Jewish professor explains religions differences

The NY Times explains:

I’d say there are two characteristics that set most forms of Judaism apart from Christianity and Islam. First, whereas Christianity and Islam imagine themselves as universal religions, Judaism is usually imagined as a religion for a specific people, for Jews. ...

Second, in comparison to Christianity and Islam, Judaism places less of a stress on belief and more on practice. ... Most Jewish movements are concerned not with what you believe about God, but with how the tradition informs your life: how you pray and celebrate the holidays; how you conduct your family or business affairs; what you eat and so on.

In short, Jews are tribalist and have no spiritual beliefs.

These differences are so huge that it is hard to see what anyone could mean by "Judeo-Christian". The term used to refer to Jews who had converted to Christianity, but is now used as if Jews and Christians believe the same things. They do not.

There are many other large differences as well. I just give these, as they are from a Jewish source. Other differences are apparent from Hollywood movies, or Jewish voting patterns.

Plan to replace the white European race

A Dutch politician said this:

the European Union was setting up ferry services “to transfer immigrants from Africa to Europe, to weaken national identities so that there will be no more nation-states.”

A court just ruled that it was correctly summarized as:

“Thierry Baudet caused a stir in the House of Representatives last week by saying that he thinks the EU has a preconceived plan to replace the white European race with African immigrants,” TV presenter Natalie Righton said a month ago on the Sunday afternoon program “Buitenhof.”

Baudet sued, but:

On Wednesday, the Lelystad-based Central Netherlands Court agreed that although Righton had used three words Baudet had not – “white,” “race,” and “replace” – the sentiment was similar, both to what Baudet said during that debate and also in other statements.

Really? So if someone complaints about transferring in African migrants, that is just the same as complaining about the plan to replace the white European race.

After all, why else would those African migrants be imported, except as part of a plan to replace the White race? This court is essentially saying that is the only reason. Okay, noted.

Media doing more harm than good

Rawstory.com reports:

One of the first deaths in Virginia from coronavirus was a 66-year-old Christian “musical evangelist” who fell ill while on a trip to New Orleans with his wife. As the Friendly Atheist’s Bo Gardiner points out, Landon Spradlin had previously shared opinions that the pandemic was the result of “mass hysteria” from the media.

On March 13, Spradlin shared a misleading meme that compared coronavirus deaths to swine flu deaths and suggested the media is using the pandemic to hurt Trump. In the comments, Spradlin acknowledged that the outbreak is a “real issue,” but added that he believes “the media is pumping out fear and doing more harm than good”

“It will come and it will go,” he wrote.

I guess we are supposed to laugh at how stupid he was.

He is dead, but he was also essentially correct. We are living in mass hysteria. That is why the stores lack toilet paper.

When this crisis is over, we can have a rational discussion about whether the public overreacted or underreacted to the Wuhan virus. My gut feeling is that officials have exaggerated the threat, and that the cure was worse than the disease. We shall soon see, as the New York city gets overloaded with cases. But the disease has run its course in China, and they only had about 3000 deaths from it.

It seems clear now that the govt overreacted to the 9-11-2001 crisis, and probably also the 2008 investment banking crisis.

Site attacks neo-Nazi attitude towards women

I think I found the most misogynistic site on the net. Consider this:

Women do not like soft, pathetic men who treat them as equals. Women like being under the control of strong and dominant men. The feminization of white men, through this program of feminism, is why so many European women have chosen to start dating blacks and Arabs.

They will tell you this themselves.

All women prefer masculine men. The exception is women who are in their late twenties and have lost their sex appeal and single mothers. Those women are simply looking for a man to feed off of, and to control. Many feminist neo-Nazis will actually tell men to marry single mothers, because that fits into their “respect overload” philosophical paradigm.

However, if you are interested in attractive and fertile young women, respecting women harder is not going to get you there. Even if you are uniquely handsome, if you treat women as equals, they will still view you as weak, and exploit and abuse you.

The defining aspect of masculinity is the ability to control a situation. That goes beyond intelligence or physical strength, though it is often represented by one or the other or a combination of the two. There is no place for the gynocentrism of viewing women as sacred in a masculine identity.

Only a weak man is capable of having respect for women. Women are stupid, physically weak, incompetent and utterly amoral. Respecting that sort of a creature is something only a pathetic individual would do.

And this:

Women are Vile and Disgusting

What neo-Nazis don’t understand, due to their lack of sexual experience, is that women are disgusting and savage animals. Their lack of sexual experience should be a virtue, and something they are proud of, as being “sexually accomplished” is still this stupid boomer meme. Instead, these neo-Nazis speak on something they clearly know nothing about. I’m sure some of them have had sex before, in stupid casual situations, or with girlfriends. Some of them may even have been married. But they have never seen the depths of female depravity, which is why they are able to maintain the illusion of female purity.

Here’s the truth about what is considered “good sex” for a woman: every single woman just wants to be slapped and choked during sex. That is what women crave more than anything. That is what she will compliment you on, that is what will make her obsessed with you and keep texting you compulsively afterward. I’ve even heard tell that literal hookers will ask you to choke them, if you’re a muscly and aloof young guy, and they want to use the opportunity of you paying them for sex to act out their own sex fantasies on you in-between business sessions with old men.

