Western origins go back to Rome and Greece

I mentioned Henrich's theory of the origin of Western individualism, and other behavioral differences from the rest of the world.

Here is another detailed criticism.

There are many issues here, such as whether European marriage customs are the result of Catholic teachings of a millennium ago, or Greek and Roman law of two millennia ago.

Obviously it was some combination.

This research came to light when universities did psychology experiments on student subjects, and then found that their results do not apply to the rest of the world.

The research is much more important than that. It goes to the heart of what made modern civilization possible. We need to figure that out, or else we might be inadvertently undermining civilization. It is also important for understanding cultures from other parts of the world.

There is also a nature-nurture issue, and these authors have only scratched the surface.

The War against Free Software

I mentioned a plot to cancel the leading advocate of free software, and the battle rages on with Mozila, Red Hat, other other big companies

pushing an open letter against him:

Richard M. Stallman, frequently known as RMS, has been a dangerous force in the free software community for a long time. ...

We, the undersigned, believe in the necessity of digital autonomy and the powerful role user freedom plays in protecting our fundamental human rights. In order to realize the promise of everything software freedom makes possible, there must be radical change within the community. ...

We cannot continue to let one person ruin the meaning of our work. Our communities have no space for people like Richard M. Stallman, ...

We are calling for the removal of the entire Board of the Free Software Foundation. These are people who have enabled and empowered RMS for years.

The attack is so vicious, and the actual offensives are so trivial, that I wonder what underlies it.

Apple, Microsoft, and other software companies have hated him for many years, because they sell software and he gives it away for years.

Mozilla claims that its software is free, but it is not really free in the way that Stallman defines the term.

But he was more of threat to him 30 years ago. Now they make money selling his free software. Why now? And why do they want to take down his whole Free Software Foundation?

Why do they say he is "dangerous"? This can oly be a reference to his ability to persuade others with his free software ideas.

I am guessing that this is partially a personal vendetta, partially a business attempt to steal the ability to define what is or is not free software, and partially a symptom of our cancel culture run amok.

A clue is that these companies are pushing "radical change". Mozilla is also the company that fired its CEO for donating a small amount to a winning ballot measure.

These companies have become extremely intolerant.

Some of those commenting on this matter say that Stallman is being blamed for his personality traits. In some cases, he is blamed for saying something rude or insensitive, and he will argue that he was just expressing a completely legitimate opinion. To some, the question is whether we should tolerate someone with a mental illness that makes him insenstive to others. I think that the people taking offense are the mentally ill ones. They should be able to deal with some ordinary opinions.

Update: Stallman has posted an apology. He admits to being "tone-deaf". That has become one of the major accusations of the modern age.

Israeli Spy Admits Dual Loyalty

Pollard claims Jews ‘will always have dual loyalty,’ whether they know it or not
Convicted spy laments US Jews see themselves as more American than Jewish, suggests he’d counsel Jew working in American security apparatus to spy for Israel even now

Jonathan Pollard, an American who served a 30-year sentence for spying for Israel and who moved to Israel in December after the end of his parole, made blunt comments on supposed Jewish dual loyalty and the FBI in an interview published Thursday.

“American Jewry has one major problem: they consider themselves more American than they do Jews,” Pollard told the Israel Hayom daily.

Asked how he felt about being accused by US Jews of having dual loyalties, Pollard did not take issue with the title. “If you don’t like the accusation of double loyalty, then go the F*** home,” he said bluntly.

“It’s as simple as that. If you live in a country where you are constantly under that charge, then you don’t belong there. You go home. You come home. If you[‘re] outside Israel, then you live in a society in which you are basically considered unreliable. The bottom line on this charge of dual loyalty is, I’m sorry, we’re Jews, and if we’re Jews, we will always have dual loyalty,” he added.

An he suggested that if asked for advice, he would counsel a young US Jew working in the American security apparatus to spy for Israel.

“I’d tell him, not doing anything is unacceptable. So simply going home [to Israel] is not acceptable. Making aliyah is not acceptable,” Pollard said. “You have to make a decision whether your concern for Israel and loyalty to Israel and loyalty to your fellow Jews is more important than your life.

“If you do nothing, and you turn your back, or simply make aliyah, and go on with your life, you’ll be no better than those Jews who before and after the destruction of the Temple said, ‘It’s not my responsibility.'”

Pollard, now 66, sold military secrets to Israel while working as a civilian intelligence analyst for the US Navy in the 1980s.

Dual loyalty is not really the right term, as he is advocating loyalty to Israel and Jews, over loyalty to America.

To be fair here, he concedes that many American Jews are loyal to America. He is now a citizen of Israel, and it doesn't bother me that he aligns with his own kind. Most of the world have some group that they identify with, and then they are loyal to that group. Jews happen to have particularly strong tribal loyalties.

I had thought that he served an extra-long sentence because he got double-crossed in his plea bargain. But the article quotes him as saying that he refused to cooperate with prosecutors, so maybe he was the one to renege on the bargain.

Men's college basketball makes money

The press has had stories all week about how women's sports suffer discrimination, but here is the college basketball story:

The NCAA Division I men’s basketball championship budget for the 2018-19 season was $28 million — almost twice as much as the women’s budget.

