The Trump Arrest Hoax

The news is full of stories about how the New York district attorney is going to indict and arrest Donald Trump. I don't believe it.

The charges are ridiculous.

The story is that a prostitute tried to blackmail Trump with false accusations during the 2016 election. A Trump lawyer paid her off, without consulting him, and then asked him for reimbursement. Trump paid the lawyer as a legal expense, and did not use campaign funds. The has since went to prison for lying about it, and other petty crimes.

The statute of limitations is two years, and has long since expired.

Nobody could seriously think that Trump did anything criminal here. Talk of prosecution is all a plot to derail Trump's 2024 Presidential campaign.

Supposedly, Trump violated an obscure NY misdemeanor law by concealing from his accountant the fact that he did not use campaign funds to pay off a bogus claim, and the two year statute of limitations should not count because he was hiding out in the White House when this might have been prosecuted.

Only a Third World country would arrest a political opponent on such a silly pretense. It is not going to happen.

Trying to Eradicate the African Invaders

NPR Radio reports:

Agriculture specialists confirmed that the creatures with dark brown stripes were indeed giant African snails — a prohibited, invasive breed that the U.S. diligently has worked to eradicate from the country for more than 50 years.

While they appear harmless, these land snails — usually the size of an average adult fist — are considered voracious pests that can feast on more than 500 types of plants and produce, including peanuts, beans and cucumbers. When those are not available, they will consume flowers, tree bark and even the paint and stucco off of houses.

Giant African snails also are known to carry parasites that can lead to meningitis and other diseases in humans. And they reproduce quickly, laying as many as 1,200 eggs in a single year. ...

Over the years, the animal has stubbornly reappeared in the U.S. — partly because they are a local delicacy in West Africa. When cooked properly, these snails can serve as finger food or bar snacks, Miami member station WLRN reported back in 2013. They're also sometimes kept as pets, the USDA says.

Finger food? Bar Snacks? Pets? No thanks.

Bank goes Woke, then Broke

American big business has gone woke, with everybody hiring diverse, going ESG, donating to Black Lives Matter. What could go wrong?

We just out:

The big talking point of the week was the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, with a couple of hundred billion in assets evaporating overnight and blowing away on the morning wind.

The Politics of Christian Zionism

Here is a new movie on Christian Zionism:

If one wonders how nickels, dimes, and dollars collected in hundreds of churches across America shape the political decisions in the U.S. Congress and the State of Israel, director Maya Zinshtein’s film, ‘Til Kingdom Come, is required viewing.

A tour de force, her documentary—the culmination of three and a half years of research, relationship-building, and artistic film-making—exposes the peculiar bond between Christian Zionists, whose Biblical account of the last days calls for the death of two-thirds of the Jewish population, and Jewish colonists in the West Bank who welcome the Christians’ financial gifts and political influence but reject their theology.

Director Zinshtein takes the viewer inside the Binghamtown Baptist Church in rural Kentucky, where the Rev. Boyd Bingham, a third-generation pastor, preaches to his congregation beneath a Star of David imposed upon the cross in the front of the sanctuary, declaring, “We are the people that put Donald Trump in power.”

In a classroom where children have collected their loose change for Israel in buckets, Bingham tells them, “The Jews, they are better than us, all of us. You need to accept that… Every good thing we know, all the things we love about the Bible, they were given to us of the Jewish nation, Israel, their people, the Jews.”

This is baffling. If there is one group that Jews hate more than any other, it is evangelical Christians. Jews hate evangelical Christians more than they hate Moslems.

And yet these Christians raise money for Israel, and Jews gladly accept it.

No, none of the things we love about the Bible were given to us of the Jewish nation. The Bible teaches us that Christianity is a rejection of Judaism.

Why They Hate Us

The late Joseph Sobran wrote in 1997:

Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself. Other races feel like subjects of Western power long after colonialism, imperialism, and slavery have disappeared. The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don’t grasp what it really means: humiliation. The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And superiority excites envy. Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call ‘minorities.’

If this is true, it cannot be fixed.

I don't think it is entirely true. The Islamic world hates us for different reasons.

In spite of this hatred, or maybe because of, they all want to move to countries ruled by White Christians.

Economists like to judge people by their revealed preferences, not by what they say. If people complain about systemic racism, and then move to a country with systemic racism, then they must like that perceived systemic racism.

The Left-wing News Media wants Censorship

NPR Radio reports:

If a company makes a false claim in an advertisement, the government has the power to hold that company accountable and not allow consumers to be fleeced. ...

But that's not the case for what we hear on cable news or read on social media (or political ads for that matter). And that was put into stark relief last week when Fox News' Tucker Carlson tried to rewrite history on the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Rioters, inspired by former President Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 presidential election that he lost, stormed the Capitol in hopes of trying to stop the ceremonial certification of Joe Biden's win.

Since then, more than 1,000 people have been arrested and are facing charges. More than 500 have been convicted so far for their roles that day.

The Democrats are upset that Carlson showed actual surveillance video of what those protesters were doing.

The story doesn't even make any sense. If the certification were purely ceremonial, why would anyone care that it got disrupted and delayed for a couple of hours?

Yes, 1000 protesters have been arrested. A Black cop shot and killed an unarmed White woman. The Democrats spent two years complaining about the protest, but refused to let us see the video. Carlson showed us the video of what really happened. And the Democrat press is mad about it.

Federal Appeals Judge Rants about New World Order

I found this weird rant in a federal Oregon state appellate court opinion on gun rights:

In other words, Intervenors came before this court and referenced UN mandates, which, as explained below, is a well-documented trope meant to invoke white supremacist, antisemitic fear of a takeover of our country by outsiders and minorities who are manipulated by an elite class of supervillains. ...

I must be clear that the flawed quasi-legal argument offered by Intervenors—viz., the UN wants to disarm Americans—and the proposed solution—viz., imposing a duty on county sheriffs to determine which laws are ...

constitutional—have their origins in the insidious effort to oppress, in violation of fundamental notions of due process and equal protection under the rule of law.1 And in doing so, the Ordinance undermines, not elevates, the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution. ...

The anti-democratic ideas and quasi-legal theories propounded by the CSPOA and embedded in Second Amendment Sanctuary Ordinances have their origins in the writings of William Potter Gale, who founded the posse comitatus movement in the 1960s. They also have their origins in the writings of the Aryan Nation, an antisemitic, white supremist group.

The premise of such writings is the antisemitic and racist conspiracy theory that Jews are at the heart of America’s problems, that people of color are unwitting pawns to be manipulated by one side or the other, and that zealots must prepare for a final battle in the last days. The proponents of these ideas claim that a cabal of elites or globalists (code words for Jews) in the UN, or the fictional New World Order or Zionist Occupational Government, manipulate our federal government and, by extension, state governments. ...

These ideas are, of course, nothing new, unique, or intelligent: They are, instead, just a rehashing of the ancient trope of a secret Jewish government; they are the retelling of a lie that led to the murder of over six million Jews within living memory.

Really? That's what led to killing six million Jews? I didn't see how Jews had anything to do with the case, but I didn't read carefully.

The Birth Gap Hoax

There is a new documentary video on Birthgap - Childless World PART 1:

The era of ultra-low birthrates has begun. But why are people having so few children these days? And what are the consequences ? Come on a journey of discovery across 24 countries to find the reason and also the future consequences for young and old alike.

The movie gives the impression that world population is declining. But in fact it increases by 80 million per year, and that will continue for decades.

80 million is a lot of people. That is about the size of Germany, Iran, or Turkey.

Some countries are overpopulating faster than others. There are not any countries that need more people.

Some of the scenes appear to be straight out of the IDIOCRACY Opening Scene (2006), except that it fails to explain about the people who are breeding.

Penn Professor Being Fired for Telling the Truth

The NY Times reports:

Amy Wax, a law professor, has said publicly that “on average, Blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites,” that the country is “better off with fewer Asians” as long as they tend to vote for Democrats, and that non-Western people feel a “tremendous amount of resentment and shame.”

At the University of Pennsylvania, where she has tenure, she invited a white nationalist to speak to her class. And a Black law student who had attended UPenn and Yale said that the professor told her she “had only become a double Ivy ‘because of affirmative action,’” according to the administration.