You all know that the 50 Shades of Gray trilogy topped the best selling books list for the 2010s, right?

Wow. The site trolls a lot, so I don't know how serious this is. Those Grey books really were the best selling books of the last decade, and they were almost entirely read by women who like to fantasize about being abused by a man. And they were not reading those books for the quality of the writing.

Was Freud right about anything?

Evolution professor Jerry Coyne writes:

About fifteen years ago, I decided to read Freud. After all, he was touted as one of the three greatest thinkers of our time, along with Einstein and Marx (all Jewish men), and while I found Marx boring, I could at least try to read Freud. And I did: I read a lot of Freud, including his major books on dream analysis, the psychopathology of everyday life, The Future of an Illusion, his book on jokes, his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, and many of his famous case studies, like “Little Hans” and the “Wolf Man.”

I was appalled. As a scientist, I recognized that his works were tendentious in the extreme. He wasn’t following the data, but massaging the data to conform to his preconceptions. In other words, he was ridden with confirmation bias. In fact, I couldn’t find a single idea in his works that was new (the “unconscious” had been suggested by others), and a lot of ideas that were complete crap (e.g., the Oedipus complex). In the end, I couldn’t figure out why he was regarded as such a great thinker. While psychoanalysis was touted by Freud as a “science,” there was no science in it: it was in fact the opposite of science—pseudoscience based on faith (a religion, really) and, ultimately, on Freud’s ambition to be famous.

Then I discovered that a professor named Fred Crews, once chairman of English at UC Berkeley, had devoted a lot of his writing to criticizing Freud in an objective but hard-hitting way. ...

“Statistically, it’s conceivable that a man can be as dishonest and slippery as Freud and still come up with something true,” Crews said. “I’ve tried my best to examine his theories and to ask the question: What was the empirical evidence behind them? But when you ask these questions, then you eventually just lose hope.”

The conclusion is that Freud was never right about anything.

I had a similar experience. Freud was just an obvious charlatan that it is baffling that anyone would respect him for anything. And yet they do. Not only that, but he was supposed to be "one of the three greatest thinkers of our time".

At least it has become acceptable to trash Freud in the last 30 years. But still, most of the trashing comes from non-psychologists.

One explanation for this is that other theories of the mind are also problematic. True, but not really an explanation.

The Einstein story is also interesting. He got some things right, but he got a lot wrong, and was also dishonest and slippery. He is credited for a lot of things where he deserves little or no credit. The discovery of the theory of relativity was almost entirely the work of others. I have explained this in great detail elsewhere.

So why are these three Jewish men considered the greatest thinkers? What do they even have in common?

Several things, besides all being Jewish men. All were not really religious in the usual sense, but very strongly identified with their fellow Jews. All were extreme leftists and communists. All have an army of Jewish academics worshiping them. The worship is so silly it is almost like a religious cult.

None of this is new. These guys were exposed as impostors in their lifetimes. A well-respected 1953 book attributed relativity to Poincare and Lorentz. Einstein's friends urged him to defend himself, but he had no defense. Most physicists agree that Einstein was wrong about most of what he said in the last 30 years of his life. But he is idolized anyway.

Update: I see Netflix just started streaming a biographical series on Freud.

Drug companies dependent on foreigners

USA Today op-ed:

President Trump initially kept reasonable travel restrictions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, ...

A new analysis of government data from the Cato Institute shows that eight of the major companies developing treatments and vaccines for the virus are heavily reliant on foreign workers. ...

A medical crisis is not the time to talk about stopping all legal immigrants. It’s the time for more legal skilled immigrants to help fight this virus.

So that is the Libertarian lesson from this crisis? That America should become even more dependent on China?

Why Biden will be the nominee

The NY Times reports:

Mr. Biden is also succeeding even as progressive policies such as single-payer health care, robust action on climate change and student debt cancellation continue to poll high among Democratic voters, drawing majority support in some states.

This disconnect, in which policies are popular but the candidates who advocate them are losing, has frustrated progressive groups.

It is not that complicated. First, Biden has a moderate voting record, but he has now repudiated all those positions in favor of the more "progressive" Democrat positions. He now favors open borders, LGBTQ agenda, letting blacks out of prison, tax-paid abortions, etc.

He is obviously senile, and controlled by party officials and donors. They have told their obedient members to vote for him.

Second, Sanders is a Commie, and was leading the race for the nomination until the Democrat established decided that Trump and Sanders must both be stopped at any cost.

All of a sudden, Jewish publications were all running articles on how Sanders must be stopped. Being Jewish, they know the type when they see it. They described Sanders as an incorrigible Jewish Leftist Commie who cannot be reasoned with. Electing him would be a disaster worse than Trump, they wrote.

So the fix was in. Nobody ever really liked Biden. But the power brokers had to coalesce on someone other than Sanders and Trump, and Biden was the only once available. The low-IQ Democrat voters promptly voted as instructed.

Banning price gouging is harmful

There are many press stories complaining about price gouging, but not everyone is offended by it. Read this comment:

Banning price gouging is harmful, especially in disaster scenarios. The laws of supply and demand do not change because there's a natural disaster or a pandemic.