Information provided by the NCAA to ESPN on Friday shows the men’s tournament brought in a total net income of $864.6 million that season, while the women’s event lost $2.8 million — the largest loss of any NCAA championship.

The women's sports are probably going to get ruined by the transgender athletes anyway.

Woke White Model has Baby Boy

The famous model Emily Ratajkowski writes in Vogue magazine:

WHEN MY HUSBAND AND I tell friends that I’m pregnant, their first question after “Congratulations” is almost always “Do you know what you want?” We like to respond that we won’t know the gender until our child is 18 and that they’ll let us know then. ...

I like the idea of forcing as few gender stereotypes on my child as possible. ...

When I bring this thought to my therapist, she explains that this is relatively common. ...

I resent that his entire family’s DNA is inside of me but that my DNA is not inside him. “It just seems unfair,” I say, ...

I’m scared of having a son too, although not in the same way. I’ve known far too many white men who move through the world unaware of their privilege, and I’ve been traumatized by many of my experiences with them. And boys too; it’s shocking to realize how early young boys gain a sense of entitlement — to girls’ bodies and to the world in general. ...

My friend who is the mother to a three-year-old boy tells me that she didn’t think she cared about gender until her doctor broke the news that she was having a son. She burst into tears in her office. “And then I continued to cry for a whole month,” she says matter-of-factly. After a difficult birth experience, she developed postpartum depression and decided that she resented her husband more than she’d ever imagined possible. She told me she particularly hated — and she made an actual, physical list that she kept in her journal, editing it daily — how peacefully he slept. “There is nothing worse than the undisturbed sleep of a white man in a patriarchal world.” She shakes her head. “It was hard to come to terms with the fact that I was bringing yet another white man into the world. But now I adore him and can’t imagine it any other way.” She also eventually learned to love her husband again. The sound of his perfect sleep next to her at night is now tolerable.

She gave birth to a boy, and posted the above picture of her breastfeeding him.

She is seeing a psychotherapist, so I guess she at least recognizes that she has a mental illness. I am guessing that she has a sense of entitlement that is greater than any man I know.

Pres. Joe Biden just said:

You know, I’ve told my daughters, granddaughters from the time they got old enough to understand what I was saying — and I mean it: There’s not a single thing a man can do that a woman can’t do as well or better. Not a single thing.

Both men and women can say dopey things.

Canceling Richard Stallman

One of the most influential men in the history of computer software is Richard Stallman. Besides programs that he wrote, he figured out how copyright law could be used to force open source software, and then convinced the world. Without him, the industry might be about ten years behind where it is now.

He was canceled in 2019, and is now making a comeback.

Here is the attack:

Richard M. Stallman, frequently known as RMS, has been a dangerous force in the free software community for a long time. He has shown himself to be misogynist, ableist, and transphobic, among other serious accusations of impropriety. These sorts of beliefs have no place in the free software, digital rights, and tech communities. With his recent reinstatement to the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation, we call for the entire Board of the FSF to step down and for RMS to be removed from all leadership positions.

And here is a letter of support.

He is over-opinionated, and I disagree with a lot that he says. I think that I alienated him once, but he probably doesn't remember me.

At any rate, the gripes against him are remarkably trivial. The one that seems to have done the most damage was simply that he stood up for his deceased friend and mentor, MIT professor Marvin Minsky, against some extremely doubtful allegations. For that, I commend him.

Even if you follow all the above links, read all the backstories, and disagree with him, it is still just an opinion. Can't a man have an opinion anymore? I do not agree with these cancellations, that are so popular today. Even the EFF, which used to be a free speech advocate, is against Stallman.

Not a White Supremacist Armed Insurrection

The press keeps calling the Jan. 6 protest a white supremacist armed insurrection. It was none of those things.

Jared Taylor expains in detail:

One of the few journalists who scoffs at the “armed insurrection” tale is Glenn Greenwald. He writes: We know that “no Trump supporter fired any weapon inside the Capitol and that the FBI seized a grand total of zero firearms from those it arrested that day . ...” He adds that there were “no known cases of the rioters deliberately killing anyone,” and “no evidence anyone intended to assassinate Mike Pence, Mitt Romney or anyone else.” ...

None of these groups is “white nationalist” or has any racial orientation at all. The leader of the Proud Boys is Enrique Tarrio, a black Cuban who was in Latinos for Trump. As he says, “I’m pretty brown, I’m Cuban. There’s nothing white supremacist about me.” ...

As for the Oath Keepers, all members have had a job — mostly as peace officers or soldiers — in which they swore to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Not even the Southern Poverty Law Center can bring itself to call them “racists.” It’s leader, Elmer Rhodes, says he started the group when it occurred to him that if German soldiers and police had refused to follow orders, they could have stopped Hitler. The Three Percenters are similar to the Oath Keepers in opposing what they see as unconstitutional federal power, but with an even heavier emphasis on the Second Amendment. The group denounced the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, saying, “we will not align ourselves with any type of racist group.”

If the press didn't hate Trump so much, it would call it a mostly-peaceful pro-democracy protest.

Anyone but a Straight White Man

The Hill reports:

Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) say they will vote against President Biden's nominees amid frustration over the lack of Asian American and Pacific Islander representation and broader concerns about diversity in his Cabinet.

Hirono, who was born in Japan, and Duckworth, who was born in Thailand, are the Senate's only two currently serving Asian American senators. ...