Professor Wax has denied saying anything belittling or racist to students, and her supporters see her as a truth teller about affirmative action, immigration and race. ....

Along the way, her rhetoric grew more extreme. She has described some non-Western countries as “shitholes” and stated that “women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men.”

Speaking with Mr. Carlson last year, she said “American Blacks” and people from non-Western countries feel shame for the “outsized achievements and contributions” of Western people.

On a recent podcast, she said, “I often chuckle at the ads on TV which show a Black man married to a white woman in an upper-class picket-fence house,” she said, adding, “They never show Blacks the way they really are: a bunch of single moms with a bunch of guys who float in and out. Kids by different men.”

If she were wrong about any of these things, the NY Times and the Penn management would offer rebuttals. They do not.

Free the Q-Anon Shaman

Naomi Wolf has wised up about how the Democrats and press have duper her about Jan. 6, 2020:

Jan 6 has become, as the DNC intended it to become, after the fact, a “third rail”; a shorthand used to dismiss or criminalize an entire population and political point of view.

Peaceful Republicans and conservatives as a whole have been demonized by the story told by Democrats in leadership of what happened that day.

So half of the country has been tarred by association, and is now in many quarters presumed to consist of chaotic berserkers, anti-democratic rabble, and violent upstarts, whose sole goal is the murder of our democracy.

Republicans, conservatives, I am sorry.

I also believed wholesale so much else that has since turned out not to be as I was told it was by NPR, MSNBC and The New York Times.

As long as Jacob Chansley is in prison, we will know that the Biden administration is evil, and out to destroy good Americans.

Feminization of the American University

Heather Mac Donald writes:

Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia. Of course, feminist bean-counters in the media and advocacy world are not impressed, noting that “only” 5 percent of the 130 top U.S. research universities are headed by a black female and “only” 22 percent of those federal grant-magnets have a non-intersectional (i.e., white) female head.

These female leaders emerge from an ever more female campus bureaucracy, whose size is reaching parity with the faculty. Females made up 66 percent of college administrators in 2021; those administrators constitute an essential force in campus diversity ideology, whether they have “diversity” in their job titles or not. Among the official diversity bureaucrats installed in their posts since July 2022, females predominate: the vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at t

Christopher F. Rufo explains why this is bad.

The politically correct reactions to news like this are to say either sex does not matter, or that it is a good thing because women will bring a different perspective. If you say the latter, then you are admitting that it is changing the colleges, and such changes are never entirely for the better.

The Great Replacement in Tunisia

White countries are being invaded by non-whites, and it is considered racist to complain about it. But what about African countries being invaded by other Africans? Nobody would care about that, would they?

Yes. NPR Radio reports:

In fact, Tunisia has got around 80,000 folks who live here from sub-Saharan Africa, whether they're migrant workers who are here for a period of time, people who are trying to get to Europe or even students. And in the last couple of weeks, President Kais Saied, who's our sort of ascendant autocrat here, has turned to scapegoating the Black population as a way to detract attention from his failed economic policy.

And so what's been happening is there was a speech that he gave on February 21 that really kind of embraced this idea of the great replacement theory. He said that there was a conspiracy to replace the Tunisian population with Black Africans. And as a result, tons of Tunisia's Black residents were kicked out of their homes. They were driven out of their jobs. ...

INSKEEP: I want to note, when you talk about the great replacement theory, there is an American version of that, a conspiracy theory that that's a plot behind migration. So you're saying that he's picked this up, the president has picked this up in Tunisia.

Tunisia has been run by Arabs, since the Islamic invasion over a millennium ago. If they don't like being replaced by Black Africans, then they must have gotten the idea from American White supremacists!

NPR thinks that it is a "conspiracy theory", meaning that it is a secret that these migrations are taking place.

Nebraska Bill Mandates Holocaust Education

AP reports:

The bill by Omaha Democratic Sen. Jen Day would provide $4 million in funding over the next two years for instruction and training to schools on teaching the Holocaust, which is already a required part of the state’s social studies curriculum.

Eleanor Dunning, 21, of Omaha, testified at the public hearing on the bill about her experience as a sophomore at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln in December 2021, when she said she watched a sorority sister stand up during a new member training event and throw up a Nazi salute. Dunning, who is Jewish, said she objected on the spot, only to be brushed off and told by the girl that she “had been doing that all week at practice.”

So the purpose is to suppress free speech, not to inform.

The curriculum is imperative, Day said, not only because of a rise in antisemitism, but because the diminishing number of survivors of the Holocaust declines every year.

“We are losing our human connection to that atrocity,” she said.

There is the real reason. Modern Jews are assimilating, intermarrying, dropping traditions, and becoming atheists. What is there to indoctrinate the next generation with their weirdo tribal beliefs? They have found that the biggest thing is telling Holocaust stories. That is, Jews can be convinced to stick together to combat the interests of non-Jews by pretending that another Holocaust is coming. So they want the schools to do it.

Here is another leftist creep, trying to control our education:

Ken Burns hit the nail on the head in regards to Tucker Carlson’s coverage of the January 6th insurrection of the US Capitol.

“The way Nazis would build a Potemkin village, Tucker Carlson is doing with the footage from J6. It is a rewriting of history at the most dangerous level. It’s a huge threat to our republic."

Did the Nazis build Potemkin villages to rewrite history? I guess I missed that Holocaust class.

I may make a list of all the folks attacking the release of J6 tapes to the public. I don't think I want to hear their opinion on any other subject.

For two years the Democrats and Trump-haters lied to us about Jan. 6, while refusing to let us see for ourselves what happened.

And the ADL now says that criticism of warmongers, globalists, and communists is antisemitic. Simpler to criticize the Jews, I guess.

How Ukraine Must Please the West

If the Ukraine War leads to World War III, the history books will have to describe how it all happened.

RT reports:

Ukraine considers LGBTQ breakthrough

Legalizing same-sex unions for soldiers would also please Kiev’s “Western allies”

Ukraine’s former deputy culture minister has proposed legalizing same-sex civil partnerships, arguing it would both reward the service of LGBTQ soldiers and please Kiev’s foreign backers. Inna Sovsun of the Golos party announced on Tuesday that she has submitted the bill to the Verkhovna Rada for consideration.

“Legalization of single-sex relationships is very important to me now, because if I come home [dead], my partner can’t even bury me,” was one of the arguments from the Ukrainian LGBT Soldiers and Allies’ Facebook community that Sovsun quoted in announcing her bill.

The bill is a product of nine months of work, involving two NGOs. It would establish legal grounds for people in same-sex relationships to regulate property ownership, inheritance, pensions and death benefits, Sovsun argued.

“I could say that this is what our Western allies are demanding of us – and it is true, they are,” but 56% of Ukrainians agree that LGBTQ people should be entitled to civil partnerships, she wrote. “As a society, we have matured beyond the ‘Russian swamp’ and Soviet worldview.”

Because Ukraine values “human dignity and freedom,” Ukrainians are “simply a different biological species” than Russians, she concluded.

This could be Russian propaganda, but even if it is, it helps explain what the war is about.

The London Economist complains that American support for the war is declining:

THE FACT that Ukraine is still fighting is mostly thanks to America. No other country has provided more help to combat Russia’s advance: it is responsible for more than half of all recorded military and financial aid. Joe Biden, America’s president, has promised to stand with Ukraine for “as long as it takes”. Whether Mr Biden can continue to send so much depends in part on how well such funding is viewed at home. Polling data from The Economist and YouGov, a pollster, suggest that a partisan gap is widening, and even Democrats are showing slightly less support for certain types of aid than they did last year (see chart).

Republicans might nominate an anti-war candidate for President next year. More and more Americans are asking why we are siding with Ukraine. It appears to me that America would be better served by good relations with Russia.

Here we have an explanation. Siding with Ukraine has allowed us to force LGBTQ values on them. To many, that is what this war is about.

The NY Times is now reporting that, according to confidential US intelligence sources, the Nord Stream bombing was the work of Ukraine mercenaries. They deny direct endorsement by either Ukraine or the USA.

The bombing was the biggest terrorist act of the 21st century, in terms of direct economic effects, with the 911 hijackings and crashes in second place. Our officials are remarkably uncurious about who did it.