Firstly, it destroys incentives for conservation and encourages hoarding. When people rush out to buy hand sanitizer, of course they're going to buy more than one bottle when they cost $4 each. If stores were allow to charge $10 per bottle, people would think twice about loading up.

Secondly, it reduces supply, because sellers don't have enough incentive to supply the market. And the suppliers are both the manufacturers and the people who have some stockpiled. Right now there are thousands of empty office buildings with hand sanitizer stocked in janitorial supply closets. But that supply won't get to consumers, because it's not worth it for most businesses to unload the stuff at $4/bottle. And because online marketplaces have cracked down, there isn't a good venue to sell it.

By setting a price ceiling, the law aims to prevent price exploitation, but at the cost of actually distributing goods. To put it another way, the law is saying that instead of being able to buy hand sanitizer at $20/bottle, it's better for you to *not* be able buy it at all. The price ceiling creates the shortage, and an empty shelf is like an infinite price, from the consumer point-of-view.

No one like a profiteer, but the alternative isn't that the shelves would be full. The shelves would still be empty, and other people would have cleared them out.

Because of price gouging laws, toliet paper manufacturers are refusing to expand capacity, Ebay is banning hand sanitizer sales, and people who need essential goods cannot buy them.

You know your country has too much socialism if your local store's toilet paper shelves are empty.

For most ordinary retail stores, it is easier and more profitable to just sell out the existing inventory in case of emergency demand. Trying to manage the stock in a more responsible way is just too much trouble. But price gouging laws prevent entrepreneurs from entering the market, and making products available for those who really need them.

Whites invented romance

Psychology professors have taken to calling Whites WEIRD:

In 2010, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan reported a systemic bias in conducting psychology studies with participants from "WEIRD" (western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) societies.[229][230] Although only 1/8 people worldwide live in regions that fall into the WEIRD classification, the researchers claimed that 60–90% of psychology studies are performed on participants from these areas.

In particular, the American nuclear family is considered weird to most of the world, and to most non-Whites and non-Christians.

Here is what underlies the differences:

Henrich does not express himself in these blunt terms, but for the sake of immediate clarity, his basic argument about WEIRD people is that they see themselves as individuals rather than as members of collective ingroups. Their individualism is the difference that underlies all the other differences. It is the difference that explains why WEIRD people are less attached to extended families, tribal units, religious groups and even nation states. Because WEIRD people judge others as individuals, they are willing to extend their trust to outsiders, to people from other ethnic backgrounds and nationalities. They are more inclined to be fair to outsiders, judging them on the basis of impersonal standards rather than standards that only serve the interests of their ingroup. WEIRD people are less conformist, more reliant on their own individual judgments and capacities, willing to reason about issues without following the prescribed norms and answers mandated from collective authorities. In the non-Western world, trust is circumscribed within one's ingroup rather than extended to individuals from outgroups.

The key to the individualism of WEIRD people is their lack of kinship ties. The most important norms and institutions humans have developed to regulate their social behavior revolve around kin groups, which are networks of individuals connected by blood ties, extended families and clans. Humans are born into these kin groups; their survival, identity, status and obligations within society, as well as their sense of right and wrong, who and when they should marry, where they should live, who owns the land and how property should be inherited, are determined by the norms of the kin group.

Given the importance of kinship networks in determining whether people are "normal" or WEIRD, Henrich set out to find what factors may have led to the breakdown of kinship networks in the West. His conclusion was that the Catholic Church was responsible for the "demolition" of kinship networks and the rise of WEIRD people.

The article traces these difference further back, to the Ice Age and development of agriculture:

MacDonald observes that, as members of the same Homo sapiens species, all humans have common biological adaptations, but they do "differ in degree in adaptations" depending on environments, and these differences can generate "major differences" between cultures. Under the "harsh evolutionary pressures of the Ice Age," there would have been more pressures to live in small groups and in relative social isolation, rather than to form "extended kinship networks and collectivist groups" competing in close proximity for resources. There were selective pressures for males to provision simple households or nuclear families characterized by monogamy, exogamy, and bilateral kinship, because the ecology and availability of resources could not have selected for large polygynous families. This was in contrast to Near Eastern regions with their long fertile rivers supporting "large tribal groups based on extended kinship relations". The strategy pursuit by northern Europeans was quite successful, enabling them to develop complex hunting gathering cultures during the Mesolithic era for a long time, 15,000 to 5,000, delaying the advance of farming which was slowly spreading into central and north Europe after Anatolian farmers settled in various parts of southern Europe starting 8000ybp.

Mesolithic cultures in Europe did consist of larger bands of hunter-gatherers due to their more efficient exploitation of resources and improved stone age tools, but lacking any "stable resource" that could be controlled by an extended lineage group, their residences remained seasonally occupied by relatively small families living in a state of egalitarian monogamy and without one extended family superimposing itself over the others by controlling fertile and stable land areas. In northern Europe, families "were periodically forced to split up into smaller, more family-based groups". These smaller groups were forced to interact both with related families and with "non-kin and strangers" also moving around from season to season. These interactions were not regulated by kinship norms but instead led to emphasis on "trust and maintaining a good reputation within the larger non-kinship based group".

These evolutionary selected behaviors characterized by small families, exogamous and monogamous marriages, and relations based on trust with outsiders, were the primordial ground out of which Western individualism emerged.