"I am a 'no' vote, on the floor, on all non-diversity nominees. ... I will vote for racial minorities and LGBTQ but anybody else, I'm not voting for," said Duckworth, who is one of two Asian American senators.

They have temporarily dropped their threat, as Biden has promised an AAPI appointment.

This is what identity politics have become. Every group pushes for its group interests. Small groups form coalitions with other small groups. The current game is to unite non-whites and LGBTQ against Whites.

Update: After posting this, FoxNews Tucker Carlson opened with a segment on it.

The Boulder shooter is a Moslem

The press likes to go crazy with generalizations about mass shootings, so let's look at the latest one in Boulder Colorado.

Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa has been charged with ten murders. After the Sept. 11, 2001 Moslem terrorist hijackings, USA policy was to import millions of Moslems. He came to the USA from Syria as a small child. He is a Moslem.

His victims were all White folks.

Donald Trump was elected in 2016 to reduce this sort of immigration, but we are back to importing millions of refugees.

The argument is often given that immigrants can be vetted for membership in terrorist organizations, but that is obviously impossible. We welcome Moslems from countries like Syria.

The London Daily Mail reports:

Meanwhile, more social media posts from the gunman's Facebook page were released on Tuesday.

In Facebook posts over the last two years, he complained about not having a girlfriend, ranted about President Trump and talked about his Islamic faith.

He also ranted online about 'racist islamophobes' hacking his phone. ...

Another post dated for March 16, 2019, reads: 'The Muslims at the #christchurch mosque were not the victims of a single shooter. They were the victims of the entire Islamophobia industry that vilified them.'

Apparently he was partially inspired by press Trump-hatred.

Jefferson complained about the slave trade

The anti-racists want to cancel Thomas Jefferson. His sins include owning slaves, and complaining about them in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, 1776:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce ...

He was complaining about the slave trade, not slavery itself.

It is common to say that slavery was the American original sin. It was not. The sin was the slave trade.

Planning to exterminate Whites

Rod Dreher quotes:

Damon Young, a black writer for The Root, a black-oriented commentary site owned by the same people who own Jezebel, Gizmodo, and The Onion (their parent company is Univision), had this to say at The Root about the Atlanta massage parlor mass murders:

I don’t have much to add here today that hasn’t already been said.

Whiteness is a public health crisis. It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people — white people and people who are not white, my mom included. There will be people who die, in 2050, because of white supremacy-induced decisions from 1850. ...

White supremacy is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it. I guess a vaccine could work, too. But we’ve had 400 years to develop one, so I won’t hold my breath.

I am not sure about some of these. I believe that forests are expanding in White countries. White medical advances have greatly increased life expectancy.

Maybe White infest consciousness, whatever that means. And maybe they flatten dialects.

I just post this to show that extreme anti-White opinions have become increasingly acceptable in otherwise respectable publications.

Those Atlanta murders were committed by a White guy. Most Atlanta crimes are committed by Blacks.

Here is a law that actually passed:

What most don’t know about this bill, however, is the small provision known as “Section 1005” that authorizes the secretary of agriculture to make payments of 100 to 120 percent of the “outstanding indebtedness of socially disadvantaged farmers.” Under this provision, those included in the socially disadvantaged category are American Indians, Alaskan Natives, Asians, Blacks, Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, and Hispanics.

That's right, farmers are being paid for being non-white. I thought that the civil rights laws forbade this sort of thing.

Update: The NY Times is not quite so explicit in its White hatred, but publishes anti-white articles everyday. For the past week, it has published dozens of articles on how the recent Atlanta murders shows persecution of Asian-Americans. By Asians, they mean Orientals, as they do not include Russians or Indians. They are called AAPI, for Asian-American or Pacific Islander.

One article interviews middle-aged Oriental women, asking for their gripes. One complained that she lived in Indiana and sometimes a man who had served in the Korean War would recognize her as Korean, and try to strike up a conversation about Korea. Another complained that a homeless man in Chicago said that she reminded him of a friend in Vietnam. These incidents happened many years ago, when they were younger. Another complained that a movie set in Arkansas, about Korean-Americans speaking Korean with English subtitles, won a prize for a foreign-language movie. I guess she thought that it was anti-Asian discrimination to regard Korean as a foreign language.

Another article is titled:

Your Home’s Value Is Based on Racism
Wherever they choose to buy, Black people are penalized by white preferences.

It tells the supposedly sad story of a Japanese-American woman married to a Black man. At first they wanted to live in a Black neighborhood because they figured their kids would look Black and they wanted to be with their own kind. That worked out well because the cost of housing was much cheaper in the Black areas. After several years they decided that they would rather live in a White community, and that it was worth paying more for housing to live among Whites. So they did. Their house appreciated in value, and their kids attended better schools. Even though there were no other Black folks on the street, they loved it there and had no complaints about any anti-Black or anti-Asian discrimination or hostility.

So what's the problem?

The federal government should stop subsidizing a racist housing valuation system that’s made so by the preferences of white homeowners. It should repeal all federal tax subsidies for homeownership. ...

If white supremacy is to be rooted out everywhere, it must be rooted out of our tax system. Black taxpayers should not be required to finance our own subordination.

The federal govt did eliminate the home mortgage deduction, and that was the biggest tax subsidy. So the only complaint is that certain home sale gains are not taxed.