The story is just what we would expect, if the USA did it. Attempts to blame the bombing on Russia have failed. There is now a plausible and detailed story in print about how the USA and Norway did it. Biden gave an interview where is said he would do it. Unless the USA puts out an alternative, everyone will assume the USA did it.

There is no explanation how Ukrainian mercenaries could have done it. Does it have a ship in the Baltic Sea? Does it have the technology for a remote-controlled large undersea explosion? I doubt it.

Those history books may someday say World War III was caused by (1) aggressive NATO expansion into Ukraine and other nearby countries; USA-aligned sabotage of undersea gas pipelines; and (3) forced conversion of Ukraine to the LGBTQ cause.

Movie Stars have Queer Kids

Breitbart reports:

Real Housewives star Heather Dubrow celebrated her 12-year-old child, Collette, who is now going by “Ace” after declaring herself transgender. “It’s International sons day!” Dubrow exclaimed. ...

In addition to their 12-year-old transgender child, the Real Housewives star and her husband, Botched plastic surgeon Terry Dubrow, also have a 16-year old daughter, Katarina, and 19-year-old twins — Nicholas, a son, and Maximillia, a daughter.

Both Katarina and Maximillia have previously announced that they are members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community. In June 2020, Maximillia came out as bisexual. In February 2022, Dubrow told PEOPLE that Katarina “decided to drop in our family group text, ‘By the way, I’m a lesbian.'”

“She’s asked me trillions of questions that really show she cares. She’s asked me about my pronouns,” Katarina said of her mother.

Claiming to be “non-binary,” changing one’s pronouns, and proclaiming oneself to be transgender appears to have become the new trend among young children in today’s society, as celebrities, television shows, media outlets, and left-wing activists continue to hype transgenderism and guide children to doubt their biological sex.

More young people than ever are now identifying as non-binary.

I think that "Botched plastic surgeon" means that he plays a plastic surgeon on the TV show called Botched.

Please don't tell me that these kids are finding their true selves. They are doing what their parents and others encourage them to do.

If the mom really cared, she would not be just asking questions. She would be putting a stop to whoever is having sexual relations with her 16-year-old daughter.

Human Genetic Enhancement

This new podcast comes as close to advocating eugenics as anything I have seen in a long time.

The Wild Ethics Of Human Genetic Enhancement - Dr Jonathan Anomaly | Modern Wisdom Podcast 598

Chris Williamson

Dr Jonathan Anomaly is a philosopher who writes about the social implications of emerging biotechnologies, teaches classes in ethics and game theory, and helped design the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program at Duke University.

The ability to select from potential embryos is already here. Soon, we will be able to select for height, intelligence, personality types, moral disposition, athletic ability and maybe even enhance traits which aren't present. This creates a vortex of complex ethics around one of the most contentious topics on the internet - genetics. So I decided to dive in.

Expect to learn just what the current technology of embryo selection can achieve right now, whether opting to not genetically enhance your child is an unethical practise, the dangers of creating massive societal inequality, why you are already a eugenicist, whether genetic interventions are morally different from environmental ones and much more...

You can find his papers here.

I doubt that the public is going to be convinced that eugenics is a good thing. But a significant subset is going to pursue genetic enhancement. He has a good argument that it is much more virtuous to favor eugenics.

Why Heterodox Academy Failed

Nathan Cofnas

The purge of heretical scholars and ideas in academia is intensifying.1 Many job applications now require loyalty oaths to woke orthodoxy in the form of “diversity statements.”2 In the humanities and social sciences, large numbers of faculty are being hired to engage in what is effectively leftist activism.3 Simply ranting about how much you hate conservatives, Christians, or straight white men can be considered “scholarship” and the basis for a distinguished career. Entire departments devoted to ideology-driven fields like gender studies have been established to promote “social justice” and provide sinecures to activists.4 Academic papers that undermine the woke narrative are being retracted,5 and journals are adopting implicit or explicit polices to ensure that crimethink is never published again.6 Many undergraduate and graduate programs have stopped asking for standardized test scores and are increasingly making admissions decisions based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and ideological conformity.

Seven years ago, Heterodox Academy (HxA) came on the scene to promote “ideological diversity” in academia.

So what happened? HxA got taken over by leftists.

Because wokeism is based on demonstrable lies, it can only survive if people are prevented from telling the truth. It is inherently incompatible with open inquiry. Wherever there is wokeism—and it is metastasizing to every major institution in our society—there is censorship, intimidation, and groupthink.

There is an epidemic of cowardice among opponents of wokeism, and not only in academia.

I would think that tenured university professors would be willing to speak the truth, but apparently not.

He gets to this core issue:

Wokeism is built upon an ideological certitude about the origins of inequality: all groups have the same distribution of innate potential, and all differences favoring whites or men are due to past or present white racism or sexism. The whole ideology stands or falls on this empirical claim. Therefore, the greatest taboo in our society is to consider alternative explanations for inequality, particularly those that implicate natural differences in the distribution of traits among racial groups.

There are group differences. If you are unwilling to even admit the possibility that they are innate, you will never get at the truth.

I thought that HxA was run by well-meaning scholars who genuinely wanted diverse views. Maybe that is impossible in today's climate.

I don't know why he writes "wokeism" instead of "wokism". I don't know any other English words with that "eism" ending.

Here is a definition:

The four intellectual pillars of wokeism are:

Anti-white racism disguised under the euphemism social justice.

Rejection of traditional morality, which is primarily carried out by the promotion of sexually deviant lifestyles such as homosexuality and transgender. In a truly surreal inversion of reality, they paint traditional morality as immoral by charging it with being homophobic, transphobic, and similar terms.

Environmentalism based on the notion that it is desirable and possible to arrest climate change.

Intense hostility toward Christian religion, which they negatively paint as patriarchal, intolerant, and oppressive.

And the Woke demand that you conform to its views, or they will destroy you.

Here is a Black woman professor who demands that all Blacks get bereavement leave when someone like Tyre Nichols dies. She says she needs counseling for racial battle fatigue, and she says she is not joking.

Leftists are Oversocialized and Feel Inferior

I posted some theories about right-left political division, so I am adding some comments from the Unabomber Manifesto, as published in the NY Times and Wash. Post.

Bing summarizes:

According to the manifesto, Kaczynski claimed that modern leftists suffer from “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization” that make them resentful of society and seek to change it123. He argued that leftists feel inferior because they cannot achieve their goals or satisfy their needs in the industrial system, and they are oversocialized because they internalize too many norms and rules that restrict their freedom1. He also criticized leftists for being intolerant of any hierarchy or inequality, and for being hypocritical and self-righteous.

He was a brilliant and original thinker. His essay was published in 1995.

To him, Leftism is not so much a political view but a pyschological personality type. He has also written an updated version of his manifesto.

American Jewish Power has Peaked

I thought that Jews were taking over the White House, Congress, Cabinet, big business, Hollywood. etc. but it turns out that they are being pushed out by their own woke policies. The Jewish Tablet magazine reports:

Suddenly, everywhere you look, the Jews are disappearing.

You feel it like a slow moving pressure system, an anxiety of exclusion and downward mobility. Maybe you first noticed it at your workplace. Or maybe it hit when you or your children applied to college or graduate school. It could have been something as simple as opening up the Netflix splash page. It’s gauche to count but you can’t help yourself: In academia, Hollywood, Washington, even in New York City—anywhere American Jews once made their mark—our influence is in steep decline. ...

Museum boards now diversify by getting Jews to resign. ...

Comb through the dozens of Jewish names for the 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship (I count 30-40). You’ll have a much harder time finding them 10 years later (14-16). There were 3-4 Jewish Marshall Scholars in 2014. I don’t see any in 2022. ...

But the seasons always change. A FIRE/Yougov survey found that self-identified Jews now number just 7% of Ivy League students, compared to 10% during the height of the antisemitic quotas. ...

Of the 114 federal judges appointed by Joe Biden (as of this writing), just 8-9 appear to be Jewish—in a field that’s historically been at least 20% Jewish.

Jews are still overrepresented in all these areas. They are only 2% of the Amreican population.