In the Near East complex hunting gathering societies soon evolved into agrarian villages controlled by lineage groups in charge of stable resources. I would add, as Jared Diamond observed, that most of the animals and plants susceptible to domestication were found in the Near East, which encouraged or made it easier to develop farming villages with plentiful resources controlled by the stronger kinship groups. Whereas monogamy and exogamy persisted in the West, in the East the tendency was for marrying relatives, even first cousins.

The European practice of marrying outside the extended family meant that marriage was more likely "based on personal attraction", which meant that there was selection for physical attractiveness, strength, health and personality, in contrast to the East where marriage was arranged within the extended family. Love and intimacy between wife and husband, including greater affection and nurturance of children, MacDonald observes, were a salient trait of Europeans. Whites invented romance, in contrast, for example, to Semitic marriages where marriages were intended to solidify kinship ties, arranged by elders, with love and romance having a far lesser role.

This analysis doesn't explain how much is nature, and how much is nuture. Presumably some of these difference are innate. But whether they are or not, they appear to have persisted for millennia, and are unlikely to change anytime soon.

Futility of personal action

Imagine that that there were a little fence around the entire world, made of plastic drinking straws standing side-by-side. That is, it would extend across the roughly 25k mile circumference, including the oceans.

Now suppose that you were convinced that this is stupid, ugly, and detrimental to the environment, and that you should do your part in dismantling it.

It turns out that the number of straws in such a fence is about the same as the number of people in the world. So doing your part would be to remove one straw from the fence.

Would you bother to remove your straw? No, it would be obvious that such a gesture is silly and pointless. You would have such a trivial effect on the fence that no one would even notice.

This is analogous to anyone trying to be environmentally conscious by avoiding straws, recycling newspapers, or driving an electric. It is just lunacy to think that you are doing some sort of good for the planet. At best, you are like the guy who removes one straw from the straw fence.

Feminist goals for destroying marriage

I posted before about Jewish efforts to destroy the American nuclear family, and here is a HuffPost effort to destroy traditional marriage:

28 Reasons It Pays To Have A Feminist Marriage
Don't settle for someone who thinks feminism is a dirty word. ...

6. While we’re on the subject of sex, your partner would never slut-shame you for your sexual past. Your “sex number” is no big deal. ...

8. Mansplaining is not an issue ...

9. You both know a woman’s place is anywhere she damn well pleases ...

10. Ideologically, your partner believes that the world is a better place when women are empowered. ...

11. Your partner loves your body but recognizes that the decisions you make regarding it are yours and yours alone.

12. You don’t fret about maintaining relationships with friends of the opposite sex. Your partner knows you can and should have relationships with other men and other women. ...

15. If your partner’s guy friends start badmouthing feminism, you know he’ll correct them. ...

18. If you decide to marry, you can do whatever you want with your last names. Take his surname, have him take yours, hyphenate, create a hybrid/combo last name ― it’s your call. ...

20. Phrases like “man up” or “don’t be a pussy” are off limits.

This sounds like a joke, but it is not. Note that the picture creates an image of a White man being enslaved by a non-white woman. And the wife is proud to have a history of being a slut.

Another site responds:

For men there is now little reward in marriage and children. Single men can live cheaply. A man would rather pay off a house, buy a fancy car, and get a vasectomy. He has little reason to reproduce – not economic, religious, social, or legal. A man just needs good friends. He doesn’t need to be enslaved by a modern type of marriage that would destroy his standard of life. Maybe men play video games because video games won’t nag them. Modern marriage is a bad deal for men, and it has been for quite a while. Men just don’t want to be plow horses.

Men who are aware of how badly society has decided to treat them are consciously getting out of the game. Men work hard for very little reward. Men with families are often the most boring men one can meet. A lot of men are like sheep, going dutifully off to some job so they can get away from the wife and children for a few hours. But other men have gone their own way. Why spend half a million dollars to be a slave to an ungrateful man-hating woman? Who in his right mind would want to bring a child into this world?

Hence the rise of MGTOW.

Acquitted, and sentenced for it anyway

If you are ever on a jury, there are a few things you need to know, that the judge will not tell you. You can find many of them online at the Fully Informed Jury Association .

Here is a big one, that they don't even mention.

Law site:

Trial by jury is essential to preserving liberty because it protects individuals from arbitrary use of government power by allowing the people to act independently of the state. Accordingly, upholding the people’s role in the administration of justice is foundational to upholding the purpose of this procedural guarantee.

Against this background, U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, recently introduced the Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act of 2019. The bill seeks to address the insidious practice known as acquitted conduct sentencing, wherein a judge enhances a sentence based on conduct underlying charges for which a defendant has been acquitted by a jury.

You read that correctly. Under current law, federal judges are permitted to sentence individuals based on charges for which a jury found them not guilty.

Another legal site:

“Most lawyers, as well as ordinary citizens unfamiliar with the daily procedures of criminal law administration, are astonished to learn that a person in this society may be sentenced to prison on the basis of conduct of which a jury has acquitted him, or on the basis of charges that did not result in conviction,” Yale law professor Daniel J. Freed, a sententencing expert, wrote in 1992. Almost 30 years later, last week, this lawyer was herself astonished to learn this fact.