That would not have helped the couple in the article. It appears that their real complaint is that they would have liked to live in Black neighborhood where the people were as nice as the White neighborhood.

Arrested for misgendering his daughter

Breitbart reports:

A Canadian father has been arrested for “misgendering” his own 14-year-old child by calling her his “daughter,” and referring to her with the pronouns “she” and “her.” ...

Justice Boden of the British Columbia Supreme Court had reportedly declared that Hoogland and his wife had to affirm their daughter’s new gender identity. Hoogland was told that if he tried to dissuade his daughter or refer to her as a female, then he would be considered guilty of “family violence.”

The 14-year-old girl had this court-appointed lawyer to argue against her parents.

This case shows what is wrong with the modern world.

Just a couple of years ago, I could imagine a conversation where a right-winger says: "If family courts have the power to decide the best interest of the child, then a judge might tell the parents that that have to treat a daughter as a son." And the left-winger says: "That's ridiculous. No court anywhere would ever do that."

The day is here. We are doomed.

There is no anti-Asian crime wave

CNN reports:

Former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao on Thursday said the string of deadly shootings at three Atlanta-area Asian spas "cut at the very core of our country" and that work to combat hate against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community "must intensify."

Both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday expressed concerns about violence against Asian Americans as they addressed the shootings. The President said in the Oval Office that he was "very concerned because, as you know, I've been speaking about the brutality against Asian Americans for the last couple of months."

The crime had nothing to do with race. This is all a big hoax.

Also:

“The expert witnesses at the hearing today testified that the reports and research showed there is a link between racist rhetoric and the rise in hate crimes,” Lieu noted. “So when the former president used racist terms like Kung flu, you can see that there was also an increase in hate crimes against Asian-Amerans last year. Nearly 150% spike in 16 major cities.

This is absurd. Violent crime was up in all the big cities in 2020. It was mostly due to George Floyd riots, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and police being ordered to be more passive. Possibly there was an increase related to the covid lockdown and unemployment, but the big increases started with the Floyd riots, not the lockdowns.

Most of the high-profile anti-Asian crimes were committed by Blacks.

So the Democrats blame this on Trump because he once used the term Kung Flu? No, this is nuts. They cannot even find one example to back up what they say.

Update: Canceling on account of Asians seems to be the order of the day:

Alexi McCammond is a 27-year-old political writer and the recipient of a 2019 award from the National Association of Black Journalists. She was slated to become the next editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue.

But on Thursday, McCammond announced her resignation from that position, following outrage from staff members — and two advertisers — over some tweets that made fun of Asian people. She wrote them in 2011, when she was a teenager.

I looked up the tweets, and they are fairly trivial. There is something wrong with those staff members expressing outrage. Maybe they just want to create animosity between Blacks and Asians. No Whites are involved in this fight.

The Culture War is being waged by the Left

Here is one of several recent essays blaming the Republicans for the culture war:

With new stories about "cancel culture" and "woke" outrage breaking every few days, it sometimes seems as if the culture war has swallowed up everything in American politics. ...

... Through his four years in office, Trump used Twitter, public rallies, and other presidential statements to frame many of his policy commitments in culture war terms, casting his opponents on these issues as morally alien from American culture and history. ...

This points to a significant difference between the left and the right today: Democrats don't typically denounce the activists of the cultural left or those who capitulate to its demands in the academic, journalistic, and business worlds, but neither do they tend to hold them especially close. Republicans, on the other hand, increasingly define themselves by what right-wing anti-woke activists and obsessives are saying and doing online.

No. The Left is increasingly radicalized, and is saying and doing things that were unthinkable several years ago.

As an example from this week, here is Amazon banning books with unapproved opinions about transgenderism. No one is allowed to say that actress Ellen Page has a mental illness. Or Meghan Markle. We have a crisis at the Mexican border, because the Biden administration has welcomed migrants as never before.

There are not Republican-initiated issued. I think it is fair to say that most Republican politicians would rather not say a word about either one. It is the Left that has forced these issues into public debate.

Ronan Farrow is worse than I thought

I commented that Ronan Farrow is in the business of making reckless accusations, and that he is a creep, but his situation is more disturbing than I thought. His real name is Satchel Allen. His father is thought to be Woody Allen, a well-known neurotic genius. His mother Mia Farrow is much stranger.

According to this, Mia Farrow may slept naked with him, and breast-fed him, up to about age ten. Furthermore, she had his legs broken, extended, and reset repeatedly in order to make him taller, and enhance his future political career. He ended up as a homosexual. Now 16% of Gen-Z identify as LGBTQ, so nobody thinks that is strange anymore.

He is a pitiable character. He assembles hearsay, distorts the facts, and reports MeToo stories. He is way too damaged, and way too unreliable, for anything he says to be believed.

When Mia Farrow was interviewed about some of her outlandish accusations, she said: “It doesn’t matter what’s true. What matters is what’s believed.” Ronan/Satchel recites her lies along with other seemingly-bogus MeToo accusations. I get the impression that is his position also -- truth does not matter, only what is believed. He symbolizes much of what is wrong with our society today.

A NY Times article on a bogus college accusation reports:

The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it.