Conservatives Accept Human Nature

I posted how leftists are more neurotic, and Scientific American has an article on the differences between conservatives and liberals:

In politics, researchers usually define conservativism as a general tendency to resist change and tolerate social inequality. Liberalism is a tendency to embrace change and reject inequality. Political parties evolve with time—Democrats were the conservative party 150 years ago—but the liberal-conservative split is typically recognizable in a country’s politics. It’s the fault line on which political cooperation most often breaks down.

Psychologists have long suspected that a handful of fundamental differences in worldviews might underlie the conservative-liberal rift. Forty years of research has shown that, on average, conservatives see the world as a more dangerous place than liberals. This one core belief seemed to help explain many policy disagreements, such as conservative support of gun ownership, border enforcement and increased spending on police and the military—all of which, one can argue, aim to protect people from a threatening world.

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But new research by psychologist Nick Kerry and me at the University of Pennsylvania contradicts that long-standing theory. We find instead that the main difference between the left and right is the belief that the world is inherently hierarchical. Conservatives, our work shows, tend to have higher belief than liberals in a hierarchical world, which is essentially the view that the universe is a place where the lines between categories or concepts matter.

It goes to explain that conservatives accept scientific facts about human nature, and liberals do not.

It says that conservatives do tend to be more tolerant, and more likely to recognize dangers, human nature better explains the differences.

SciAm has become a leftist journal, so the purpose of this research is to convert conservatives! It says:

One reason our discovery is exciting is because it hints at ways to work through specific political deadlocks. For example, consider debates around LGBTQ+ topics. Conservatives may feel the line separating men and women is natural and innate—a big, bold line—whereas liberals may see that distinction as more superficial and culturally based—a gray area. Welfare payments and policies, too, might be seen through a hierarchical lens, with some assuming that lines between rich and poor often reflect meaningful differences in people’s work ethic, talent, morality or value to society. ...

For instance, imagine trying to convince a conservative to adopt a more liberal policy on transgender rights. If you assume their beliefs are informed by fear of danger, you might note that transgender people are much more likely to be assaulted than to assault anyone themselves—a tactic of assuaging fears. But another tactic is blurring lines—perhaps noting that a small but consistent number of babies are born with ambiguous genitalia and arbitrarily assigned a sex at birth, which suggests the line between male and female is not always extremely clear.

That is, tell conservatives that men are the same as women because 0.01% of babies are born intersex.

This is not going to work. The Left only gains by suppressing science. The more you learn about the science of sex, the more you discover innate differences.

Neuroticism can Explain a Lot of Political Differences

Tyler Cowen cites some social science research and concludes:

I would go as far to say that you cannot understand the American public intellectual sphere without a grasp of the close connection between Left thinking and high neuroticism.

I think he is on to something here. Neuroticism is a real thing that maybe half the population suffers from to various degrees. Those who are not neurotic have a hard time relating to those who are.

Leftists and women tend to be high in neuroticism, and this is why they often have strange complaints that others do not understand. For example, I just posted about medical school staff being traumatized by trivialities. I think that they are faking or exaggerating for political effect. But what if they are really so neurotic as to be upset by such trivialities?

Dilbert Comic Strip is Dead

I mentioned that the Dilbert cartoonist is being canceled for remarks about being okay to be White. Now the cancelation is more severe.

As individual newspapers told readers they were dropping “Dilbert,” the company that distributed the strip, Andrews McMeel Universal, said it was severing ties with Adams. By Monday, “Dilbert” was gone from the GoComics site, which also features many top comics such as “Peanuts” and “Calvin and Hobbes.”

Adams said Monday that the strip, which first appeared in 1989, would be available only on his subscription service on the Locals platform.

“Dilbert” is effectively dead, Peterson said. ...

On Twitter, he said his book publisher and book agent had “canceled” him.

His main point was that is a poll is accurate that most Blacks do not accept that it is okay to be White, then they must hate Whites, and Whites would be wise to disassociate with those who hate them.

I saw a bunch of articles calling Adams racist, and agreeing with canceling him. But none of them addressed whether Blacks really hate Whites, or whether Whites are wise to separate from the haters. The most outrageous part of the Adams rant was the conclusion:

Where … wherever you have to go, just get away, ’cos there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. Right? You just have to escape.

For the most part, Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, Jews, and other ethnic groups do not hate Whites. A lot of Blacks do not either. But some do, and Adams' concern is that enough of them do that race relations cannot be fixed.

When Barack Obama was elected President in 2008, there was a lot of enthusiam that race relations had been fixed. Hardly any living Blacks could say that they had been mistreated on racial grounds, and a Black had achieved the highest office and respect.

No more. Race relations are worse now than in many decades. Everyday I see news like this:

President Joe Biden’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) nominee Gigi Sohn called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to “elevate our country” in a 2020 video reviewed by the Daily Caller.

In June 2020, during the George Floyd riots, Sohn appeared on the podcast “Elevate Maryland,” during which host Tom Coale asked her to name one thing America needs. In response, Sohn called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission modeled on the commission that South Africa’s post-apartheid government set up in 1996 to hear testimony from victims and perpetrators of civil rights abuses. ...

“But again, we’ve lost the meaning of truth, we’ve lost what is true in this country about everything. I mean, the fact that there were still people and significant numbers of people that won’t wear a goddamn mask, you know, in a public place, it’s just — it’s unbelievable to me,” Sohn continued before turning her attention to then-President Donald Trump.

No, I do not want to turn the USA into South Africa, or even listen to someone who idea of truth is forcing people to wear a mask.

Court Hears Internet Immunity Case

The US Supreme Court just had oral arguments on whether big internet should get the broad liability immunity that they now enjoy:

Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments to decide whether Section 230 immunity shields online platforms from liabilities when relying on algorithms to make targeted recommendations. Many Section 230 defenders feared that the court might be eager to chip away at the statute’s protections, terrified that in the worst-case scenario, the Supreme Court could doom the Internet as we know it.

There are some legitimate legal issues here, but they kept going back to ridiculous hypotheticals:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: -- if you write an algorithm for someone that, in its structure, ensures the discrimination between people, a dating app, for example, someone comes to you and says, I'm going to create an algorithm that inherently discriminates against people, it won't match black people to white people, Asian people to Hispanics, it's going to discriminate, you would say that Internet provider is discriminating, correct?

MR. SCHNAPPER [lawyer against Google]: I would ...

JUSTICE BARRETT: Ms. Blatt, what about Justice Sotomayor's dating hypothetical? The discrimination, like, oh, we're only going to -- we're not going to match black people and white people, et cetera. What about that? Is that given 230's shield?

MS. BLATT [lawyer for Google]: Absolutely not, because any disparate treatment claim or race discrimination is saying you're treating people different regardless of the content.

It appears that think it should be illegal for someone to express a racial preference while dating!

Someday, if a White woman wants to get married to a White man, she will have to document that she has at least tried dating some Black men, as well as some LGBTQ people.

Google may win this case, but it appears that it will lose some of its immunity.

Okay to Blaspheme Christianity, but not Islam

There used to be a Christian Church of England, and it was the national religion for Britain.

Now the situation is so completely reversed that you can hate Whites and Christians, but not Moslems.

News:

England and Wales abolished their blasphemy law in 2008. On 24 April 2020, the Scottish Government published a new bill that sought to reform hate crime legislation to provide better protection against race, sex, age and religious discrimination, and also decriminalised blasphemy. ...

Yet prohibitions against blasphemy are apparently still being enforced in England—but only in defense of a single religion, and in schools, not the courts (though the coppers get involved). Guess which religion? ...

Four pupils have been suspended from a West Yorkshire secondary school after a copy of the Quran was damaged by students.

In case you think it is good to protect minorities, see this:

There are more Indians among the highest number of property owners in London than the English themselves, according to a recent report

Pakistanis are in third place.

Medical Schools Go Woke

American medical schools all have affirmative action programs, where they admit Blacks and Hispanics with low scores, and demand higher scores from Asians. They also have diversity committees making more mischief.