Can that really happen? “Yes, it can,” writes Oklahoma City University law professor Barry Johnson. “In federal court and many state courts, once a defendant is convicted, under the concept of relevant conduct, the defendant’s sentence can be increased by the consideration of uncharged, dismissed, or even acquitted conduct of the defendant. … Relevant conduct allows a sentencing court to reach as far back in time as can be said to be part of the scheme, plan, or enterprise related to the defendant’s convicted offense.”

This is not just hypothetical. Harvey Weinstein was acquitted of the more serious charges, but the judge sentenced him for them anyway. The LA Times reports:

“Although this is a first conviction, this is not a first offense," Judge James Burke said in imposing the sentence.

In other words, the judge sentenced Weinstein to spend the rest of his life in prison because of accusations that were not even charged as crimes, and for charges that the jury decided to acquit.

Brooks: Nuclear Family Was a Mistake

NY Times columnist David Brooks writes in The Atlantic:

The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake

The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. ...

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

This article is about that process, and the devastation it has wrought—and about how Americans are now groping to build new kinds of family and find better ways to live. ...

Today, only a minority of American households are traditional two-parent nuclear families and only one-third of American individuals live in this kind of family. That 1950–65 window was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family. ...

But the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems—with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force—stem from that crumbling. We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back.

What to make of this? It reminds me of the Unabomber Manifesto, which starts "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." There is a popular Netflix document on the author.

David Brooks is a divorced Trump-hating Jewish man, writing for Jewish publications.

This is so strange, that I am beginning to think that there is a Jewish plot to destroy the nuclear family. The nuclear family has never been important in Jewish culture, and Commies seeking social change have often regarded the family as a huge obstacle.

Here is how Brooks wants to replace the nuclear family:

The modern chosen-family movement came to prominence in San Francisco in the 1980s among gay men and lesbians, many of whom had become estranged from their biological families and had only one another for support in coping with the trauma of the AIDS crisis. In her book, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, the anthropologist Kath Weston writes, “The families I saw gay men and lesbians creating in the Bay Area tended to have extremely fluid boundaries, not unlike kinship organization among sectors of the African-American, American Indian, and white working class.” ...

Ever since I started working on this article, a chart has been haunting me. It plots the percentage of people living alone in a country against that nation’s GDP. There’s a strong correlation. Nations where a fifth of the people live alone, like Denmark and Finland, are a lot richer than nations where almost no one lives alone, like the ones in Latin America or Africa. Rich nations have smaller households than poor nations. The average German lives in a household with 2.7 people. The average Gambian lives in a household with 13.8 people.

Really? He is haunted by Denmark being richer than Gambia?

Here is what Brooks does not mention.

The nuclear family is an invention of White Christian Northwest Europe, in the last millennium. It is popular there and in America, and not much elsewhere. It was a byproduct of the feudal system and Christianity.

Nuclear families have created the greatest civilizations. If you look at what is great in the world today, nearly all if from the cultures with nuclear families.

For the past 50 years or so, a long list of legal and social policies have served to undermine the nuclear family. Most of those bad policies are promoted by NY Times columnists, and others who come from cultures that do not appreciate the nuclear family.

These attacks on the nuclear family are attacks on Americanism.

There is no indication that Brooks understands any of these issues. Or maybe he does and he wants to destroy Americanism.

There is some online criticism of Brooks, such as here. They cite some data on advantages to the nuclear family, but they great understate the importance, and even concede some of Brooks's stupid points.

Chinese proud of exporting a deadly virus

I was not expecting this, but I am starting to hear about Chinese people who seem to think that they have a right to infect the world with a life-threatening disease.

The NY Times reports:

“I am announcing that I, along with 3 of my senior staff, are officially under self-quarantine after sustained contact at CPAC with a person who has since been hospitalized with the Wuhan Virus,” Mr. Gosar wrote on Twitter. “My office will be closed for the week.”

What followed was a torrent of online criticism that his comment was xenophobic and racist, and that attaching geography to a virus that was first detected in Wuhan, China, will lead to continued stigmatization of the Chinese. Among the critics was Representative Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, ...

Wow, Gosar is objectively describing how he is doing the responsible thing, and some Chinese politician hates him for it.

A Chinese female editor of a Chicago student newspaper writes:

As for why your message was xenophobic, it’s even more obvious: You made Chinese students feel like our trauma is unrecognized and unimportant at this school. Your message suggests that our trauma is only worthy of being the backdrop of “important” discussions like capitalism vs. socialism.

The girl being attacked merely said, "the Coronavirus won't destroy America, but Socialism will."

An especially narcissistic Chinese woman writes in a NY Times op-ed:

I turned 24 last month. The day before my birthday, I walked into a nail salon to get myself a birthday manicure. After I was seated, a nail technician walked over. She was an Asian woman in her 50s. She sat down and I smiled at her. I couldn’t see if she smiled back because she was wearing a face mask. ...

Finally, my voice cracking, I said: “I just came back from China in January. If you’re scared of me, get up and leave.” The technician went silent.

This is shockingly hateful. I refuse to believe that this is representative of Chinese Americans. I am guessing that most of them think about the same of the Wuhan China virus as I do.