The student was a Black immigrant girl, from a landlocked African country, trespassing in a Smith college cafeteria. Her hysterical complaint threw the college into turmoil for months.

In addition to the training sessions, the college has set up “White Accountability” groups where faculty and staff are encouraged to meet on Zoom and explore their biases, although faculty attendance has fallen off considerably.

The janitor who called campus security quietly returned to work after three months of paid leave and declined to be interviewed. The other janitor, Mr. Patenaude, who was not working at the time of the incident, left his job at Smith not long after Ms. Kanoute posted his photograph on social media, accusing him of “racist cowardly acts.”

The only racists were the misbehaving African girl, and the college administrators who went out to punish Whites.

Echoing Mia Farrow, the newspaper astutely observes that complaining women often have a "deeply felt sense of personal truth" that is totally false.

Toy companies are getting woke:

“Hasbro is making sure all feel welcome in the Potato Head world by officially dropping the Mr. from the Mr. Potato Head brand name and logo to promote gender equality and inclusion,” the company said in a statement on Thursday. ...

Rich Ferraro, the chief communications offer for Glaad, an L.G.B.T. advocacy organization, applauded the change, saying it was part of “a larger movement towards greater diversity and inclusion in toys and media aimed at kids.”

In 2016, Mattel announced that it was expanding its Thomas the Tank Engine franchise by adding more female train characters and friends from countries such as India, Brazil and Mexico.

Update: I see that HBO has a new documentary on Allen v. Farrow, and it shows newly-released video of a 7-year-old girl making coached accusations. I have not seen it.

Rise of the French Far Right

The NY Times has an article attacking the rise of the "far right" in France. It is using the term "far right" more and more, and I wondered what it meant.

It mentions only three things that the French "far right" party supports. Reducing immigration. Limiting Islam, such as banning the public wearing of the Muslim veil. And cutting crime, such as by hiring more police officers.

It also said that the party occasionally complains about France turning savage, but said that other political parties say the same things.

These seem like centrist positions to me. I assume that "far right" is a dog whistle for the NY Times.

Silicon Valley imports India's castes

One of the dirty little secrets of Silicon Valley is how the major tech companies have become dependent on imported Indian labor. There are also a lot of workers from China and other places, India has the deepest caste system, and the companies love it.

Bloomberg Business Week reports:

How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley Graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology are highly sought after by employers. They can also bring problems from home. ...

The caste system traces as far back as ancient India. It comprises four core strata, with the Dalits lying outside and below. (The word “Dalit,” in classical Sanskrit, means “broken.”) These divisions still permeate life for many Indians, dictating how they work and worship, eat and marry, own land and vote. More than 200 million of the country’s 1.3 billion people are classified as Dalits.

Supposedly the castes in India go back 3000+ years when the area was invaded by Aryans who then maintained distinctions from the local population. See Wikipedia for details.

People often think that racial differences can be overcome after several years of assimilation. India has had three millennia or more, and yet differences still persist after then move to the other side of the world.

Some psychotherapy is a crime in Canada

Under Canada law, a psychotherapist can try to convince you to be homosexual, but not heterosexual.

Quillette:

Bill C-6, which was approved in principle by Canada’s parliament last year, would serve to criminalize “any practice, treatment or service designed to change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual or gender identity to cisgender.” And while the government insists that the definition of conversion therapy “does not include a practice, treatment or service that relates to a person’s gender transition or exploration or development of a person’s identity,” the law’s entire text is otherwise written in a way that suggests an individual’s announced identity corresponds to a revealed truth that cannot be challenged. Given the five-year jail term that the legislation would authorize, therapists would understandably fear that mainstream treatments might be categorized by government investigators or prosecutors as going beyond “exploration” or “development.” Even an unsuccessful prosecution could end their careers.

The above link has references to the opinions supporting this law. It claims to be based on scientific evidence, but it is not. It is all political.

Update: Germany is also going to extremes:

A new bill proposed by the German government would allow gender-confused children as young as 14 to change their first name and documented gender on government records, regardless of their parents’ wishes.

Update: Here is a Canadian father being prosecuted for opposing forced medical procedures on his 14-year-old daughter.

White Fragility, Part 2

The leading anti-racism book will soon have a sequel:

An incisive follow-up to the New York Times bestseller White Fragility asserting that it is white progressives who are responsible for inflicting the most daily harm on people of color. ...

Racism is a system in which all white people are implicated. ...

Dismantling white supremacy requires white people to commit to a lifetime of education and accountability.

Nice Racism Hardback edition by Robin DiAngelo

She has made millions of dollars tells Whites that even tho they are not personally racist, they must commit to a lifetime of re-education to understand how people of color hate them anyway.

This description used to be on Amazon and other sites, but Amazon now says:

She challenges the ideology of individualism and explains why it is OK to generalize about white people, and she demonstrates how white people who experience other oppressions still benefit from systemic racism. ...

Nice Racism is an essential work for any white person who recognizes the existence of systemic racism and white supremacy and wants to take steps to align their values with their actual practice.

She has quite a scam going. She can make racist generalizations about Whites and people of color, and then call everyone racist. If you don't want to pay her $30k speaking fee, she will accuse you of being definitely not interested in racial justice.

