to or simply ignore.

The solution is: Argumentation with consent.

A liberal society protects not only the right to express and challenge ideas, but the right to decline engagement. Written into the concept of “the marketplace of ideas” is that it is not compulsory. You may enter the market. You may leave it. You may stay at home and read a good novel or go for a walk and smell the flowers. Nobody can force you to go to the market and display your wares or buy anybody else’s. Other people, however, must remain free to do so in your absence. As I have argued before,

There are some who will not accept other people’s right to decline to argue with them or to disclose their stance on any issue or even consider the possibility that they may not have a stance. They will accuse others of being evasive and hiding their true position which is assumed to be problematic. They may insist that not taking a stance on their particular pet issue is a dereliction of duty or even that ‘Silence is violence.” Silence, however, is not violence and such people are illiberal ideologues who are failing to appreciate the principle of free speech which includes the freedom to remain silent and to ignore the speech of others.

There are also the ‘debate me, bro’ types who erroneously think that if anybody expresses a belief, they then have the responsibility to defend it with evidence and argument. This is not the case. The burden of proof only applies if you are trying to prove something in a debate situation. If you are not, you can just mention that you believe something and leave it there. The fact that you have mentioned being, say, a Christian or an atheist does not commit you to proving that God does or does not exist to anybody else. If anyone asks you to do so, you can say, “But I don’t care whether you believe me or not” and go away.

We must protect the right of people who do not want to argue not to have to do so and also make this a perfectly socially acceptable stance to take and not badger them into doing anything they don’t want to do. All we can ask of anti-authoritarians who do not want to engage in a debate on any issue is that they do not stand in the way of others who do. Provided those of us who do consider truth-seeking important and who do find argument intellectually stimulating are doing this with others who have consented to join in collaborative truth-seeking and productive debate, this is a perfectly liberal activity. In fact, liberalism exists precisely to make this possible.