Note that the targets in the above are of different races. But all stories represent news media attacks on common-sense efforts to avoid a contagious disease, and trying to recast them as racist.

Are there any limits to what the NYT will call racist?

The disease originated from sloppy handling of bats or snakes for human consumption in Wuhan China, according to reports. It is the biggest public health crisis in decades. I am surprised that people are not much more critical of the Chinese.

Indian laws against men

A men's rights site complains:

Nine gender-biased Indian laws that are unfair to men
Submitted by arindamp on Sat, 2020-03-07 12:23

There are many more such laws. It is time to change these sexist, anti-men laws and end the discrimination faced by men in Indian society. We need equality and justice for men.

1. The father of the deceased doesn't inherit property, but the mother does.
2. A boy is entitled to maintenance only till he turns 18, whereas a girl is entitled to maintenance till she gets married.
3. Only the man is prosecuted for adultery.
4. If a man has sex on the pretext of marriage and doesn't marry, it amounts to rape.
5. If a guy under 16 years of age has consensual sex with a girl of his age, he's a rapist.
6. If a woman is treated with physical or mental cruelty by her husband and his family, she can throw them behind bars.
7. According to Indian law, a man serves up to 3 years jail or a fine for sexual harassment but what about a woman?
8. Under the Special Marriage Act, only the wife can claim permanent alimony and maintenance.
9. If the death of the woman is caused by burns or bodily injury within 7 years of marriage, it's the husband's fault.

Actually, I don't know if these are unfair or not. I just post these because a lot of people assume that a country like India is misogynistic, and probably unfair to women throughout its laws and culture. Apparently not. It has lots of laws that favor women over men.

Continuing to beat the impeachment drum

The NY Times is still hammering the impeachment issue:

Yes, Impeaching Trump Was Absolutely Worth It

Five reasons that the work of Congress to hold the president accountable has left democracy and our nation stronger.

By Norman Eisen

Mr. Eisen served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment of President Trump.

Eisen is Jewish, and has previously worked for Jewish propaganda organizations.

The president’s misconduct has intensified: Having a decorated war hero and impeachment witness, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, marched out of the White House, together with his equally blameless twin brother;

The Vindmans are Jewish also. Is there a pattern here? Eisen says it is misconduct to fire Jews who are openly hostile to administration policy.

I know the gravity of the word alone: impeachment. It is a permanent mark on Mr. Trump and his shameful presidency that will tarnish his name as long as it is remembered. It should, and I believe will, weigh in as Americans decide whether he should continue as our president.

Except that the impeachment was expunged by the Senate.

Take the swirl of events surrounding the sentencing of Roger Stone. The four federal prosecutors who withdrew from the case showed swift, admirable fealty to their principles. The judge who presided over the case, Amy Berman Jackson, and the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, Beryl Howell, also exhibited great integrity by condemning Mr. Trump’s implicit orchestration, with the court levying a tough but fair sentence of over three years.

Actually the judge specifically said in her sentencing order that she agreed with Trump that the recommendation of 7-9 years was excessive.

What's missing from his argument is any criminal conduct by the President. The impeachment was just a big argument that leftist Jews don't like Trump.

Woody Allen's autobiography is blocked

The NY Times reports:

Hachette Book Group on Friday dropped its plans to publish Woody Allen’s autobiography and said it would return all rights to the author, a day after its employees protested its deal with the filmmaker. ...

The journalist Ronan Farrow, whose book “Catch and Kill” was published by another Hachette imprint, criticized Hachette in an email exchange earlier this week, calling its decision to publish Mr. Allen’s book a betrayal. ...

Mr. Farrow, whose reporting on accusations of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men helped touch off the #MeToo movement, is Mr. Allen’s son with the actress Mia Farrow.

Among Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, and Ronan Farrow, I actually think that Woody is the least creepy.

Ronan claims to be a journalist, but he obviously has no interest telling the public multiple sides to a story, or even considering that someone might be innocent until proven guilty. He appears to have never had a sexual relationship with a woman, and does not seem to understand female attitudes and feelings at all. He makes the man guilty if the female accusation is "credible".

The idea that he would block his own father from telling his life story is just bizarre. He does not appear to have any personal grievance with his father. All of the evidence indicates that Mia made up a nasty accusation against Woody as part of a child custody dispute, and Mia's own kid says the story is completely false. Ronan does not appear to have any direct knowledge about it.

Ronan is half-Jewish, and seems to hate Jews, as some sort of weirdo daddy issue. His nastiest accusations are against Jews.

Woody has his faults, which he admits in his semi-autobiographical movies. He is also an amazingly original movie-maker.

Ronan appears to have inherited a mental illness from Mia. No one should take him seriously.

Gladwell is right about Paterno

Statistician Andrew Gelman writes:

“We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly. ... The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.” — Malcolm Gladwell, 2000.

Gladwell’s recent book got some negative reviews. No big deal. He’s the world’s leading science writer, the author of a series of best-sellers and promulgator of science-based slogans (“10,000 hours,” etc.), secure in his perch at the New Yorker, and I’d assume “review-proof” ...

I don’t know, though, if Gladwell’s reputation will fully withstand [saying "Joe Paterno essentially did nothing wrong."] ...