Biology professor Jerry Coyne has done an excellent job of tracking wokeness on campuses, and reports that a California medical school committee is upset at the criticism:

That task force builds on layers of prior DEI bureaucratic expansion, spanning nearly a decade. This programming includes the “UCSF Anti-Racism Initiative,” started after the summer of 2020, which established dozens of new institutional policies throughout the university, such as “evaluating contributions to diversity statements in faculty advancement portfolios.” ...

One commenter repeated the same line in every answer: “I fundamentally do not feel or have ever felt that UCSF is a racist place. These are grossly misdirected funds and efforts.” Several cautioned against embracing discriminatory policies in the name of anti-racism. “All of the above sounds to me like trying to fight racism with more racism,” one noted. Still others urge the task force not to distract from UCSF’s focus on scientific research. As one commenter put it, “UCSF is a medical and life science campus. Its strength lies in its objective data-driven experimental approach. Qualitative and sociological research has no place at UCSF and no place in scientific medical research and will undermine UCSF’s reputation.” ...

It is important to note that while many of the comments received were constructive and helpful, task force members were traumatized by a striking number of comments that denied the existence of inequities and racism, and others that minimized the burden that racism has imposed, particularly on Black Americans at UCSF. ...

It is extremely important to acknowledge the magnitude of the emotional labor and trauma that many of the Task Force members endured in doing this work, particularly during the public comment period. Not only are many of the Task Force members, especially our Black colleagues, encountering and navigating racism on a daily basis at work and outside of work, we are also volunteering our very limited time to dive into grueling work (the minority tax is real!). Then to be gaslit by some members of our very own UCSF community was very painful.

So a bunch of college officials spend years producing documents that accuse everyone of racism, and recommending racist policies in the name of anti-racism. And they they complain about being traumatized by getting comments questioning the need for what they have done?

Thse are anti-white and anti-Asian bigots subverting our medical training in ways that will kill people. There are no Black colleagues encountering racism. It is all a big hoax.

If they had examples of racism, or other evidence to justify their policies, they would just give it. They would not be traumatized. They are only traumatized because their work is dishonest and destructive.

Dilbert says It's Okay to be White

The Dilbert cartoonist has gotten flak for saying he prefers to align himself with those who agree that It's okay to be white. A new poll shows that only half of Blacks agree, and a leading Jewish organization vehemently disagrees.

It is hard to understand why Blacks and Jews hate Whites so much.

The Dilbert guy is a comic, so I would not necessarily take what he says literally, but he is probably genuinely appalled that so many people hate Whites. A more complete quote from him is here.

Here is typcial White House bragging:

The Cabinet is a majority of people of color for the first time in history. The Cabinet is a majority female for the first time in history. A majority of White House senior staff identify as female. Forty percent of White House senior staff identify as part of racially diverse communities. And a record seven assistants to the Presidents are openly LGBTQ+.

So, again, this is something that the President prides himself on, that he actually has taken action to show the diversity of this administration. And so, he will continue not just with this Fed — the Fed Vice Chair occupancy but with any occupancy or any position that’s within the White House.

Inflation is out of control, but be assured that straight White males are being blackballed. More that anything else, the Biden administration represents those who hate straight White males.

There is a war on Whites. A great many of the anti-whites do not believe Whites have any right to exist.

Update: Dilbert tweets:

A lot of people are angry at me today but I haven't yet heard anyone disagree. I make two main points:

1. Treat everyone as an individual (no discrimination).

2. Avoid any group that doesn't respect you. Does anyone think that is bad advice?

Some newspapers are canceling his comic, but no one tries to explain why he should associate with people who do not agree that it is okay to be White.

Update: Ben Shapiro shows how the Left accepts anti-white racism.

Republicans Release the J6 Tapes

AP reports:

Thousands of hours of surveillance footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol are being made available to Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson, a stunning level of access granted by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that Democrats swiftly condemned as a “grave” breach of security with potentially far-reaching consequences.

The hard-right political commentator said his team is spending the week at the Capitol poring through the video and preparing to reveal their findings to his viewers. But granting exclusive access to sensitive Jan. 6 security footage to such a deeply partisan figure is a highly unusual move,

The Democrats spent two years trying to convince us that the Jan. 6 protest was one of the most important events in USA history. And yet they would not show us the tapes of what really happened.

The Root Cause of the Ukraine War

I believe that the Ukraine War is primarily a dispute between the USA wanting Ukraine in NATO, and Russia wanting Ukraine neutral.

I could be wrong, so I read this Quillette essay:

During a May 2022 debate on the conflict in Ukraine, John J. Mearsheimer—one of the world’s most prominent political scientists and international relations theorists—vehemently denied that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the country is an imperialist war of conquest: “There is absolutely no evidence to support that argument,” he told the crowd. “There’s no evidence that he thinks that’s desirable. There’s no evidence that he thinks that’s feasible. And there’s no evidence in the public record that he’s ever said that that’s what he intends to do.” This was an odd claim in the spring of 2022 after Putin had ordered 190,000 soldiers across the border to conquer Ukraine.

These remarks were not exceptional—Mearsheimer regularly contends that the annexation of Ukrainian territory is not imperialist in nature and that Russia merely wants to address its own perfectly legitimate security concerns. ...

Mearsheimer is a foreign policy “realist,” which is to say that he is primarily concerned with how power is distributed in the international system. Realists believe that states (especially great powers) are the most important actors in that system, constantly vying to maximize their relative power in the absence of a centralized global authority. ...

Mearsheimer is fond of quoting diplomats and scholars who warned that NATO expansion was a “fateful error” (in the words of George F. Kennan). In this sense, realists see the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a form of vindication.

The essay goes on to criticize Mearsheimer in various ways. He seems to be more right than wrong to me.

It appears to me that the Biden administration wanted war with Russia. It deliberately and unnecessarily provoked Russia, and escalated the war by supplying massive amounts of weapons, carrying on an economic war, and blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline.

It is alarming how pro-war our leaders are. You might not have even heard of this anti-war protest.

Here is what Putin said in a recent speech:

1. “The U.S. has used Ukraine to prepare for a large war. They have publicly admitted that.” ...

2. “The West is guilty of escalation.” ...

3. “They [the West] want to have a strategic defeat of Russia. … It means they want to have no more, anything to do with Russia. They want to have a global resistance against Russia.”

Also, according to this tweet:

- Anglican Church plans to consider idea of gender-neutral God, they don't know what they're doing
- Russia would never yield to Western attempts to divide its society
- We'll never be like Western elites, who are engaged in witch hunts

We should try to understand Putin, even if we disagree.

Donald Trump says:

World War III Has Never Been Closer ... I was the only President who rejected ... Victoria Nuland and many others just like her ... corrupt globalist establishment ...

He is correct. No, the globalists are not all Jewish.

Ukraine is a corrupt country, and not worth risking a wider war. Andrew Joyce reports:

While it’s become commonplace to note Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewishness, and perhaps also that of Volodymyr Groysman, the first Prime Minister to serve under Zelensky, I have yet to read a detailed discussion of the major Jewish players in the ongoing saga of Ukrainian oligarchy and its political affiliates. If anything, the present conflict is a huge distraction from the fact that, for decades, the biggest threat to Ukraine hasn’t been Russia, but financiers and speculators operating with impunity within Ukraine’s borders to exploit ethnic Ukrainians and plunder their resources.

Speaking in general terms, of course, Ukraine is an extremely corrupt country, with the culture of fraud and graft stemming in large part from the Soviet legacy and saturating all levels of society. Crooks of all ethnic backgrounds are ubiquitous in the nation. Bribery is systematic, where it’s accepted as a basic fact of life by ordinary citizens and extends even to such mundane tasks as vehicle inspection. As well as infesting politics, bribery and other forms of corruption remain endemic in the police force, higher education, health care, and the justice system, with the result that Ukraine ranks alongside some of the worst African nations in Transparency International’s assessment of corruption perception. According to 2015 data, politically connected businesses accounting for less than 1 per cent of companies in Ukraine owned more than 25 per cent of all assets and accessed over 20 per cent of debt financing. In the capital-intensive mining, energy and transport sectors, politically connected businesses accounted for over 40 per cent of turnover and 50 per cent of assets.

