Oh Who Is That Young Sinner with the Handcuffs on his Wrists?

There is nothing new under the sun. As soon as one kind of oppression ends we get another of a different flavor. So we might as well recycle the old masters of oppositional poetry as well. A.E. Housman wrote this about Oscar Wilde over a century ago, and it just as easily applies today to droves of men who are dragged to prison for something equally harmless as the color of their hair:

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?

And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?

And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?

Oh they're taking him to prison for the color of his hair.

'Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;

In the good old time 'twas hanging for the color that it is;

Though hanging isn't bad enough and flaying would be fair

For the nameless and abominable color of his hair.

Oh a deal of pains he's taken and a pretty price he's paid

To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;

But they've pulled the beggar's hat off for the world to see and stare,

And they're taking him to justice for the color of his hair.

Now 'tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet,

And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,

And between his spells of labor in the time he has to spare

He can curse the God that made him for the color of his hair.

I say don't curse God or your nature, curse society and its laws. But no one wants to do that. So we are left with a movement that only exists in my imagination. Even though these words are truer today -- that "'Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his; In the good old time 'twas hanging for the color that it is" -- because now the human nature that is a "shame" has expanded to literally all of it unless we pretend to believe that sexuality only properly begins at 18 (except it's always "rape" then too under feminist laws), and that good old time when it could be practiced at least relatively freely was just a few decades ago!

Adult homosexuality has been liberated, it is true (at least temporarily until feminists get around to criminalizing all of sexuality again). Which provides a case in point as to what happens when something that was formerly seen as very important to punish severely is decriminalized. To a keen observer like me, we got some rainbow-colored flags in our vicinity and that's it. I can attest that it's not the slightest bit enticing to those who wouldn't be into it anyway in the height of oppression, as I've been told it's wonderful to be gay all my life and never had any interest. Now, the trans movement is a slightly different story as it involves mutilation that some transitioners these days sorely regret, but that was perpetrated by the medical establishment rather than people just being free to do as they please, and I don't think they would have gone that far by themselves. I think that's how it goes for all sexual practices that do not involve violence: the moralists are flatly wrong that it leads to dire consequences like social collapse or whatever if we don't punish the "deviants."

When Housman says it's oakum for Oscar Wilde's fingers and the treadmill for his feet, he means that literally. Of course, it is complete nonsense that sex offenders can be "cured" or "reformed" now either. We remain what we are just like you can't change your natural hair color. To elaborate on the impossibility of "curing" sex offenders, homosexuals or heterosexuals alike, I want to quote at length another masterful homosexual writer who said it better than I can, namely Mike Darwin:

These [insights] were the combined work of myself and an archetypical sociopath; a convicted felon and an avowed child sexual predator. They are the distilled result of many hours of discussion between the two of us and a number of different sociopathic personalities about whether such "rewiring" or "reconfiguration" of an individual's personality would be either acceptable to the individual, or would constitute the survival of the individual. There was not just virtual unanimity that such re-engineering would constitute destruction of the person; there was absolute unanimity.

 So, to be clear (and perhaps I should have been clearer) this is not (primarily) my opinion, it is the opinion of the person's most concerned. I have read much of what Oscar Wilde has written (including most of his Yellowbook essays), his published personal correspondence and many books about his life and his internment at Reading Gaol, where he spent his days pulling oakum, treading the barrel and turning the crank. These were miserable and debilitating activities that went on for 10 hours a for years on end (so-called hard labor).

In Wilde's case, these behaviors were prescribed for the purpose of rehabilitating his homosexuality. Not only did they fail, they caused Wilde to reflect deeply on to what extent his homosexuality was an integral part of who he was as person. Most people never consider in what way common elements of their behavior and "personality", for lack of better words, are critical to their personhood. Wilde's homosexuality unarguably shaped almost every aspect of his life, work and art, as well as his dress, aesthetics and social interactions (apart from his discrete sexual behavior). To cure Wilde of homosexuality, as opposed to his homosexual behavior -- and these are two very different things -- would be something that Wilde himself would have rejected as incompatible with who he was as a person.