Why do Whites put up with this? Some wealthy Whites put up with much worse, because they fear not going along:

I recommend this essay of hers in City Journal, “The Miseducation of America’s Elites.” It’s about the same kind of groupthink having taken over the country’s prestigious private high schools. Weiss writes, “The idea of lying in order to please a teacher seems like a phenomenon from the Soviet Union. But the high schoolers I spoke with said that they do versions of this, including parroting views they don’t believe in assignments so that their grades don’t suffer.”

Wealthy parents are ladling out huge amounts of money to get their kids into schools that are saturated in social justice/victimhood ideology. Some don’t mind at all, but Weiss spoke with some dissidents, who are as guarded as were (are) dissidents in totalitarian countries. They’re afraid that if they send their children elsewhere, they won’t get into one of America’s elite universities.

The article cites parents who pay $40k a year, and are afraid to even express their opinions privately.

Only 28% of Whites say George Floyd was murdered

The trial of George Floyd is beginning.

USA Today reports:

Last June, 60% in a USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll described Floyd's death as murder; that percentage has now dropped by double digits to 36%. ...

Nearly two-thirds of Black Americans, 64%, view Floyd's death as murder; fewer than one-third of white people, 28%, feel that way. White Americans are more likely to describe it instead as the police officer's "negligence," 33% compared with 16% of Black respondents.

This surprises me. Everyone in authority has called it murder. The only way someone could decide that it was not murder is if he is thinking for himself.

This racial split reminds me of O.J. Simpson, where polls indicated Whites thought he was guilty, while Blacks said he was innocent. I guess Blacks were also thinking for themselves.

That said, Americans who have heard at least something about Chauvin's trial say 4 to 1, or 60%-15%, that they hope Chauvin is convicted. That included 54% of white Americans and 76% of Black Americans.

A utilitarian would probably say that a conviction is for the better. An acquittal could result in race riots killing dozens of people. Unjustly imprisoning Officer Chauvin could be seen as the lesser harm.

The trial could change some more opinions. I expect the defense to argue that a fentanyl overdose was the cause of death; that Floyd had a dangerous excited delirium; that Chauvin followed recommended police procedures; that Chauvin's actions made Floyd less likely to die.

The NY Times reports:

Late last year, a 14-page questionnaire began to arrive in mailboxes across Minneapolis and its suburbs. It asked if the recipient had watched the video of George Floyd dying under a police officer’s knee. ...

The questionnaire went out to potential jurors for the trial of Derek Chauvin, the white former police officer accused of murdering Mr. Floyd, who was Black.

Minneapolis, where neighborhoods and storefronts still bear the scars of last summer’s looting and arson, is already bracing for unrest if Mr. Chauvin is acquitted. Concrete barriers around government buildings and high fencing topped with razor wire have transformed downtown into a fortress and blocked off one of the most popular sites for large demonstrations. National Guard soldiers will stand watch.

The trial may be determined by the jury selection process, more than anything else. That could also be said about the O.J. Simpson jury.

If Chauvin is found not guilty, then millions of Americans will conclude that Black Lives Matter was all a big scam. After all, George Floyd was the biggest and most obvious example of systemic racist against Blacks that anyone could find. If it turns out that there was no racism or mistreatment, then many will doubt that any Blacks are mistreated anywhere.

On the other hand, some will say that a not guilty verdict will just further prove that the systemic racism runs so deep that murderous cops are not held accountable.

I think that they should televise the trial, so there can be a consensus on the facts.

Dr. Seuss has scammed us

Here are the best-selling books on Amazon. As I write this, about half of the top books are Dr. Seuss books.

Have we all been scammed? The Dr. Seuss publisher got a lot of publicity by canceling 6 of his more obscure books. It also appears to have generated about $10 million in sales on the remaining books. Maybe it was all a publicity stunt.

His kids' books were great. He was a liberal Jew. It was predictable that right-wingers and left-wingers will rush to his defense, while a few on the woke left will applaud the banning of some images. The result was big profits.

I would not be surprised if the publisher bring back the banned books, with possibly some annotations, possibly with some annotations, like the TCM problematic movies. Or maybe some images will be replaced. That will generate more publicity, and more sales.

The Potato Head makers also made some change that appeared to caving into gendered political demands. It was probably also a publicity stunt to drive up sales.

Who can be blamed for a virus?

SciAm has opinion articles blaming Pres. Trump and Gov. Cuomo, for COVID-19 response.

The attack on Trump blames him for a decline in life expectancy, as claimed by a study. But that study was widely criticized. COVID-19 did not really have much effect on life expectancy.

The allegations against Cuomo are very serious, as he could have killed 10,000 New Yorkers. But he seems to be facing more political trouble for some relatively minor MeToo allegations.

Before the election, the nearly universal opinion in the press was that Cuomo should be graded A+ and Trump F- for their COVID-19 responses. Now I would like to see a more objective comparison.

Academic intolerance on the rise

The Russian RT.com reports:

Surveying both victims and perpetrators of political discrimination in the US, the UK and Canada, researchers at an academic think tank have found intolerance toward dissent is only just beginning – and things may get much worse.

The plot to destroy girls' sports

Jerry Coyne explains:

Mara Keisling, the founding executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality (Keisling is a transgender woman, which I mention only because it’s relevant to the discussion). ...