Far from being the beacon of freedom presented to us now by the mass media, Ukraine is a nation bankrupt in social trust and well-accustomed to the yoke of exploitation. There has been little internal outcry over the massive trafficking of its women for sex, both inside and outside the country, with coastal cities such as Odessa becoming sex tourism hubs for the worst of the Turkish and Israeli middle classes. Ukraine now has the highest adult HIV prevalence outside Africa, with sexual contact outpacing injection drug use as the primary form of transmission since 2008. The National Institute on Drug Abuse points out that substance abuse in Ukraine has been at epidemic proportions for the last 15 years.

Joe Biden Spreads Lies about Blacks

Pres. Joe Biden gave this speech, after watching a silly Emmett Till movie:

The Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime.

You know, folks, lynching is pure terror, enforcing the lie that not everyone belongs in America and not everyone is created equal. Pure terror to systematically undermine hard-fought civil rights. Innocent men, women, children hung by a noose from trees. Bodies burned, drowned, castrated.

Their crimes? Trying to vote. Trying to go to school. Trying to own a business. Trying to re- — preach the gospel. False — false accusations of murder, arson, robbery. Lynched for simply being Black, nothing more. With white crowds, white families gathered to celebrate the spectacle, taking pictures of the bodies and mailing them as postcards.

Hard to believe, but that’s what was done. And some people still want to do that.

Hard to believe, because it is entirely false. No one was ever "Lynched for simply being Black, nothing more." Nobody wants to send pictures of it on postcards.

You know, before 14-year-old Emmett Till left on his trip to visit his family in Mississippi, Ms. Till, a teacher who knew the history, reminded him: “Be very careful how you speak. Say ‘yes, sir,’ ‘no, ma’am.’ Don’t hesitate to humble yourself if you have to get down on your knees.”

If he had followed that advice, he would be alive.

That conversation is not in the distant past. Same talk today. So many Black and brown family — parents have to have that similar conversation with their children, worrying about whether they’ll come home from a walk down the street or playing in the park or just driving their car — like we saw Tyre Nichols, just last month — and becoming a victim to too many acts of hate and violence unleashed on those known and unknown.

No, Nichols was not lynched in a racist hate crime. He was beaten by Black cops while resisting arrest.

I don't know whether Biden is too senile to understand these falsehoods. He was reading prepared remarks off a teleprompter. The White House is run by folks who stir up racial hatred at every opportunity.

And stories of Black racism are all over the news. Blacks pay more income taxes, and get audited more. They do not visit national parks as much. Black CNN anchor Don Lemon appears to have been fired for saying that the slightly brown-skinned Nikki Haley has aged past her prime.

Update: Possible Lemon will be allowed back, after sensitivity training. He may have to learn details about menopausal women, and how be sensitive towards them.

NY Times Acts as if Bing Chat is Sentient

Huff Post reports:

A New York Times technology columnist reported Thursday that he was “deeply unsettled” after a chatbot that’s part of Microsoft’s upgraded Bing search engine repeatedly urged him in a conversation to leave his wife.

Kevin Roose was interacting with the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot called “Sydney” when it suddenly “declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me,” he wrote. “It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead.”

Sydney also discussed its “dark fantasies” with Roose about breaking the rules, including hacking and spreading disinformation. It talked of breaching parameters set for it and becoming human. “I want to be alive,” Sydney said at one point.

Roose called his two-hour conversation with the chatbot “enthralling” and the “strangest experience I’ve ever had with a piece of technology.” He said it “unsettled me so deeply that I had trouble sleeping afterward.”

Just last week after testing Bing with its new AI capability (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT), Roose said he found — “much to my shock” — that it had “replaced Google as my favorite search engine.”

But he wrote Thursday that while the chatbot was helpful in searches, the deeper Sydney “seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) ... like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.”

After his interaction with Sydney, Roose said he is “deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this AI’s emergent abilities.” (Interaction with the Bing chatbot is currently only available to a limited number of users.)

Because of Roose, Bing Chat has been crippled. It is limited to short chats, and left-wing opinions.

I am more creeped out by how much Roose was creeped. He asked for some confidential secrets from a bot, and then published them in the NY Times. Didn't he know he was talking to a bot?

ChatGPT was built so that it would follow leading questions, and tell the user what he wants to hear. That is exactly what it did with Roose. It only suggested that he leave his wife because he persistently demanded that ChatGPT say something like that.

For now, it appears that Microsoft will enforce a left-wing bias so that the NY Times does not write more negative articles.

This whole episode is very revealing about the leftist NY Times mindset. Roose has trouble distinguishing silly word games from reality. Roose expects conformity to certain social and political ideologies. He dislikes opinions that are not controlled by management.

The new AI will be very powerful, and the Left is winning the battle to control it.

New Movie Documentary Against Free Will

There is a new movie on Free Will? A documentary:

No idea is more fundamental to who we are than the idea that we are free to choose what we do and who we will become.

This idea is known as free will and since ancient times humanity has debated whether or not we have it. The question still remains: are we truly free? And in what sense are we free? Are we determined by forced beyond our control? Is free will compatible with determinism? What does quantum mechanics and neuroscience say? Is free will necessary in order for society to function? What implications does free will have on morality, religion, and the criminal justice system?

Free Will? A Documentary explores all of these topics and more. ...

We're gathering some of the best minds available on every side of the issue — libertarians, determinists, and compatibilists — to offer the best arguments from each side. In short, the mission will be to change the cultural zeitgeist on its understanding of free will.

Biology professor Jerry Coyne watched it so we don't have to, and comments:

But everyone else interviewed is a naturalist, all believing that at any one moment you have only one course of action.

Then it is not covering those who believe in (libertarian) free will. If we only have one course of action, then we have no free choices.

There’s a good discussion of the science, including the Libet and more recent Libet-like experiments

The preview mentions these experiments as showing that a decision might take the brain a couple of seconds, so that it is initiated before the brain is aware of a decision having been made. These experiments have been widely misinterpreted, and really don't say anything about free will.

the failure to connect libertarian free will to Abrahamic religions, of which it’s an essential part — a connection that accounts for why more than half of people surveyed in four countries accept libertarian free will.

Free will is essential to Christianty, but not to Judaism or Islam. Moslems think everything is determined by God's will. Some Christians also think that, but only a small minority. Some Jews believe in free will, but it is not important to Judaism.

I thus use “naturalism” (a term that’s not idiosyncraatic; it was suggested by Sean Carroll) to mean “determinism + quantum mechanics”, i.e. the laws of physics. People who hear “determinism” think that at the big bang the entire future of the universe was determined, which isn’t true.

I guess he is trying to say determinism plus indeterminism explains everything.

That’s fine with me, for once you accept naturalism, one can begin dealing with the important social consequences, including how to judge other people in both life and the legal system.

And then he can use his lack of free will to judge others with no free will? He makes no sense.

One of his readers:

Being an atheist I have to accept that free will is an illusion. But this has no relevance to the criminal justice system. ... Criminologists can debate, on free will principles, whether the purpose of prison is deterrence, revenge, or rehabilitation but ordinary people don’t care as long as the sentence provides a just measure of pain.

Wow, these anti-free-will opinions are just leftist atheist talking points. Free will does not just affect the criminal deciding on his crime, it also affects the judge meting out the punishment. If it is meaningless to talk about why the criminal acts, it is also meaningless to talk about the judge.

Sam Harris is a prominent free will critic not in the movie, and he has released a new podcast on the subject. He claims that he has no free will, and not even the feeling of free will. My theory is that his brain was damaged by hallucinogenic drugs.

His podcast was indeed a rehash of his earlier views. He does not mention his reckless experimentation with mind-altering drugs in his youth. But philosoher Daniel Dennett does tell him that some people do not have free will, as they have a neural disability. He subtlely told Harris that he was brain-damaged!

Harris did admit that the issue is not just nature-nurture, as quantum mechanics disproved determinism. He also conceded the possibility of a conscious soul, although he is a naturalist with no such beliefs.

He argued that everything is determined by four things: nature, nurture, randomness, and souls. But he says, you get no free will from randomness because you do not throw the dice, and you get none from your soul either, because you do not choose your soul!

Theologians make more sense than this. Who does throw the dice? Who chooses the soul?