I’m wonder if Gladwell didn’t realize how bad it could look to make a high-profile defense of Paterno and Paterno’s bosses and not realize how. It’s not that this should make anyone think that Gladwell is evil, or that he’s soft on child molestation, or anything like that. It just shines a bright light on Gladwell’s poor judgment, his willingness to believe contrarian stories without looking into them. ...

The Paterno thing is so weird ... I haven’t been following the details. But it seems a bit much to not only excuse Paterno but the entire leadership of Penn State!

Gladwell deserves a lot of criticism for many things, but he is right about this. The Paterno story is the modern witch trial.

The whole story was wildly implausible. The central claim is that an ex-coach was criminally molesting and raping young boys at a public university, and this was generally known to many football and administration officials. No, this sort of thing does not happen in America.

And there was no solid evidence. There was never a contemporaneous complaint of a crime, or any physical evidence, or anything like that. There were about a dozen witnesses, but they all first testified that Sandusky was innocent of any crime. Years later, they found recovered memories after being offered 6-figure settlements to change their stories. The strongest witness, Mike McQueary, got $12M in awards.

What made this case big was that Penn State had deep pockets, and lawyers conspired to drain it of $100M or more.

I realize that I am in the minority on this issue, and that courts ruled against Sandusky and Penn State. To me, this is like saying the Salem witches were convicted. The story is preposterous, and the evidence was so obviously tainted by bad science and monetary bias that I don't see how any rational person could believe it.

I was going to link to a Wikipedia chart of how every witness changed his story, but editors have deleted it, and removed it from the archives. The reason given was that it put victims in a bad light.

Gelman likes to point out the moral failings of other scholars, but Gladwell has many faults to attack.

I hardly hear anyone defending Paterno et al. If Gelman is right, then any scholar would be risking his reputation to making such a defense. I guess that is why there is so little defense.

Jews try to blame the Pope

The London Guardian reports:

Critics of [Pope] Pius XII have accused him of remaining silent during the Holocaust, never publicly condemning the persecution and genocide of Jews and others. His defenders say that he quietly encouraged convents and other Catholic institutions to hide thousands of Jews, and that public criticism of the Nazis would have risked the lives of priests and nuns. ...

More than 150 people have applied to access the archives, although only 60 can be accommodated in the offices at one time. Among the first to view the documents will be representatives of the Jewish community in Rome, and scholars from Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

So Jews are plotting to force the Catholic Church into apologizing, and groveling for approval of another religion.

World War II in Europe was largely a war between the Commies and the Nazis. Neither was friendly to the Catholic Church. The Church had no military power. If the Commies were to win the war, and gain control of Europe, the result would be devastating for the Church.

The Commies were largely Jewish. When they got power in Russia, they sought to exterminate Christianity. And the Commies killed millions of people.

Even today, Jews like Bernie Sanders side with the Commies.

And now a bunch of Jews are complaining that the Pope did not side with the Commies?!

This is pretty crazy for Jews to be trying to dictate what a Catholic Pope should have said about non-Catholics.

This nation began in 1776

Quillette essay:

The United States of America began in 1776, not 1619.

That one sentence is the thesis statement of “1776”—a non-partisan black-led response to the New York Times’s “1619 Project” initiative, which launched last week at D.C.’s National Press Club. I am pleased and proud to be a part of 1776, along with founder Bob Woodson, Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, Jason Hill, Carol Swain, John Wood, Taleeb Starkes, Robert Cherry, and many others. From my perspective as a member, 1776 has three core goals: (1) rebutting some outright historical inaccuracies in the 1619 Project; (2) discussing tragedies like slavery and segregation honestly while clarifying that these were not the most important historical foundations of the United States; and (3) presenting an alternative inspirational view of the lessons of our nation’s history to Americans of all races.

What is going on here? Why would the NY Times conspire with a bunch of historians to tell such an obviously wrong view of American history?

Why is a Black-led response needed to rebut obvious lies?

Nobody wants to connect the dots here.

One possibility is that the NY Times has been secretly taken over by White supremacists. They argue that the USA has always been White supremacists, and that Blacks are inferior creatures only fit to be slaves. Maybe if we recognize that White Americans have always been destined to be slavemaster, we can return the country to a plantation economy.

Okay, I don't really know of anyone who believes that.

Another possibility is that the NY Times editors believe that Jews should run the world. They can't say that explicitly, so they put out fake news about Whites are oppressors, and Blacks and Jews are oppressed. This convinces everyone that White Christians are evil while reinforcing the master/slave view of the world. This tricks White cucks into giving up power out of guilt, and Blacks into accepting Jewish dominance.

Billionaire Tom Steyer is half-Jewish and half-Episcopalian, and he just spent $100M to convince Black voters in S. Carolina that he will pay them slavery reparations, if elected President. He got 11% of the vote, and dropped out. It sounds like the NY Times convinced that White guilt sells, that Blacks need to be reminded about slavery, and that anyone can be bought.

Why pay so much attention to the NY Times? Isn't it just Jewish Leftist propaganda?

Because it now dominates the news. Its own columnist brags:

The gulf between The Times and the rest of the industry is vast and keeps growing: The company now has more digital subscribers than The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the 250 local Gannett papers combined, according to the most recent data. And The Times employs 1,700 journalists — a huge number in an industry where total employment nationally has fallen to somewhere between 20,000 and 38,000.

