Yay, thank you anon--I’m glad that section had its intended effect! >:)

Think of thoret as Blest’s kryptonite for Diminished: it works pretty much the same way (from what I remember of kryptonite). It doesn’t need to be directly touching a Diminished person to have an effect on them, but touching it directly does often burn the victim. But just being in proximity with it can sap a Diminished person’s powers, weaken them, or make them ill (like radioactive material). Notably, it has this effect on all Diminished Gifts, including magic, arma, and grace. Elves don’t lose their long lifespans necessarily, but their thinking and speech becomes garbled and confused, they became slow and clumsy, and at times they even fall into a coma.

These effects aren’t permanent, and when you take thoret away, the Diminished person will always recover their powers slowly--like a limb that’s gone asleep slowly waking up again, little by little. 

But you’d think this would absolutely nerf Diminished people: why wouldn’t the Autarchy make bullets out of it? Or swords? But thoret is exceedingly rare (well... until you... you know...) and prior to this, the only known objects made of it were the Seven Manacles of the God-king Shabarat (no one really calls them this anymore, it’s like a fairytale name), all of which are in possession of the Autarchy. (Also, for thoret to have its intended effect in the form of a manacle, say, it must be forged from PURE thoret--nothing else, or else that Mage or Ket or Elf is going to find a way out of it.) 

There are RUMORS that the Autarch wears a secret amulet of thoret around her neck, but these are unconfirmed and unverified stories, likely made up to explain her immunity against Diminished assassins and to deter certain rebels from making an attempt. If it were true, an amulet would protect her from, say, being enchanted to walk off a balcony, or spied on, but the spells and wards of her Court Mages could also prevent this. 

Finally, it should be noted that thoret doesn’t have any known effect on Norms whatsoever! There are a few things in the world like this, like the plant witch’s bane, which is poisonous to Mages but no one else, but it only serves to reinforce the division between the Norms and the Diminished. 

The idea is that a convincing liberalism should be free of any taint of hypocrisy. The liberal is disingenuous if he is not at the same time rigidly anti-racist and rigidly anti-censorship. But the demand that liberalism be free of any taint of hypocrisy can only logically be made by those who are themselves fanatically strict liberals. This is of course impossible: the very idea of such a liberal is an oxymoron. And that's what disconcerts liberalism's critics.

If liberals are all about tack and trim -- as Holbo says, 'a healthy liberal is one who dialectically tacks and trims, in pursuit of liberty, btween extremes of illiberal arch-rationalism and anti-rationalism' -- their opponents' concern is to deny them their recourse to talk of absolutes and ideals. But isn't it the whole point of the liberal's project to disembarrass us of the divine validation we formerly claimed for our most cherished beliefs?

Can the liberal ground his talk of ideals at all? I think he can: he can do so as effectively as any of his antagonists. And how? This he doesn't state explicitly, but shows in what he does. He grounds it in an assertion of the nothingness of the divine. This is an assertion he is never done making -- but so what if he must repeat it to make it secure? The liberal is nothing without his extinct God, the God he invokes whenever he denies God, and proclaims the purposelessness of things. It has as much of a presence in his life as the vengeful deity has in the life of the evangelical.