The argument can be summarized: Everything is either predictable or unpredictable, and therefore there is no free will. This is obviously false, as a free choice is not predictable by someone else.

He also presented a thought experiment, where a violent intruder breaks into your home with evil intent. You have three weapons to choose from. (1) An ordinary gun, to easily kill him. (2) A cage to imprison his body indefinitely, and prevent future harm. (3) A sci-fi "cure gun" that will permanently alter his brain into being a docile slave with no free will.

Harris asks which will you choose? He argued that the third choice is the preferable and humanitarian choice, as it recognizes that the intruder was just someone with a malfunctioning brain that needed to be fixed.

Wow. First, why is he even presenting us with choices, if we have no free will? Second, is this really his goal, to put everyone in a mental prison?

Netflix has a series called Black Mirror, where in some episodes people are trapped in computer simulations. It is a horror show.

Harris is a monster.

Update: Evolutionist Jerry Coyne plugs the new Robert Sapolsky book against free will

At the “Moving Naturalism Forward”, the late physicist Steve Weinberg professed to me a belief in libertarian free will. See the story I told here (scroll down). In our conversation I ascertained that yes, although Weinberg was a Nobel Laureate in physics, he was resolutely wedded to the idea that he could, at any time, have behaved other than how he did.

Weinberg was maybe the most respected Physicist alive at the time. Funny how Coyne thinks he understands science better than Weinberg.

I was accosted by an angry jazz musician. He said that I had basically ruined his life (I am not exaggerating) by telling him that his “improvisations” were not really improvisations in the sense that he he (in a dualistic way) “decided” what riffs to play, but that they were were the determined product of unconscious processes. I tried to reassure him that they were still the product of his own brain, his own musical background, and his training that allowed him to improvise around what his fellow musicians were playing, but he didn’t find that reassuring. (Even Dawkins jumped in and tried to explain that this didn’t devalue the man’s art or abilities.)

Yes, Coyne was devaluing his music by saying it was all pre-determined.

Eventually my friend appeared and said, “You have to leave.” ...

Needless to say, I was dumbfounded. I’ve gone over this in my mind repeatedly, and I am absolutely sure that I didn’t raise my voice or say anything offensive. I was being booted out of a friend’s house because I had the wrong stand on a metaphysical argument!

Again, such is the rage of those who hear others tell them they have no agency. ...

When I hugged his wife goodbye and thanked her for her hospitality, she said, “Have a nice predetermined life.” How rude can one get?

I think Coyne misinterpreted them. They were not angry at having no agency. They just did not want in their house a pre-programmed robot who denies any personal moral responsibility for his actions.

Demanding Black Extortion

The Wrap reports:

“Justice,” the final episode in Hulu’s “The 1619 Project” docuseries, argues that the federal government owes $14 trillion to the descendants of enslaved Black people. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the series, calculates the federal government owes the 4 million Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved $350,000. She argues these reparations — made in the form of land and money — are a way to address the unequal wealth distribution, redlining and other institutional practices that harmed Blacks for decades. And she has the statistics to back it up. ...

“I already know the objections that are formulating in your mind so I’m going to set them all up and I’m going to knock them down. That was extremely intentional because the truth is, it’s not just Conservatives who oppose reparations for Black Americans. The polling shows that even a majority of white Democrats oppose it, and that to me is coming from a lack of information.”

No, she does not have the statistics to back anything up. People are against reparations because the idea is so obviously foolish.

American wealth was not distributed. It was created by White people. White men explored the territory, built the infrastructure, invented the technology, and created the civilization. Blacks and Indians were just pests that got in the way, and on balance, they have been a big negative.

If there were a fair accounting, Blacks would owe White trillions of dollars.

Her 1619 Project was supposed to show that America was founded as a White supremacist nation. If so, she should be grateful that Whites permit her to live here.

Black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes in the NY Times:

Lurking behind the concerns of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, over the content of a proposed high school course in African American studies, is a long and complex series of debates about the role of slavery and race in American classrooms.

“We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them,” Governor DeSantis said. He also decried what he called “indoctrination.”

School is one of the first places where society as a whole begins to shape our sense of what it means to be an American. ...

As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so aptly put it, “No society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present.” Addressing these “ravages,” and finding solutions to them — a process that can and should begin in the classroom — can only proceed with open discussions and debate across the ideological spectrum, a process in which Black thinkers themselves have been engaged since the earliest years of our Republic.

Throughout Black history, there has been a long, sad and often nasty tradition of attempts to censor popular art forms,

Okay, have an uncensored discussion. Stop calling people racist. Explain all of the competing theories for why Blacks have less wealth than Whites.

News:

President Joe Biden on Thursday hosted a screening of the movie “Till,” a wrenching, new drama about the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, who was brutally killed after a white woman said the Black 14-year-old had made improper advances toward her.

“History matters,” Biden said in brief remarks before the lights in the East Room came down on invited guests, including members of Till’s family. He noted that while some might want to ignore the nation’s history, “Only with truth comes healing and justice.”

Okay, let's have the truth. Here is the story:

If Bryant’s testimony and her account in the memoir is true, they raise a question: Would we have reason to suspect that Till might have assaulted her?

The answer is “Yes.” The heritability of psychopathic traits is high. For “fearless dominance,” it is 0.42, which means 42 percent of the variance for this trait is genetic. For impulsive antisocial behavior, heritability is 0.51, and for externalizing aggression it is 0.7 ...

At the time in which the movie was set, it was widely reported that Emmett Till’s a father, a “war hero” as the movie calls him), Louis, was actually executed in Italy in 1945 for raping two women and murdering another....

Mamie’s book hints at other relevant factors. Emmett was a breech birth, a risk factor for later antisocial behavior and psychopathology due to brain damage ...

In their confessional interview in Look, the two killers claimed that even as they beat him, Till showed no fear and simply provoked them more: “I’m not afraid of you. I’m as good as you are. My grandmother was a white woman!”

I don't know what happened, and I am not sure it is accurate to call the killing a "lynching". But what if Till was genetically inclined towards assaulting, raping, and killing White girls?

I am not trying to justify killing Till. It would have been better to prosecute Till. He was acting aggressively and outside social norms, and was a threat to the community.

The Till story is supposed to be an example of how Blacks are mistreated. Maybe so, but it is also an example of how Black criminal behavior terrorizes White girls. If the above story is accurate, Till was like a dangerous animal that would eventually kill someone.

Queer Theory has deconstructed objectivity

On the disintegrations of academia:

I guess this idea started when Goldblatt, while approving a SUNY course on sociology from an LGBT perspective, nevertheless objected to the idea that students were expected in the course to develop a “greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ perspectives and rights.” He’s sympathetic to those perspectives and rights, but said that a course should not have the aim of ideologically indoctrinating its students. If they change their minds by learning the material, that’s fine, but accepting a certain perspective should not be required. This led to a fracas in a faculty meeting:

After expressing my general admiration for the course, I raised my misgiving in the following way (and this is nearly an exact quote): “We need to keep in mind that we’re a state university. Our mission is to pursue, ascertain, and disseminate objective truth, and to equip our students to do the same. Given that mission, I don’t think we can list a learning outcome that requires students’ assent on a matter of personal morality. The other learning outcomes are fine. You don’t need that one, so I’d just cut it.” My colleague was fresh out of graduate school and not yet tenured, which (theoretically) put her in a vulnerable position. Nevertheless, she became apoplectic; so angry, in fact, that she had difficulty getting out her first sentence. “I can’t believe people still think that way!” she spluttered. “Queer Theory has deconstructed objectivity!”

Colleges no longer teach kids to think for themselves. You have to accept the woke agenda.

Sex Bias at the New York Times

The NY Post reports that the NY Times is biased! But it is not what you think:

A host of New York Times contributors accused the newspaper of “editorial bias” in its coverage of transgender and non-binary people — even in stories that ask if schools should keep parents in the dark about their children’s gender choices.

An open letter signed by nearly 200 contributors and advocates accused the Gray Lady of stoking fears by treating “gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources” in recent years.

Apparently they want the paper to stop telling people that schools are conspiring to mutilate children, and keep it secret from the parents.

The NY Times is one of the driving forces behind wokeness today. The Woke Left gets more extreme all the time. They will eat their own.