 Perhaps an even better example is that of the creator of modern computer science and the darling of uploaders everywhere, Alan Turing. British society and government undertook a program of neurobiological modification of Turing to ablate his homosexuality. Judging from Turing's correspondence, in this they were somewhat successful. After treatment with estrogens was discontinued Turing's sense of sexuality did not recover. He describes this in detail, including the horrible sense of depersonalization that resulted from it. This was without any doubt a major factor in his decision to kill himself, which has to be interpreted as a strong rejection of personhood. Indeed, he described the experience as having left him an incomplete person. [While not routine, the brain remodeling that occurs during intensive estrogen therapy in males does not always reverse when withdrawn.]

 It is possible to acquire "bad" or undesirable behaviors which can be subtracted by either psychiatric or neuropsychiatric means and which, far from diminishing the person, enhances him. It is also possible to mistake undesirable behaviors for add-ons to a person, rather than as central to their personhood. For the same reasons most homosexuals (in the past) never revealed their inner cognitive states and personality structures, psychopaths, contemporary and otherwise, rarely do so. It is also the case that in any human population only a few people will have the ability to adequately reflect upon who they are and to then commit it to writing in an accessible way.

 I have an extensive library on the psychology (psychopathology) of criminality, including extensive analyses of the personality structures of such individuals. However, perhaps the best book for understanding the personal identity structure of of the psychopath is The Gates of Janus, by Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer. The expanded edition has excellent and insightful material by Colin Wilson and Peter Sotos. Shortly before his death, Wilson gave a fascinating TV interview about his interaction with Brady; it was Wilson who edited and facilitated the publication of Brady's book. Wilson also agreed that the "psychopathology" was the person in the case of individuals like Brady.

 Brady is the psychopath and the psychopath is Brady. They are not separable and it is not possible to successfully treat the patient without destroying him in the process. This is NOT the opinion of the therapists, so much as it is the position of the "patients". It is easy to mistake obtaining someone's accession to being killed, as opposed to being treated, as one in the same thing. Indeed, a version of this happens when law enforcement "persuades" innocent people to confess to heinous crimes which they did not commit and it happened in medicine during the era of the prefrontal lobotomy.

 If you choose to believe that psychopaths are simply people who have acquired bad behaviors, apart from the very fabric of who they are, that is, of course, your right. If, on the other hand, you undertake to treat them on this basis, then may I suggest that you either make a will, reconcile yourself to homicide, or both.

 To recap, I'm not stating that psychopaths must not ever be rewired to make them human in the sense being human is generally understood. Rather, I am saying that psychopaths, the people actually at issue here, want no part of such a treatment. Under the current, much evolved medical paradigm, patients (people) have the right to refuse treatment -- any treatment. If you choose to redefine psychopaths as not people, as incomplete people, or as something else, well, that is another matter altogether. The fact is that right now, today, we have effective treatments that allow many people currently incarcerated under dismal conditions to safely (for the rest of us) reenter the community. The thing is, these people do not wish to accept such treatments and instead "choose" to be incarcerated. I've never met a psychopath who felt otherwise. It is also the case that I've never met anyone who would accede to being rewired in such a way that they are no longer themselves. Thus, there is perfect parity here.

Yes, the integrality to personhood also applies to psychopathy, which is not to be confused with sexual orientation and though the normies may not be, I think my readers are intelligent enough to understand that no such conflation is intended by either Mike Darwin or myself.

Though thankfully not quite so personally affected yet, similarly to how forced labor caused Oscar Wilde to reflect deeply on to what extent his homosexuality was an integral part of who he was as person, the ongoing cultural oppression of heterosexuality has caused me to think deeply about what it means to be a heterosexual man. How integral our love for "underage" girls is to our sexuality, for example.

It's rare to express such thoughts today. But that's what my blog is for. For whatever reason, I have some freedom here similarly to what Housman had in his poetry in the midst of oppression. Perhaps only because it is so obscure and evidently dry and boring to the normies. But anyway, here it is, and open to comments as well about such matters you can scarcely express anywhere else.