Keisling hardens her position as the discussion proceeds, basically asserting that any difference between men and women in sports (and she’s clearly reluctant to admit the existence of such differences) may rest merely on “height” differences.  That, too, is not true, as height is largely irrelevant to sports like weightlifting except insofar as it’s correlated with weight and muscle mass.

Keisling’s is the position of extreme transgender advocates: there are no average differences in sports performance between men and women.

Note that Biden’s executive order of January 20—prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation—pretty clearly states that there should be no discrimination in sports based on gender identity, so that if your gender identity is that of a woman, regardless of whether you’ve undergone medical treatment, you should be able to compete as a woman. There is nothing in his order about any kind of medical treatment. Taken literally, Biden’s order spells the end of women’s sports in secondary schools.

Keisling is Jewish, and his sex is male. He adopted a female gender identity in his 40s. This info is from Wikipedia. It does not say whether or not he was castrated, or what his real name is.

Keisling is determined to use his mental illness to destroy girls' sports, and try to gain accepted for his perverted activities.

Other news:

A group of Democrat California lawmakers are considering a bill (AB 2826) that would fine department stores for separating children’s toys, clothing and other products by gender.

If there were no difference between boys and girls, then there would no need for one to transition to the other.

Apparently there is a leftist belief that toys should be unisex, whether kids like it or not.

The sponsor of this bill is not Jewish, but is an openly gay man with no kids.

Our society is being taken over by radical extremists pushing policies that benefit no one.

This stuff is all so crazy. I don't why anyone would want to listen to a middle-aged Jewish man who likes to dress up as a woman and try to destroy girls sports. Or to a Chinese gay man with no kids who wants to limit how parents buy toys for their kids. There is just no merit to anything that these creeps say.

Lockdowns cause more harm than good

This study says coronavirus lockdowns do a lot of harm, and very little good:

Medical experts Eran Bendavid, Christopher Oh, Jay Bhattacharya, and John Ioannidis published just two weeks ago at the European Journal of Clinical Investigation their research on “Assessing Mandatory Stay-at-Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID-19.”

They studied “COVID-19 case growth in relation to any NPI [non-pharmaceutical interventions; i.e., lockdowns: mandatory stay-at-home and business closures] implementation in subnational regions of 10 countries: England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, and the US.” They then examined “case growth in Sweden and South Korea, two countries that did not implement mandatory stay-at-home and business closures, as comparison countries for the other eight countries (16 total comparisons).”

Their findings? “While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less restrictive interventions.” In short: there was no practical difference in effect between countries that locked down and those that didn’t. Or even shorter: whatever benefits lockdowns give are dwarfed by their enormous costs.

This study was complemented by Canadian infectious disease expert Dr. Ari Joffe in his study “COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink” (November 2020). Here, he stated that “The costs of lockdowns are at least 10 times higher than the benefits. That is, lockdowns cause far more harm to population well-being than COVID-19 can.”

Another study says that you will probably not get the disease, even if someone in your household gets it:

One in 10 people exposed to COVID-19 tests positive for the virus, according to a study published Friday by JAMA Network Open.

In the analysis of data on more than 7,200 confirmed cases of the virus in the Boston area, diagnosed between March 4 and May 17, 2020, more than 1,800 of the study participants' nearly 18,000 household contacts later were infected, the data showed. ...

Household transmission of the flu can be as low as 1%, research suggests.

The coronavirus most commonly spreads from person-to-person via airborne respiratory droplets emitted from the nose or mouth.

This is lower that earlier studies. It says the coronavirus is less contagious than the flu, but still suggest that the big majority of unvaccinated people are not going to get COVID.

This study surprises me. If true, then maybe 90% of the population is not going to get COVID no matter what. If so, then we are probably already at herd immunity.

Noah Carl writes in Quillette:

Whether or not lockdowns are justifiable on public-health grounds, they certainly represent the greatest infringement on civil liberties in modern history. In the UK, lockdowns have contributed to the largest economic contraction in more than 300 years, as well as countless bankruptcies, and a dramatic rise in public borrowing.

He then goes on to document legitimate scientists arguing that the lockdowns don't work, and being censored for expressing a scientific opinion.

Now Biden accuses Republicans of 'Neanderthal thinking' for lifting mask mandates. This is a slur against those of European descent.

Math and Dr. Seuss are being canceled

Sergiu Klainerman writes:

In my position as a professor of mathematics at Princeton, I have witnessed the decline of universities and cultural institutions as they have embraced political ideology at the expense of rigorous scholarship. Until recently — this past summer, really — I had naively thought that the STEM disciplines would be spared from this ideological takeover.

I was wrong. Attempts to “deconstruct” mathematics, deny its objectivity, accuse it of racial bias, and infuse it with political ideology have become more and more common — perhaps, even, at your child’s elementary school.

This phenomenon is part of what has been dubbed “The Great Awokening.” As others have explained powerfully, the ideology incubated in academia, where it indoctrinated plenty of bright minds. It then migrated, through those true believers, into our important cultural, religious and political institutions. Now it is affecting some of the country’s most prominent businesses.

He is right. Math is not immune. We have not yet seen the limits of what will be deconstructed.

For historical reasons, we often discuss contributions to the field of mathematics from the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Chinese, Indians and Arabs and refer to them as distinct entities. They have all contributed through a unique cultural dialogue to the creation of a truly magnificent edifice accessible today to every man and woman on the planet.