The Times so dominates the news business that it has absorbed many of the people who once threatened it: The former top editors of Gawker, Recode, and Quartz are all at The Times, as are many of the reporters who first made Politico a must-read in Washington. ...

“The New York Times is going to basically be a monopoly,” predicted Jim VandeHei, the founder of Axios, which started in 2016 with plans to sell digital subscriptions but has yet to do so. “The Times will get bigger and the niche will get nichier, and nothing else will survive.”

It doesn't say how much of this success is a byproduct of catering to Jewish Trump-haters.

Psychotherapies are worthless

I have argued that psychiatry is just bogus stuff that Jews believe, and here is some evidence that the treatments are worthless.

SciAm science writer John Horgan writes:

Over the past half century, researchers have churned out countless findings about the brain, mind and mental illness. And psychologists and psychiatrists have introduced many supposedly new and improved treatments for mental distress, notably cognitive-behavioral therapy and antidepressants such as SSRIs. But research suggests that these ostensibly scientific treatments still gain most of their effectiveness from the placebo effect.

In a massive 2002 study of psychotherapies, including cognitive-behavioral therapy, a teal led by psychologist Lester Luborsky found that all are roughly as effective as each other. Studies favoring one particular therapy, Luborsky asserted, tend to show an “allegiance effect,” a prior bias of researchers toward that therapy.

Other analyses suggest that medications for mental illness, although they benefit some people in the short term, might end up hurting more people than they help. Thomas Insel, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said recently, “I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.”

Research into the brain and mind, I have argued on this blog and elsewhere, has yet to produce truly persuasive theories of and treatments for mental illness. As a recent essay in a British psychiatric journal argues, “it is still not possible to cite a single neuroscience or genetic finding that has been of use to the practicing psychiatrist in managing [mental] illnesses despite attempts to suggest the contrary.”

This failure helps explains why people still turn to Freudian psychoanalysis, although it does not stand up to scientific scrutiny, and to an even older mind-therapy, Buddhism. And it explains why many people in distress turn to astrology, tarot cards and other pseudoscientific methods. May they find the solace they seek.

So quack stuff like Freudianism and astrology is not any crazier than the mainstream methods.

For an example of a widely acclaimed psychotherapy that is worthless, see this
review of John Gottman Marital Counseling.

In the past several years, California and other states have partial banned psychotherapies to avoid homosexuality, on the grounds that testimony said that they were not effective. But if you read the testimony carefully, it never really claims that any other psychotherapy is more effective.

We also have laws saying physical and mental ailments have to be funded the same, in some ways. But we have hundreds of effective treatments for physical ailments, and none for mental ailments.

Matthews confronts Warren on believing women

Laura Bassett writes:

MSNBC host Chris Matthews, whose long history of sexist comments and behavior have somehow not yet gotten him fired, tested the boundaries of his own misogyny again on Wednesday night. After the tenth Democratic presidential debate, the Hardball anchor grilled Elizabeth Warren about one of her lines of attack against Mike Bloomberg during the debate: that a pregnant female employee accused Bloomberg of telling her to “kill it.”

“You believe he’s lying?” Matthews asked Warren of Bloomberg's denial.

“I believe the woman, which means he’s not telling the truth,” said Warren, who recently had to defend her own credible story of pregnancy discrimination.

“And why would he lie?” Matthews said. “Just to protect himself?”

“Yeah, and why would she lie?” Warren responded pointedly.

“I just wanna make sure you’re clear about this,” Matthews said. Right there on America’s purportedly liberal network, the anchor spoke to a 70-year-old United States senator who is running for president — and a renowned Harvard Law professor, no less — like she couldn’t possibly understand her own words, as if she were a child choosing between a snack now or dessert later.

It is revealing that Warren would so stubbornly accept the truth of and old and unverified accusation, and on that basis to accuse her fellow candidate of being a liar.

I have no idea whether the accusation is true or not, and I think it is foolish to argue about such a thing or to blame someone on such flimsy evidence.

If Warren is elected President, she will have to make decisions about committing acts of war based on limited evidence. Would she weigh the evidence by just always believing the woman?

Yes, women sometimes lie. Warren herself has been caught lying many times, including "her own credible story of pregnancy discrimination." Sure, it was a credible story, but it was contradicted by every other account, including the ones she told herself.

The lesson here, from Bassett and Warren, is that a woman telling a credible story should be believed.

I hope that this is not what is taught at Harvard Law School. All this gives the impression that women are incapable of understanding truth.

Mike Bloomberg has had a very public life, and his candidacy has many pros and cons based on demonstrable facts. It is crazy to make an issue about an old rumor of an inappropriate remark. He is running for President. Even if he made the tasteless remark, there are a thousand other issues that are more important.

Bassett goes on the whine about some gossip about Chris Matthews. I can believe that he has made some inappropriate remarks, as he says a lot of dumb things on the air. But who cares? He was just asking Warren to explain her peculiar opinions.

Update: March 2 was Matthews' last day on the air. It appears that he was forced into retirement, as a result of some of these remarks. I do not agree with terminating him for this.