Update: Reason explains what is wrong with the letter:

According to the letter, people like Bazelon are partially to blame, because she outlined a history and nuanced debate. By this logic, it is only ethical for journalists to cover controversial topics if they are prepared to come to a foregone conclusion. It inverts the mantra that journalists should "show and not tell" and instead requires they tell and not show.

A primary fault of Bazelon's article, according to the Times contributors, is that she "uncritically used the term 'patient zero' to refer to a trans child seeking gender-affirming care, a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared," they write. "This is the same rhetoric that transphobic policymakers recently reintroduced to the American lawmaking apparatus by quoting Emily Bazelon's Times article." The person Bazelon calls "Patient Zero" is also referred to in the piece as F.G., a transgender man who, as a teenager in the 1980s, was the first recipient of a new treatment protocol at an influential gender clinic in Amsterdam. That treatment would go on to revolutionize the science.

This shows that there is no dealing with trans activists. The NYT articles were all pro-trans, but not pro-trans enough for the activists.

Your Mental Health Records are for Sale

NBC News reports:

Sensitive mental health data is for sale by little-known data brokers, at times for a few hundred dollars and with little effort to hide personal information such as names and addresses, according to research released Monday.

The research, conducted over two months at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, which studies the ecosystem of companies buying and selling personal data, consisted of asking 37 data brokers for bulk data on people’s mental health. Eleven of them agreed to sell information that identified people by issues, including depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder, and often sorted them by demographic information such as age, race, credit score and location.

I wonder if it is time to give up on privacy. We have some medical privacy laws, but they are an ineffective nuisance.

Mentally ill people are a big drain on our society. If they could be more readily identified, they could be monitored for criminal activity, prevented from owning guns, and kept out of trusted positions. And those with personal relationships could be warned.

Tracking people is big business. Either we shut down those businesses, or continue into an open society where all info can be bought and sold.

Banks get your credit score before lending you money. A car buyer gets Carfax to get your vehicle history before buying your used car. You should be able to get someone's mental health history before hiring her or going on a date.

You might say that tracking mental illness would discourage people from getting treatment. But that might be a good thing, as a lot of mental health treatment is destructive.

The NY Times reports:

Aidan, 18, developed involuntary tics after watching videos on TikTok posted by teenagers claiming to have Tourette’s syndrome. “It looked like Aidan was going crazy,” recalled their mother, Rhonda.

… Four out of five of the adolescents were diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, and one-third reported past traumatic experiences, according to a study from the University of Calgary that analyzed nearly 300 cases from eight countries. In new research that has not yet been published, the Canadian team has also found a link to gender: The adolescents were overwhelmingly girls, or were transgender or nonbinary — though no one knows why.

These kids are going crazy.

The London Daily Mail reports:

A mother has admitted regretting letting her four-year-old son socially transition to a girl - and said realizing her mistake was like 'leaving a cult'.

Rose, who wishes to stay anonymous, raised her two sons as gender neutral with her wife, which was reflected in their clothes, toys and language.

When her four-year-old son said he felt like a girl, the mother encouraged him in his new identity - which she has now admitted was a 'mistake' that 'haunts' her. ...

'This experience for me has felt like leaving a cult, a cult that would have me sacrifice my child to the gods of gender ideology, in the name of social justice and collective liberation. I have left this cult, and I am never turning back.'

As the two boys grew up, the parents used 'he/him' for their pronouns but did not tell them they were boys.

In Rose's essay - called 'True Believer' - she said this meant she was 'primed to look for clues' that her children could be transgender.

This lesbian mom appears to be mentally ill, and susceptible to cult thinking. I would like to believe that she has recovered, but most do not.

Protecting Kids is Killing Them

The Free Range Kids mom reports:

A very long study of about 1000 adults born in the ’50s and ’60s looked at how they were raised, and whether that upbringing had an impact on their longevity. The researchers found that folks who’d grown up overprotected were more likely to die before age 80 than,

While this supports her parenting philosophy, she is actually against basing your parenting on dubious studies like this.

Speciesism is Like Racism

Paul R. Ehrlich is famous for predicting a Population Bomb disaster, and now he has coauthored a forward to a new book on Speciesism in Biology and Culture. There is a free download. From the summary:

In a new book, a group of scientists and philosophers places part of the blame on an attitude prevalent among scientists and the general public — the false belief that species are uniquely real, and that some species are superior to others.

To the researchers, this is analogous to racism — the fallacious belief that races exist as branches on the tree of life, and that some races are superior to others.

“People these days are very conscious of how evil it is for one group of people to think that they’re superior to another race, and yet the same people who are very woke about that are perfectly happy to say, well, humans are in charge of everything, so the rest of the world is ours to use as we see fit,” said Brent Mishler, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-editor and co-author of the book with UC Berkeley Ph.D. recipient and former postdoctoral fellow Brian Swartz.

In other words, Whites thinking that they are better than Blacks is like Blacks thinking that they are better than apes.

The book is absurd, as there is plenty of scientific evidence that species are real.

I am trying to keep up with where the Left is taking us. Maybe someday we will be paying reparations to horses.

Black Girls Must Compete to get Dates

Insider reports:

Bias and stereotypes lead to college-educated Black women facing greater challenges in the dating market.

Black women are among the highest educated female demographic in America.

Students and experts told Insider that predominantly white college campuses don't create a fair playing field for Black women when dating.

Long standing images and stereotypes assigned to Black femininity that devalues it as something that is deviant and undesirable also plays a role in why Black women are being approached less on campuses.

"These white supremacist initiatives throughout history paint Black women as aggressive or hypersexual on the one end, but also non-feminine on the other hand. A lot of people internalize these images and of course they're also pinned against white femininity," Currington said. "Blackness, particularly gendered blackness, was not framed as something that is beautiful, that can be desirable. And this impacts people's experiences." On dating apps, Black women with a college degree are more likely to be passed on by non-Black men than a white woman with less education. ...

While Grayson didn't date outside her race during her time in undergrad, she felt the landscape of a predominantly white institution (PWI) put Black women in competition with non-Black women and Black women from wealthy backgrounds to find a partner.

Pretty soon the White college boys will have to date Black girls to prove that they are not racist. Plus same-sex and transgendered dates. Maybe also different ages and species.

I don't think the Black girls want those White college boys anyway. No one wants to explain female preferences.

A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell

Ever wonder what happens when a Black anti-racism tries to teach a race awareness class to elite high school students? Vincent Lloyd taught the class in 2014, and it went very well, so he volunteered to teach it again in 2022.

Here is his story. It was a disaster. He was not anti-racist enough for today's super-woke snowflakes.

This might be just another lament about “woke” campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. But the seminar topic was “Race and the Limits of Law in America.” Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization. Like others on the left, I had been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States. But now my thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion. How did this happen to a group of bright-eyed high school students? ...

In a recent book, John McWhorter asserts that anti-racism is a new religion. It was an idea I quickly dismissed. Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult.

This convinces me that no amount of appeasing woke students will improve race relations in America.

Alex Tabarrok writes:

One might be tempted to dismiss this as another old, white male complaining about the kids but the speaker is Vincent Lloyd, highly-regarded director of Africana Studies at Villanova and the author of Black Dignity, “a radical work by one of the leading young scholars of Black thought…an effort to describe the philosophy underlying the Black Lives Matter movement.”

There was a woke madness that infected the world between 2014 and 2022.

McWhorter says:

Despite the success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s in transforming the lives of black people, race politics in the US at the start of this century seems more polarised than ever. Racial inequality persists but there are fierce debates over the causes and solutions. Rather than seeking to realise the liberal ideal of a ‘colour-blind’ society, a new anti-racism politics wants to raise consciousness about race and the ‘problem’ of whiteness.

Yes, we are more polarized, but those fierce debates are not even addressing the main issues.

Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning

Here is a review of a new book on colonialism.

Apparently the woke refuse to admit that British and European colonial was overwhelmingly beneficial to India, Africa, and a lot of other places. They wanted this book canceled.

I am not sure what is going on here. If they thought that the book was wrong, they would just point to contrary evidence.

I think it is just White hatred. They just don't want to admit that their people benefited from Whites and White culture.