He is right, but I think he misses the point. A lot of fields have drawn on contributions from many sources. What we call Western Civilization has taken ideas, science, technology, and values from Romans, Greeks, Medieval Europeans, Egyptians, and many others.

For various reasons, Western Civilization is a target. Today's news is that Dr. Seuss is being canceled. Explaining that his works were fairly enlightened, and appreciated by many, does no good. His excellent children's books must be banned anyway.

(I once had an office down the hall from Klainerman, but I had no direct dealings with him.)

The Nonsense of Authoritarian Personality

Ben Shapiro did a video on The Authoritarian Left Is On The March, and refers to academic work on right-wing authoritarianism. He is an Orthodox Jew, and he criticizes the Left a lot, and a lot of those leftists are Jews or Jewish-led.

Wikipedia defines:

The Authoritarian Personality is a 1950 sociology book by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley, during and shortly after World War II.

The Authoritarian Personality "invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the 'F scale' (F for fascist)."[1] The personality type Adorno et al. identified can be defined by nine traits that were believed to cluster together as the result of childhood experiences. These traits include conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex.[2][3]

Though strongly criticized for bias and methodology,[4][5] the book was highly influential in American social sciences, particularly in the first decade after its publication: "No volume published since the war in the field of social psychology has had a greater impact on the direction of the actual empirical work being carried on in the universities today."[6]

This speaks volumes about what is wrong with academic social science. These studies did not use random sampling, and did not correct for the political biases of the researchers. So it is garbage. And yet this was one of the most influential books of the XX century, to academic social scientists.

We have had four years of Jewish leftists complaining that Pres. Trump was an authoritarian, based on this book. But Pres. Biden has been President for a month, and he is already more of an authoritarian than Trump ever was.

So what is this "Authoritarian Personality"? It appears to be just a list of traits that Jewish leftists don't like. Many of them don't have much to do with authoritarianism.

I mentioned how the NY Times fired a very good science reporter, and now he has posted more detail on how he offended some rich ignorant teenagers. It is scary how brainwashed those kids are. The paper attacks him again, with an article titled, "Ex-Times Reporter Who Used Racial Slur Publishes a Lengthy Defense". He did not use a slur. He discussed punishing 12-year-old kids for using some terms that were not meant to offend. This might have been his worst offense:

I explained: “It’s Kipling. ‘The White Man’s Burden.’ It’s a poem saying white people are obligated to civilize the world. When you say that, you’re sounding like one of those Victorian ladies who felt it was their job to speak for the poor benighted natives. In my experience, black and brown Americans are perfectly capable of speaking up for themselves.”

Or maybe management wanted to get rid of him because he was a union representative.

Swedish women import Africans to be rapists

Sweden is a feminist utopia, where women manipulate men in many ways, including phony rape charges. Just look at Julian Assange, who was imprisoned for 7 years on investigation of a Swedish rape. The woman admitted to having consensual sexual relations with him, but wanted to hassle him anyway, after she found out about another woman. Apparently he had no idea that was how things work in Sweden.

Officially Assange was to be held for questioning about his own guilt. That police practice would be unconstitutional in the USA.

Since the Swedish men are all emasculated, the women eagerly import African migrants, and they also don't understand the local feminist customs.

Breitbart reports:

The Lund University found the majority of convicted rapists in Sweden are of migrant backgrounds and nearly half of rapists born abroad in a landmark study which is one of the first of its kind in the high-migration level nation.

The study, which was published online on February 22nd, looked at a total of 3,039 convicted rapists and found that 59.3 per cent of the convicts came from ‘migrant backgrounds’ — first and second-generation migrants.

For those offenders born outside of Sweden — 47.8 per cent in total — 34.5 per cent came from the North African and Middle Eastern region, while 19.1 per cent came from sub-Saharan Africa.

Snopes denies that Sweden is the rape capital of the world, and explains it this way:

In Sweden we count as many crimes as [the victim] can specify. So we’ve had cases with women who had a diary so they can say, ‘I’ve been raped within this marriage 400 times.’ That will result in 400 reported crimes.

This is sick on many levels. If they are really so anti-rape, why are they importing African migrants?

Sweden is not on the way to anywhere. The only way an African would get to Sweden is if the govt had an active policy of importing Africans. I am guessing that the women want to marry an African man, get raped 400 times, dump him, and get another. Feminists are often promoting more immigration from Third World countries.

This where we are headed. With Pres. Biden leading the way:

Joe Biden is the “most aggressively anti-Catholic President in history” despite his outward show of piety, Virginia priest and director of Human Life International, Father Jerry Pokorsky, states.

“For most of his political life — from his consistent pro-abortion record to his officiating at a gay wedding in 2016 — despite his Catholic affiliation and public pious practices, Joe Biden has magnified and institutionalized countless major violations of the Ten Commandments,” Father Pokorsky writes in an essay Friday.

“The hypocrisy rivals that of the chief priests and Pharisees and is worthy of the same condemnation,” the priest declares. “Indeed, Biden is the most aggressively anti-Catholic President in history.”

Pretty soon all the wives in America will keep a diary of their sexual relations. If a husband forgets to carry out the garbage or otherwise gets the disapproval of the wife, she will file charges of 400 rapes. And they run off with some African migrant, for some more rapes.